26 Exchanges: Digging into language

Part five of John Simmons's exchange with the Bolivian poet Edwin Gomez, looking at Gomez's poem 'La Cholita de San Simon':

The penultimate stanza I've expressed like this...

 

Hurry up, university calls you

To be part of your own transformation

You're already here to stay

Like you, we're all Uni today

 

I found this the most difficult stanza to find definite meaning in. The last line is 'Ahora si la U es de todos' which is very idiomatic. I thought there was something of the pronoun for 'you' in there and realised eventually that 'la U' probably refers to the university. So I wanted an idiomatic equivalent in English that still held the possibility of another reading, another meaning in the context of the poem. It seemed to me that there is something celebratory about the integration of the Cholita's culture that 'Uni' expresses. I put the couplet into rhyme to reinforce the sense of celebration.

 

So, there's just one stanza to go. Looking ahead the next line refers to qechua, another Andean language, different from the Aymara of the original poem. Digging into these languages on wikipedia I came across a fascinating piece of information. Apparently in the grammar of Quechua there are two forms of the first person plural. There is an inclusive 'we and you' and an exclusive 'we without you'. (Perhaps this even has relevance to thinking about 'la U'.) So if, for example, you were to say 'we believe' you have a choice of pronouns in Quechua. And that choice makes a big difference that we don't think enough about in English where we simply have 'we'.

 

It certainly raises interesting questions about 'tone of voice'. It also shows that language reflects and shapes culture, and even the way we think about the world. What pronoun would you use in Quechua for that 'we think'? We are made what we are by the language we speak.

Read part four of this exchange.

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