The Mossly Log

yes! the coupons stack!

last call for christmas delivery on gifts for your hippie ass meemaw!

the Gardening by the Moon calendar has been beloved by organic and traditional gardeners for nearly 30 years! beautiful, utilitarian, and intuitive to use, it makes planting at the optimal time to ensure the success of your garden a breeze--with different versions for long, medium, and short growing seasons, to match your (and your meemaw's!) local growing conditions!

oh! and they come in digital versions too--any combination of long/medium/short season, pacific/central/eastern time zone, and large/small screen optimized. that's 18 unique options for those keeping track at home

not in the mood for calendars? we also have sturdy reusable seed envelopes, tracking sheets for your crop and seed harvests, seed saver gift bundles, and seriously gorgeous winter holiday cards

to get your 12% discount, use offer code: tumblrina

to get the $4 priority shipping select "USPS Priority" as your shipping option, then use offer code: priority4

that poem about someone and their childhood, of which the title i no longer remember, by s.s.

“Tenochtitlan,” by Elisa Chavez.

Cortes’ men thought the Mexica’s floating city must be a dream: stone temples jutting from the water, voracious bright gardens and grand estates.

My sun-worshipping ancestors kept their gods close, heeded their rapt whispers. In their names, they built marvelous canals and walked on the waters.

It shouldn’t then surprise that artists have tried to recapture Tenochtitlan, brooding on the dream journals of Spaniards: they imagine her bright causeways, the lush gardens paving her streets like enchantments.

The Spanish, steely god-mongers that they were, knew well how to deal with enchantment: They burned Tenochtitlan to ash.

Leí que los Mexica ahogaban a mujeres de cercanos pueblos para apaciguar a la diosa de las lluvias. Su templo mayor tenía dos estantes de cráneos.

Mis antepasados que adoraban al sol mantenían a sus dioses cerca, escuchando a sus voces rapaces. En sus nombres, perpetraban maravillas y atrocidades.

No debe sorprender entonces que los pueblos a fuera de Tenochtitlan les daron la bienvenida a cualquiera que prometiera un final al sol cruel, las flores mentirosas, los aguas pavimentados con los huesos de tributas.

El dios de los Hispanos fue el oro, y él les mandó a quemar Tenochtitlan, enviándola para reunirse con las doncellas ahogadas.

Because what she does is honestly extraordinary. 

I have no idea which one comes first or what her process is. But what she shares with the world is a poem, in English, side by side with a translation in Spanish. Only the Spanish is wrong. Or, well, the Spanish is right; the English is wrong. 

It’s a real poem all right, and often a more powerful one than its English counterpart. But it doesn’t say what the English says. She does not supply a “correct” translation. For that she relies on her readers. 

Elisa Chavez says of her project that: “The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.

“The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.”

My own great-grandmother was born and raised in Mexico. My grandmother was raised bilingual and my mother is far more fluent in Spanish than she cares to admit (she says she “doesn’t speak it,” but the one time someone really tried to cheat us and retreated into “no hablo ingles,” she was a FOUNTAIN of español). I was the first on my matrilineal side to be raised monolingual, in English. I love these poems because the process I go through, of reading the English first, then the Spanish and guessing at it, and then looking up a proper translation, feels revelatory.

In the 3-and-a-half-ish years since I started the Miss Translated series, I’ve been thrilled to see readers create translations–whether out of their own bilingualism, via translation software, or through friends and family. This is work! It’s not something I expect, and I’m always humbled when it happens.

The one rule of Miss Translation that I’ve held myself to is that I don’t provide accurate English translations of the Spanish. However, if one just so happens to crop up, I feel like I can speak on it a little bit. 

So in this reply, I’m gonna talk about the lovely work that Francisca Cázares has done with this (re-translation? de-translation?), as well as respond to some of the points raised by @worriedaboutmyfern​. ARE YOU READY for: 

Conquistadors??

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, or HISTORY

The Florentine Codex??!?

poems written in the 1500s