Lessons from the Space Between Languages: Notes on Poetry and Ethnography

Abstract

Rosaldo’s chapter may be thought of as a companion piece to his essay “Notes on Poetry and Ethnography.” In this essay, he comments on the ethnographic poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Naomi Shihab Nye, addressing not only cultural translation but also linguistic translation. As someone familiar with the American racial field, who weighed in the translation of Komunyakaa’s poem on Vietnam into Spanish, he reads Komunyakaa’s poem as a continuation of the civil rights struggle by other means. His chapter in this volume is a meditation on what a poet, translator, and ethnographer may have in common.