Poetry, then, is precisely what is least translatable about a language – it is the ineffable, the things that only a set of words in a particular language can say. Created by English speakers, with translations into English, Khonsay, an Endangered Cento, with its lines from poems in 50 languages, is an act of audacious and unabashed imagination. It imagines the ecology of languages through a world poem. It seeks to capture the luminous originals in refracted light. The voices of the indigenous speakers are beautiful, even if we cannot fully understand what they are saying. Yet, what can not be translated, what we can not do justice to, is a measure of what is being lost with the disappearance of these languages. Khonsay premiered in New York City at the 2015 Margaret Mead Film Festival and was featured in the biannual Sadho Poetry Film Festival in New Delhi, India, where it won the Viewer’s Choice Award. Visit http://khonsay.com to read the poem in-depth, explore its languages, speakers and background, and donate to language revitalization organizations. Visit this video on our Story Map: https://storymaps.esri.com/st
Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues
There are 6,500 languages spoken in the world. By the end of the century, more than half will disappear. Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues is a tribute and call to action for linguistic diversity. A 15-minute motion poem (poem on film), each line comes from a different treasure or minority language. 48 speakers each speak in their mother tongues, as line by line, language by language, the poem is created. In the Boro tongue of North India, itself a treasure language, Khonsay means to pick up something with great care, as it is rare or scarce.
A “cento” is a collage poem; its name in Roman (Latin) means “stitched together,” like a quilt — each line of the poem is drawn from a different source. Khonsay is a “cento” poem. City Lore believes in an ecology of languages, a whole system intertwined and interdependent as the physical ecology of Earth. As Cecilia Vicuña writes, “people speak of the disappearance of the forest as if this was one thing; and they speak of the disappearance of the language as something else. But in these indigenous conceptions, these three things, the land itself, the forest, and the language are one inseparable thing. They even say in Guaraní that language falls from the trees. So if you cut down the trees you are cutting the tongue of the earth, are cutting the rustling of the wind, you are cutting the voice of the earth itself.”
