Carolina Dávila Díaz : Cutting ties : translated and transfluxed by Ryan Greene

 

 

 

Visual description: A gif featuring red text on an ivory cream background, the colors approximating the printed version of Carolina Dávila Diaz's book, animal ajena, published by Cardumen (an imprint of Laguna Libros) in Bogotá, Colombia in 2022. Around the text, there is a circle that looks digitally sketched, its edges mimicking the tactility of hand-drawn marks. The text itself consists of two texts, arranged in two columns. The column on the right is upright, legible, in either English or Spanish (depending on when you look). The column on the left is upside down, in the other language. Periodically the gif springs into motion, the outer circle rotating 180 degrees in one direction and the text rotating 180 degrees in the other. Thanks to the rotational shift in perspective, the language of legibility shifts. And then shifts. And then shifts... 

 

 

Static textual transcription:

Cutting ties

You gnaw at your nails
Everything sets me on edge you say
and the irritation grinds on 

You retain the pain of the organic
calcium peels off in your fingers
and your mouth drips wet with acidic spit 

Better the inhospitable you think
blood has been the tribute
Better this muck and mire
your blood your own blood never again 

Tradition spins you shift your gaze
you move with another familiarity
and you forge new kinships 

You look at your fingers
you slide them like freshly sharpened pencils
a slash struck through names
you won’t respond to anymore 

(homo) neanderthalensis
(homo) sapiens
cyborg

from alien animal
by Carolina Dávila Díaz
tr. Ryan Greene

 

 

Romper el lazo

Cortas con los dientes las uñas
Se me destempla todo dices
y aún no termina el rechinar 

Conservas el dolor de lo orgánico
el calcio se descascara en los dedos
la boca se llena de saliva ácida y liquidísima 

Mejor lo inhóspito piensas
la sangre ha sido el tributo
Mejor este cenagal
tu sangre tu propia sangre nunca más 

Rota la tradición volteas la mirada
te mueves con otra familiaridad
y creas nuevos parentescos 

Miras tus dedos
los pasas como lápices recién afilados
un tajo sobre nombres
a los que ya no respondes 

(homo) neanderthalensis
(homo) sapiens
cyborg

de animal ajena
(Cardumen, 2022)
por Carolina Dávila Díaz 

 

For an added treat, click on the gif below to experience an interactive "transfluxion" of three lines from the poem (works best on screens bigger than a phone).

Visual description: Another gif, with ivory cream text on a red background, its colors inverted from the gif above. Here three lines from the poem hover with arrows below. As the recorded mouse clicks on the arrows, we become aware of the text as a (seemingly) three-dimensional entity rotating along one of its axes to reveal either the text in the other language or a small snippet of paratext. The text itself reads "tradition spins you shift your gaze / you move with another familiarity / and you forge new kinships" and "rota la tradición volteas la mirada / te mueves con otra familiaridad / y creas nuevos parentescos".

 

 

 

 

Carolina Dávila Díaz is a poet and editor from Bogotá, Colombia. Her book Como las catedrales won the National Award of Poetry in Colombia in 2010. She is also the author of Imagen (In)completa (2018), animal ajena (2022), and Buenavista, un kilómetro (2026) and co-editor of La trenza, a poetry, essay, and illustration magazine. She is part of Contaminación Cruzada, an artistic and poetic intervention project that explores the possibilities of language in public spaces. She lives in New York, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ryan Greene writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. His most recent translations include projects with Carolina Dávila, Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Yaxkin Melchy, and Giancarlo Huapaya. He's learning.

 

 

Jérôme Melançon : Filles de Gore, by Clémence Dumas-Côté

Filles de Gore, Clémence Dumas-Côté
Les Herbes rouges, 2025

 

 

 

The township of Gore is located in the Laurentides region of Québec. There, in a cabin, in the middle of the night, surrounded by her three children and her partner, as they sleep, a woman – the author, the speaker, the character, the first and third person – has a miscarrage she had been told would happen.

The title of this collection could be translated as “Girls of Gore,” “Girls from Gore,” “Gory Girls,” but I’ll choose “Gore’s Daughters” after the immensely popular and inexplicably untranslated novel Les filles de Caleb. The book is in the cabin and makes its way into the poems through quotations, but it also frames the collection. To interpret the title in this direction supposes not a multiplicity of daughters, as is the case in Arlette Cousture’s novel, but a multiplicity of selves all built around the event that took place in Gore. It also suggests parallels to the novel, where young women seek a way to emancipate themselves from the expectations and domination of a patriarchal society, in part thanks to the recalcitrant humanity of their father, and in part of course against him – all this in a location not unlike Gore.

But Clémence Dumas-Côté’s collection is not a novel: it does not develop characters, nor does it give us clear indications of a plotline – the description of the book does that for us. The poems themselves read as two long poems or as two series of separate short untitled poems. They live within the event, past and possible futures entangled, full of flesh, body fluids, and the life of a child that will not be lived. There is too little for a story: focus is only passing and as attention shifts, it brings with it images of what was just fleetingly experienced. And the heart had already ceased to beat. That story is not told, then, and during the night there is too much for a story to be possible. The senses are too acute, the meaning of objects is too sharp. This loss is also that of the self (“I am no longer someone // many foetal cells have already crossed / the placental barrier / they’ve camouflaged themselves / in the corners of my organs, of my brain” – “Je ne suis plus quelqu’un // plusieurs cellules foetales ont déjà traversé / la paroi placentaire / elles se sont camouflées / dans les recoins de mes organes, de mon cerveau”). There is not enough life, and too much of it.

The speaker struggles with her imagination, now embracing it, now giving in, now pushing it back:

A bedside lamp crackles
sometimes goes out
I
can’t turn it on
I can only imagine it being on 

Une lampe de chevet grésille
parfois s’éteint
je
ne peux pas l’allumer
je ne peux que l’imaginer allumée

Somewhere between feverish dreams and an imagination that protects the self by an overabundance of distraction, we find surreal moments, as when the family’s dog does the dishes, fills out a gratitude journal, takes out the recycling, and formats writing, or when the speaker finds herself in an Ikea store every time the light goes out (a red, menacing light at that). There are also moments that are much too real, as when she quite simply waits for the miscarriage to begin as her children play – or when she can’t decide on which channel to leave the television as she miscarries.

And there are almost-moments, non-existent moments when the child lives:

We agree to meet in a maze
I sometimes follow you closely
at other times I let you get
ahead I only glimpse your hair as it floats
around a corner 

On se donne rendez-vous dans un labyrinthe
je te suis parfois de près
à d’autres moments je te laisse prendre
de l’avance je n’aperçois que tes cheveux qui flottent
au détour d’un embranchement

The main section of the book, titled “Filles de Gore,” takes place this state of suspension, where the event that violates her body cannot take place because it has already taken place. Halfway through, the page numbering shrinks, becomes blurry, then disappears. From there on the pages are not numbered, and just like earlier the poems are not titled; they simply keep coming and end with the devastation of the coexistence of death and life.

The second, shorter section is a longer list poem, with each sentence numbered. Titled “Hauntology Manual” it lists actions that belong as much to sorcery and as little to concrete real-world actions as possible:

8. On the linoleum, choose a flat stone on which to start a fire. In this manner, reanimate the angels that will arise among the brambles in the minutes that follow.

8. Sur le prélart, choisir une pierre plate où partir un feu. Ainsi, ranimer les anges qui surgiront parmi les ronces dans les minutes suivantes.

This collection is not about coping; it offers no catharsis. It is immensely sad and violent, as the tearing away of life can only be. It leaves us with many lives that do continue, neither lessened by loss nor able to fill its void – many lives that continue together.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Sonja Greckol : How I came to translation

Generating Dark Matter -- Diverted and Dark Matter based on Rocío Cerón's Materia Oscura

 

 

 

In 2019, I watched Rocío Cerón perform Materia Oscura in Guanajuato, Mexico visiting my friend, the poet and editor, Lee Gould, who had recently established and published the bilingual journal La Presa as her contribution to a Spanish English dialogue while resident in Mexico. I was swept completely into Cerón's powerful performance and felt compelled to penetrate her words. At the time, I had begun to study Spanish in Toronto and Guanajuato: I could order a meal but had little more competence.

Having grown up in a bilingual Alberta household with a unilingual Ukrainian grandmother, I had a mother tongue child tongue competence in Ukrainian. My mother, however, frequently spoke Romanian with her family so I'd heard it spoke regularly; I have never been an adept language-learner.  Such is the power of patrilineal endogamy. The block settlements of the late 19th and early 20th century produced contiguous Ukrainian and Romanian settlements.

Since my family was loosely constructed across those two communities which were linguistically distinct culturally, I had a sonic sense of Romanian but no words.  While doing a Transtranslation workshop with Mark Goldstein in which we read theories of translation, I elected to begin a sonic translation from the work of the Romanian poet, Nora Iuga, in which I had the sounds but not the sense.

My previous work, Skein of Days (Pedlar Press, 2015) a survey work had specifically focussed on the language available to shared understandings based through a fractured examination of mid to late C20th largely Canadian newspaper headlines and Magazine tables of Contents. I became interested in Natural Language Processing and Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet One but failed to execute any Kurzweil imitations on my Skein database.  I was primed to 'mess' with language. 

Dark Matter -- Diverted is the product of just such 'messing' driven by wanting to understand more of Cerón's work, to examine early Google Translate, more of the cognate and lexical structure of both Indo-European and Uralic languages and by my own poetic that seemed compatible with Cerón's as far as I could grasp it at the time.  Following the morph and flow through successive translations, both from Spanish to a single language to English or through multiple languages and back to English generated results that varied dramatically and syntactically. As with Skein of Days, the resulting texts were my compositions; they were assembled by my sensibility out of the array of words and structures provided by the various translations.

As I developed more comfort with Spanish on the page, Dark Matter took shape in a multilingual translation workshop with Erin Moure.  Under her watchful eye and polyglot guidance, poets translate from Ukrainian, French and Spanish into English. I continue to translate more of Cerón's work. Her exquisite sensibility and exuberant poetic continuesto intrigue me. While none in the workshop are fluent in all languages, the accumulation of linguistic and poetic expertise generates exciting work in multiple languages. I am grateful to Erin Moure, Jaclyn Piudik and Roman Ivashkiv for their ongoing work.

 

 

 

 

Sonja Greckol (Tkaronto/Toronto Canada) books include No Hay Linea En EL Tiempo/No Line In Time (manofalsa editore, 2025) translated by Eduardo Padilla, Monitoring Station (University of Alberta Press – Robert Kroetsch Series, 2023), No Line In Time (Tightrope, 2018), Skein of Days (Pedlar Press, 2014), and Gravity Matters (Inanna Press, 2008). 

Her long poem ‘No Line In Time’ won the 2017 Briar Patch Poetry Contest and No Line In Time was listed for the League of Canadian Poets Raymond P Souster Award in 2019. Monitoring Station (UAlta Press) was listed for the Alberta Book Publishers Award in 2024.

La Presa (Spring 2017)Asymptote (Jan 2025) published an excerpt of her translation of Rocío Cerón’s 'Trances' and her e-transtranslation ‘Dark Matter - Diverted’ of Rocío Cerón’s ‘Materia Oscura’ appeared in La Presa (Spring 2017). Greckol edits poetry for Women and Environments International. Greckol is a member of the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Il n’y aura pas de safety word, by Dominique Hétu

Il n’y aura pas de safety word, Dominique Hétu
Hurlantes, 2025

 

 

 

Dominique Hétu’s collection Il n’y aura pas de safety word (“There will be no safety word”) begins with a section titled “Nommer” (“Naming”), and so I shall also name its topic up front: fatphobia, fat-shaming, fat existence. Its poems are neither round nor angular – which is worth stating, since the collection ends with: “and then / if someone / wants to be clever / wants to be cute // and says (to me) that / I made poems / that are so full // I’m gonna break something” (“pis là / si une personne / veut faire sa fraîche / veut faire sa cute // et (me) dit que / j’ai fait des poèmes / tout en rondeur // j’casse toute”).

In this collection Hétu uses confessional poetry to express what is not allowed to be said publicly, to give it shape, to let others hear what they tell her. She responds to social discourse as well as to very specific encounters. Her humour is biting; it does not facilitate exchanges and does not defer to the power of shaming. She takes a position that complicates feminism and the demands to be proud of oneself. By bringing forward, in verse, her internal monologue, she allows the internal and everything that is internalized to pierce through to the external, to the behaviour that is imposed on her, to work against it. More than self-affirmation, then, these are poems of self-reconstruction – not in the sense that is expected of body sculpting through various (paid for) technologies, but against the constant damages that come from intimate and social interactions: “clothes tagged x / mark of the fault / of error // we know it / it’s whatever / but still it’s violent” (vêtements taggés x / marque de la faute / de l’erreur // on le sait / que c’est n’importe quoi / mais reste que c’est violent,” 70).

Part of her approach is to dare us to be as forward about fatphobia as she is, to acknowledge its presence within us. One of the sections in the book is titled “Du vent,” or “Hot air” as in, “ce n’est que du vent,” “this is nothing but hot air.” Hétu targets the false niceties, the empty encouragements, the backhanded compliments, the hypocrisy of interactions around fatness. In the process, she leads an anti-meditation on beauty, focusing on the dynamics of expectation and imposition, focusing intensely on events, words, letting them repeat and showing them for what they already are and displaying everything they already contain, rather than letting go of them or deepening them. Take this poem, for instance:

for the moment
we’ll admit
that you have the adequate outline
of beauty somewhere 

traces
clues
we see them
under your soft
under the full flesh 

be happy 

pour l’instant
on va reconnaître
que t’as le contour adéquat
du beau quelque part 

des traces
des indices
on les voit
sous ton mou
sous la chair pleine 

sois contente (44)

Hétu keeps her focus on pointing out the violence of forced compliments, pointing out what people are saying and doing when they are praising a picture, an outfit, in which she does not recognize herself. 

She lets us see the amount of energy that is needed to resist the behaviour that is expected of her, notably with a giant break on the page between the two following stanzas: “christ are we ever obliging / we consent to everything / free for all // we / when I / cost too much courage” (“on est serviable en crisse / on consent à toute / free for all // on / quand je / coûte trop en courage,” 82). As in many other passages, Hétu plays on the strength of the “on”: at once they and we, someone and everyone, it is a force that is as much internal as external, making resistance a transcendent necessity, all the more difficult for the lack of external supports. Here then I translate “on” as we, to show the presence of undefined others in the self, the agency they have within the self, but especially the depersonalization of the self, its loss in an undefined group as she acts, something this passage in particular addresses through the loss of the je in the on, looking at herself in the third person instead of acting in the first.

Perhaps in order to gain some ground on the self, it is in great part through exploring an intimate relationship that was lacking in respect, in fact devoid of it, that Hétu develops a voice and gaze that talks and looks back: 

I carry on my somber shoulders
the burden winds that ensure
your kind love
conditional
like a chorus
never fitting 

flayed
I dance
you feel like lip sync
in spite of the heat
and the asthma that keeps me weak
that hinders all rest 

bitter and constant noises
all around
that always take
that spoil the tune 

I will not be your karaoke

je porte sur mes épaules sombres
les vents fardeaux qui assurent
ton amour gentil
conditionnel
comme un refrain
jamais raccord 

au vif
je danse
tu as le goût du lip sync
malgré la chaleur
et l’asthme qui me garde faible
qui empêche tout repos 

bruits amers et constants
autour
qui prennent toujours
qui gâchent la toune 

je ne serai pas ton karaoké (40)

Poetically speaking, the collection functions so well because of its straightforwardness, its plays on silence and quick turnarounds, and the explicit avoidance of rimes, of things being neatly put together, since for her they are not neatly put together, or placed in a manner that is accessible. Still, Hétu ends on the possibility that poetry might open onto other subjects – other topics and selves – and help her reconcile with uncertainty. Without hoping for this poem, for this poetry, she desires it, and goes a long way to bringing it to the page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Madame full of shit, by Catherine Paquet

Madame full of shit, Catherine Paquet
Hurlantes, 2023

 

 

 

As you open Catherine Paquet’s debut collection, knowing that “Madame full of shit” is the French equivalent of “Little Miss Full of Shit” and that it appears within the collection in tandem with “Manic pixie dream girl” will give you two elements that seem essential to its construction. In these poems, the search for balance between self-deprecation and self-awareness is woven through with a criticism of the demands placed on women and the fantasies they resist or create in response.

Throughout the collection, Paquet expresses a desire for movement, for transformation, for a dynamic future, in part by the repeated use of the vocabulary of immobilization (“stallé,” “jammé”), partly through straightforward images like “I look for meaning like a top / at the risk of falling I spin” (“je cherche du sens comme une toupie / au risque de tomber je spinne,” 39). This expression is meant to make life possible and better instead of being an expulsion:

we should start up the fan
shake up the air along with the ideas
give ourselves the spaces of our ambitions
so that the wants that assail
stay put in a dirtpile
instead of getting expelled
on a porcelain seat 

il faudrait partir la fan
brasser l’air avec les idées
se donner les espaces de nos ambitions
que les envies qui assaillent
se tiennent dans un tas de terre
plutôt que d’être expulsées
sur un siège de porcelaine (90-91)

English speakers with some knowledge of French might find the book somewhat more approachable for its use of Franglais, which the publisher (the percussive Hurlantes Éditrices) defends in a prefatory note. Though this defense continues to be necessary in a context where attitudes toward the French language and its defense remain conservative, the text presents its own defense. It takes up and radicalizes the rhythm of spoken language, allows it to hit, to surprise, to shift ideas suddenly even as the languages flow together. Through very short lines and phrasings, it accelerates the speed of reading and of speaking, it holds a joy that is contagious for the reader.

The collection is organized in three sections, each focusing on loose themes: a youth that is lived as fleeting, and the elements of the body, inner life, and selfhood; placelessness, distress, and what existentialism looks like today; and the imperative to heal and take care of ourselves in ways that disarms the strength of anger and anxiety and their potential for change.

the veterans of “resilience”
pick up the dead soldiers
in the parks,
battlefields for dignity between
judgment,
       overdoses,
                    giving up
it’s true that the hand
is invisible that forces responsibility
down the throats of the famished 

les vétérans de la “résilience”
ramassent les corps morts
dans les parcs,
champs de bataille pour la dignité entre
le jugement,
           les surdoses,
                       l’abandon
c’est vrai qu’elle est invisible
la main qui enfonce la responsabilité
dans la gorge des affamé·es (87-88)

Paquet’s poems are highly concerned with, full of concern for, everyday life. They transform everyday clichéd expressions into new, fertile images, avoiding our expectations. Bringing water to the mill, amener de l’eau au moulin, adding proof or arguments, becomes “a seduction hydraulic / at the mill” (“séduction hydraulique / au moulin,” 18). A disappointing ending to a story (finir en queue de poisson) gives way to an improbable “fish bottom for an ending” (“cul de poisson comme fin,” 22). And the simple idea that things come in threes (jamais deux sans trois) becomes a comment on loneliness (“never two without a chill,” “jamais deux sans froids,” 25). She also details the insufficiencies of daily life by selecting simple objects that carry weight and exemplify fatigue and the dreading of change, as in the poem on page 50: the corner of the kitchen, neon lights, fingerprints on stainless steel, washcloths and jogging pants, extra-large band t-shirts, love handles, Epsom salts…

Throughout, the relationship to self passes through the relationship to the body and to clothes, and specifically to the expectations that others place on them. Reflecting on weight loss and exercise, she writes: “I think people thought I was prettiest / when I was lose in a storm / frozen mermaid / faults all over my shape” (“je pense qu’on m’a jamais trouvée aussi belle / que désorientée dans une tempête / sirène surgelée / des failles partout sur la shape,” 30). Paquet instead locates beauty in the acts of promising and rebounding:

the path the beautiful the great one
sketches itself like an abyss
rock bottoms are fertile
the softness of a warm pebble
at the end of trembling fingers
resonates like a prayer

le chemin le beau le grand
se dessine comme une abysse
les rock bottoms sont fertiles
la douceur d’un galet chaud
au bout des doigts tremblants
résonne comme une prière, 80-81

Paquet is able to create tension and awaken desires that keep us engaged. Her writing is clear and inviting, and I wrote down too many passages for me to be able to share them all here. And even as she sometimes cuts herself in the process, her precision and irony are sharp and direct – she makes language at once into a tool and a weapon. And indeed, the strongest poem might just be the one on page 73 (they are all untitled), where she describes the ruinous effect on her fingers of digging in the soil of meaning so that something new may grow.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

 

Ryan Greene : on EL REY MURCIÉLAGO // THE BAT KING, by Yaxkin Melchy Ramos

 

 

 

 

Visual description:

A gif featuring images of small square pieces of paper (some blue, some light brown, some white notebook paper with blue lines). Each frame of the gif has a photo of my left hand holding a stack of square pieces of paper, and you can slightly see the edges of the other pieces of paper lower down in the stack. In the background is a tilted spread from the chapbook THE BAT KING where there are a few interspersed words but mostly unreadable text formed from commas, "O"s, and some other punctuation marks. In the poem those unreadable bits mimic layers of soil and sediment underground. Every 9 seconds the gif shifts to a new image and it cycles infinitely.

Textual transcription:

Title page:
9 Notes
a short reflection
in short fragments
by Ryan Greene 

Fragment 1:

I've been working with Yaxkin to translate the first three books in his project "THE NEW WORLD" since the end of 2019/start of 2020. I first started reading his poems in 2015 or 2016.

Fragment 2:

Still, after all this time, his poems catch me by surprise. I think I know where we're going, and then suddenly we're somewhere I don't know if I've been before.

Fragment 3:

That sense of disorientation feels a bit heightened with a chapbook like "THE BAT KING" which was plucked from a much larger work, a book called "THE GREEN SUN."

Fragment 4:

In those moments of not knowing where I am or how I got there, I wonder why I ever expected to know in the first place. Do we ever really know?

Fragment 5:

As a translator, I often think about how expectations of "correctness" can distract from the work of honoring a feeling of not knowing.

Fragment 6:

Maybe another way to say that is that I want to put my energy toward honoring and listening to the contours of ambiguity.

Fragment 7:

I don't want to feel tricked into providing (only) "clarity." Or, I don't want "correctness" to be my only metric.

Fragment 8:

Part of what I love most about Yaxkin's poem is the way they seem to hold room for an honest multiplicity.

Fragment 9:

Life and its interconnected complexities dance across scales, timelines, and realities. Yaxkin's poems remind me it's all fractal. Alive.

Gratitude page:

Thx to rob for the invitation to write this reflection in celebration of the late-summer release of EL REY MURCIÉLAGO (THE BAT KING) by Yaxkin Melchy with above/ground press :heart emoji

 

 

 

 

Ryan Greene [photo credit: Dennis Dominguez] writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. For the past several years he has been working with Yaxkin Melchy to translate the first three books of THE NEW WORLD. He’s learning.