For the month of April, I had the opportunity to conduct on-the-ground research on the islands of Corsica and Sardnina off of the west coast of Italy for my honors thesis which is a report documenting preservation efforts for the minor languages of Corsican and Sassarese respectively. I don’t know exactly what I expected when I got to Corsica in terms of what language I would primarily be communicating in, but I definitely didn’t expect to be constantly switching between French and Italian—often in the same conversation. Neither did I expect to be spoken to in Corsican, which I soon found out I could understand quite well thanks to my knowledge of Italian. Never had I experienced such a multilingual culture where people switch between languages so frequently and with such ease—effortlessly.
Whenever I travel, it often irks me when I am unable to communicate with people in their native language. I am acutely aware of my inability to connect with that part of the culture, and it upsets me that I have to expect people to understand English in order to communicate because they shouldn’t have to. I went to Corsica and Sardinia to advocate for the preservation of these minority languages and was limited to communicating in the very languages that are actively oppressing them. Once again, I felt this part of the culture would be forever locked behind a door unless I learned to speak the language. Being able to understand Corsican, at least, allowed the people I talked to to express themselves in their native language, but it always left me wishing I could respond in Corsican as well.
While on the islands, I was also finishing up my special project for Thousand Languages in which I organized a community translation challenge at my university in France where I studied abroad for the semester. I had um-ed and ah-ed over whether or not to translate the feature poem myself since I would be receiving submissions in all the languages I could translate into and had ultimately decided not to until I arrived in Corsica. After a few days of speaking with people about their passion for the preservation of their endangered mother tongue, I decided that I wanted to translate the poem into Corsican and then Sassarese when I arrived in Sardinia. I wanted to do this as an homage to the languages that I had spent the last six months reading about, the last month discussing with native speakers, and the next six months writing my thesis about in order to advocate for them. This would be my small addition to the preservation efforts of so many fighting to keep these languages alive. Thank you to Nicolas Sorba and Alessandro Derrù for their help with the Corsican and Sassarese translations respectively!
About the Translator
Born and raised in Phoenix and a third generation Sun Devil, Acacia Wastchak is a third-year undergraduate student in Barrett, the Honors College at ASU studying International Trade with a minor in French. Travel and foreign languages are two of her biggest passions and what has led her to study abroad in Ecuador, Italy, and now France for the spring semester. Both her mother and grandmother are writers, so literature - and especially poetry - have always been a big part of Acacia's life and inspired her own love of writing and language. Acacia is a polyglot and speaks Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese in addition to English and is currently learning German. As an intern for TLP this semester, she is both translating poetry from HFR into Spanish, Italian, and French as well as running the Earth Day Translation Challenge in Aix-en-Provence, France at the local universities. (updated 2023)
Projects
Earth Day Translation Challenge E-Book
Translations
"Head of Dvarapalas" by Jenny Yang Cropp (French)
"Pahá Sápa" by Julia Peçanha (French)
"The Saints of Negativity" by Norman Dubie (Italian)
"The Train" by Norman Dubie (Spanish)
"Water in Love" by Ed Bok Lee (Italian)
With grateful acknowledgment to French Language reviewers: Markus Cruse & Feriel Guennoun; Italian language reviewers: Juliann Vitullo & Gina Pietrantoni; and Spanish language reviewers: Alberto Rios & Belén Agustina