Zam_franca:«You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty»

«Vi ne devas malhavi fidon je homaro. Homaro estas kiel oceano; se kelkaj gutoj de la oceano estas malpuraj, la oceano ne malpuriĝas»

- Mahatma Gandhi

But must I not? We used to say the same thing about a few plastic bags in the ocean.

Gandhi didn't live in a polluted world. But the meaning of what he said is still true: in every times, there were bad people, but also good ones, standing for the rights considered as basic in their time. And a majority led by bad people doing bad things. This majority is not bad, but under bad influence; and with the progress of education, it tends to become reduced.
PS:
Of course people are not only good or only bad, this is a simplification, not an apology of a binary way of thinking.

Nornen is right about that you can't omit the relative pronoun.

I still disagree about the verb uzi. To me it is very near of using a tool or something, so using a canyon gives a strange feeling, Given the interpretation Nornen gave I came to think the Swedish verb vistas, restadi or estadi in Esperanto.

My second take

Jen kelkaj kanjonoj
kie oni eble restados
denove

A tool is just something used to attain an objective. Anything can be a tool. Sure, hammers and screwdrivers are tools. But tools aren't just things you hold. They can be processes, they can be beliefs, they can be observations of natural phenomena, literally anything that helps you attain some objective can be counted as a tool.

To a guerrilla band, certainly a canyon could be a tool, and possibly one put to good use - as a hideout, as a base of operations, as shelter, etc. To military people, all natural formations - rivers, mountains, forests, etc. - may be tools used in the objective of defeating the other side. To astronomers, galaxies can be tools used to illustrate or prove theories. Some people consider meditation a tool they can use for various effects (relaxation, focus, etc.). Not all tools have handles.

As far as I can tell, uzi is a word that can be applied to just about anything, since anything can be a tool, and is therefore perfectly suitable in this case.

RiotNrrd:Not all tools have handles.

QFT. This made me laugh. You should start a collection of aphorisms that haphazardly spring up on lernu. Call it "Dicta RiotNrrrdis" or something.

I have been wondering for some time now, if RiotNrrrd stands for Riot Nerd. Does it?

I have been wondering for some time now, if RiotNrrrd stands for Riot Nerd. Does it?

Well... sort of. The derivation of the name is kind of complicated.

1) In the early '90s there was a Pacific Northwest feminist punk movement called "Riot grrrl's". A number of bands were part of it, and a few of them were\are ones I like.

2) In the late '90s Douglas Coupland (a Pacific Northwesterner) wrote a book entitled "Microserf's", about a bunch of programmers who worked for a very large company in the Pacific Northwest that might be discernible from the title (although I don't think it's ever actually identified in the book).

3) Although I don't work for that particular company, I am a programmer who lives in the Pacific Northwest (one state south, though; about a twenty minute drive from the riots currently making international news, to nail it down even further).

4) In the book, the programmers "hit the town" one night, and Douglas offhandedly referred to them as they headed for the clubs downtown as the RiotNrrds; it was for sure a mixture of "Riot grrrl" (due to the whole PNW\(post)punk thing going on) and "nerd" (because they were programmers). The programmers weren't female, and neither am I, so it clearly wasn't a gendered name, and the next time I needed to create a username (which, in the late '90s, was probably the next day) it just popped into my head. And that was long before Lernu! came along.

I'm not the only RiotNrrd on the internet nowadays - every now and then I try to sign up for something with it and >gasp< it's taken - but I've certainly been known by that name for a very long time. More than twenty years, for sure.

Please do quote poetry to me! I am always hungry for poetry, and its interpretation, and I'm excited to see every translation that's being proposed here. Since my Esperanto skills are still feeble, I can at least provide my knowledge of the poet to help out.

I come from the school of literary criticism which says that a text is not alive until it is read, and the way that the reader brings their own thoughts and perspectives to the text--the dialogue between the text and the reader--is what gives it life. I spent a while trying to decide which of his poems would be a most appropriate reply to nornen's reading, but there are a lot of them, and I'm trying to practice restraint. But here, another Stafford poem we might use to help feed this translation:

Our Cave

Because it was good, we were afraid.
It went down dark, dark. After a
bend it was night. We didn't tell
anybody. All summer it was ours.
I remember best when horses went by
shaking the ground. It was war, we said,
and they wouldn't find us. Once we heard
someone stumbling and crying: we blew out
the candle and waited a long time till quiet.
It came, and the dark was closer than ever.
Now when we close our eyes, we are there
again, anywhere: we hid it well.
We buried in it the best things we had
and covered it over with branches and leaves.

And an excerpt from another:

But I'm tired of this long story
where I live, these houses with people
who whisper their real lives away
while eternity runs wild in the street,
and you suffocate.

Bring me a new one, maybe with a dog
that trots alongside, and a desert with a hidden
river no one else finds, but you go there
and pray and a great voice comes.
And everything listens.

Regarding the verb--in English, "use" can have implications like the use of a tool or object, and even implications of exploiting something, or using it up. So if "uzos" has similar implications, maybe that's appropriate. I think I would enjoy something which preserves a sort of tension between two possibilities like what we see in the poems I quoted: will we use the canyons as in the first poem, to hide, perhaps having been driven to them by humanity's violence? Or will we use them in a more spiritual manner, going there to listen to that great voice?

P.S. I've never heard of Humberto Akʼabal; those poems are beautiful. Have you thought of translating them into Esperanto?

P.P.S. Regarding good and bad people: A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you put one sentence at a line, Google translate will translate good enough. There are errors with "it" and "dark, dark" - I would translate "Ĝi iĝi pli kaj pli malhela".

Thanks for posting the poem “Our Cave”. Oddly enough, although this piece explicitly mentions war and hiding, fear and darkness, it strikes with me a completely different note. Not “Mad Max” anymore, but “Stand By Me”. This poem is about two young boys (old enough to go out and explore the woods, but still young enough that girls aren’t of any particular interest). It has to be two, because the best adventures you have in groups of two, you and your best friend. That friend who doesn’t stop you from doing stupid things, but who encourages you and multiplies his own stupidity with yours, thus creating stupidity squared. Those boys found this cave in the woods, convinced that they are the only ones aware of this cave unbeknown to beast or man, without realising that generations of children before them thought exactly the same about “their” cave. The words “all summer” refer to the summer vacations, because for children the lack of school is what defines this season. The poem is about the long summer days, when you and your friend hid in caves, tried unsuccessfully to build a dam in the creek, built traps for rabbits which never worked. Now as adults we look back at this time with a certain sweetness and longing, because we now think that we were carefree back then. But these are the pink glasses of memory: we had our worries back then, too, childish worries, but nevertheless worries that were weighing heavily on our childish minds. And at the end of summer, the first dark clouds on the horizon were an omen for both the coming thunderstorms as well as for the looming return to school.

I will give it a shot and try to translate (and hence interpret) it in Esperanto. Bear with me: neither English nor Esperanto are my first languages and translating poetry is a pain.

Nia Kaverno

Ĉar ĝi estis bona, ni timis.
La descendo estis malhelega. Post
kurvo estis nokto. Ni sciigis
al neniu. Dum la tuta somero ĝi estis nia.
Mi bone memoras, kiam ĉevaloj preterkuris
tremigante la grundon. Estas milito, ni diris,
kaj ili ne trovos nin. Iam ni aŭdis,
kiel iu faletis kaj ploris: ni elblovis
la kandelon kaj atendis longe la kvieton.
Ĝi alvenis kaj la mallumo estis pli proksime ol neniam.
Nun, kiam ni fermas la okulojn, ni estas tie
denove, ie ajn: ni kaŝis ĝin diligente.
Ni enterigis en ĝi niajn plej bonajn aĵojn
kaj kovris ĝin per branĉoj kaj folioj.

P.S. I've never heard of Humberto Akʼabal; those poems are beautiful. Have you thought of translating them into Esperanto?

I have posted some of his poems translated to Esperanto on this forum, but thanks to the awesome search feature of this site, I cannot find them anymore. However, please take a look at my favourite poem by this artist:

Q’apoj Je’lalaj Ulew

Chi ri’ q’apoj je’lalaj ulew.
Ixim, triko, kinaq,
man k’ota nijun q’ayes ri mataq’e,
ri kumätz e men.

Je’lik Ch’umil, Kowilaj Che’
kikimatzej kib’ cho ri rex q’ayes
kikich’uq kib’ ruk’ ri kaj.

Xopan k’ulo jun q’ij
xe’ch’aw ri kumätz.

Man xtij ta chi ri uwach taq ri che’
xkijach chi kixo’l
ri q’apoj je’lalaj ulew.

Paradizo

Ĉi tie estis la paradizo.

Maizo, greno, fabo,
ne estis malpermesita frukto,
la serpentoj estis mutaj.

Ĥelik Ĉumil kaj Kovilaĥ Ĉe
amoris sur la herbo
kaj kovris sin per la ĉielo.

Alvenis tago,
kiam ekparolis la serpentoj.

Ili malpermesis la fruktojn
kaj disdonis inter si
la paradizon.