208

This morning I had the great pleasure of meeting with Chilaajav, my adorable boss last year and the director of the Mongolian Writers Union and Mongolian Broadcasting. It was wonderful to see him again, even more wonderful than hearing his voice on my Mongolian "handy" (cell phone), which is saying a lot; he always says "I am Chilaajav" when he calls and then says English words in Mongolian order. He's certainly not the first to do the Mongolian order; that's a lot of what I am fixing with the translation of Altangerel's book, but my favorite person to do that is definitely Chilaa. "Dashnyam I and you together going to. Za. Byebye."

The movie I made of a trip to the countryside with Chilaajav singing a traditional Mongolian song (he has a fine voice) is the one with the most hits on youtube; it's been viewed well over 1,000 times since I posted it in fall of '07.

I'd love readers/viewers to hear Mongolian poetry by someone who can do it justice, so here is Chliaajav, reading some of his poetry:



The fantastic and accomplished Mongolian-English translator Simon Wickham-Smith and I translated a few of his poems for Best American Poetry last year here, if you'd like a sense of what the hell he's saying. One of the greatest challenges as a translator is doing justice to the song and rhythm of the origin language in the destination language, and after listening to this, listeners might understand why Mongolian is so hard to do justice. It reminds me of cats fighting when Mongolians get angry, but in moments like these, the language for me evokes leaves rustling, and wind.