Yaqui Deer Songs Maso Bwikam: Native American Poetry Volume 14 Sun Tracks | Authentic Indigenous Literature for Cultural Studies & Poetry Enthusiasts

The Yaqui —an indigenous people of the Mexican state of Sonora and also the Southwestern United States -- consider deer songs to be the most ancient of their verbal art forms and a special language of their community. They are usually sung by three people to accompany the performances of a deer dancer whose dance, usually performed throughout the night, thanks and honors the little brother deer for coming from its home—“the Flower World”—which the Yaqui believe is located to the east of a place “beneath the dawn” and which is home to the insects, birds, and animals of the Sonoran desert. As one deer singer explains: “We talk about the deer coming out to walk around and to play in an enchanted opening in the flower world. When I sing, my mind is always in the flower world. That is where I think the songs take place. There must be an opening in the wilderness over there in the flower world. The fawn comes out into that to dance and play.” In their incomparable and essential book, Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina offer us their superb translations of Yaqui deer songs that adhere to the songs’ original lines, stanzas, repetitions, parallel phrasings, antitheses, and rhetorical structures; and in their translations they repeat lines and stanzas the same number of times as did the singers they recorded. The results are breathtaking. Here, for example, is a stanza from one of those songs:"Over there, in the center of the flower-covered wilderness, in the enchanted wilderness world, beautiful with the dawn wind, beautifully you lie with see-through freshness, wilderness world. You are an enchanted wilderness world, you lie with see-through freshness wilderness world."A great work of ethnology, "Yaqui Deer Songs" is also an entrancing book of poetry.