The Making of Patakín, From the Preface by David H. Brown

Patakín: Orisha Stories from the Odu of Ifá started as a series of informal translations for a blog, “Lukumí Traditional Knowledge,” at Blogger.com. I wanted to learn about the signs (odu) lived by the Babalawos at the center of my research on Ifá’s history in Cuba. I pestered Osvaldo Morales, Jr. (Otura Pompeyo) for a year to help me encapsulate the signs of such great personages as Adeshina (Obara Meyi), José de la Asunción Villalonga (Ogundá Masá), Tata Gaitán (Ogundá Fun), Bernabé Menocal (Babá Eyiogbe), Guillermo Castro (Ogbe Shé), and Miguel Febles y Padrón (Odí Ka).

By the end of 2019, I thought I had finished the Ifá history book, which I had started writing in 2018 to pull myself out of a major depression and radiation treatment for prostate cancer. In order not to lose the momentum of the healing process, I put before me the test of translating as many patakín as I could. If I could tame some of the most difficult stories on earth, I could surely get my health back. The Lord works in mysterious ways. In taking on this project, I deepened my commitment to the Religion in ways I had not imagined.

As an art historian, I was never very good at stories, leaving them mostly to the Oriatés and folklorists. Twenty years an Olorisha did not make me much better. As well, I was never very good with the Egun. My family raised me as a Conservative Jew, and we don’t do afterlife. We are here, and we go, leaving “memories” in heads and hearts, but subsequent daily interaction with the dead was not our thing. We can say Kaddish on the anniversary of a family death and on Yom Kippur, as remembrances. Through the translation work, I got better at the stories, which drew me much closer to the Santo and reinforced my respect for Ifá. In regards to the Egun, learning the signs and their stories enabled more ample spiritual biographies of the deceased Babalawos who lived them. As well, I put the stories to work to understand key themes and events in the history of Ifá and Osha in Cuba, such as the Dancing of the Masks of Olokun in the nineteenth century and the crowning of Tata Gaitán as Obá of the Lukumí in 1910. Stories and proverbs accompany each Babalawo’s biography, providing an alternate voice and tone to the third-person historical narrative. I had collected the photographs of Babalawos and Orisha priests for three decades and had made portraits of many of them when they were alive. I feel privileged to have known them as elders, colleagues, and friends. Otura Pompeyo has watched me spend years cleaning up their images in Photoshop. Where possible, I have fixed compositions, removed scratches, repaired clothes, and made figures and faces more lifelike with techniques I developed. Was I not, therefore, committed to rendering homage to the Egun? Otura Pompeyo persuaded me that what I was actually doing was ensuring and burnishing their posterity as Egun, even more than many of their own godchildren have done. As it turned out, there are nearly 300 photographs in the book.

The translation of the Ifá stories was difficult. They make novices out of all of us, and it never lets up, even for seasoned Babalawos and professional translators. Spanish has been part of my life since middle school, where I learned its grammar and memorized all the irregular verb conjugations. I had the privilege of traveling to Spain, studying at the Universal school in Cuernavaca in Mexico, and researching and socializing in Cuba, not to mention, gaining interpretive and writing skills in college and graduate school. I understand more than I did before, but with no mastery, just bits and pieces.

I am not a professional translator and have no pretensions to being one. Therefore, technical questions of the structural issues of translation are less important to this work, though the ingenious Cuban Spanish syntax often leaves one shell-shocked. The subject and object references of pronouns often fail to clarify who did what to whom. Still, my goal was to make difficult, even opaque, texts in Spanish legible in English and, where possible, idiomatic—that is, expressive in ways natural to a native speaker. I am not a native speaker, and, as often as not, my translations are embarrassingly literal, approximations of what a native speaker might express. For example, in “The Venereal Disease of Orunmila” from Iroso Trupon, the townspeople are about to burn up Orunmila’s son for disrespecting the orishas, but Orunmila confects an ebó that includes a bell.

Orunmila citó a todos y le dijo a su hijo: un hijo de un ignorante o de un comemierda, solo le pasa esto que la paso a mi hijo, pero como yo sé de sobra que mi boca es de plomo, por el poder que Olodumaré me dió, mi hijo se salvará por la campana que le envié.

His son’s fate was certain without Orunmila as a father. Literally, “mi boca es de plomo” means, “my mouth is of lead.” One good non-native Spanish speaker suggested that, with a mouth of lead, his words merely “fall to the ground,” go unheeded—his son does not listen to him. Perhaps. My son’s brother from Camaguey squinched up his face at that interpretation, arguing that Orunmila’s words have the strength of lead, of which bullets are made. Demanding money, a Cuban may say, “choose, plata o plomo” (“money or bullet”). Clearly, the “son of Orunmila” is a Babalawo, and not the son of any ignorante or comemierda, and, despite his fault, Orunmila, ever judicious, will save him. On its own, comemierda’s is of great semantic berth, depending upon context, and resists exact translation.[1] The first version makes some sense, because the word of Orunmila does not fall to the ground (see Odí Trupon), but the latter is a resounding display of Orunmila’s prophecy and efficacy. Orunmila’s statement—“my mouth has force and, by the power Olodumaré gave me, my son will be saved by the bell I sent him”—is an incantation to make it so. I ran many passages like these, often with no punctuation or clear pronouns, before a veteran professional translator and U.N interpreter; a native Spanish speaker with a Ph.D. in folklore who had made Osha; several Oriatés, native and not. They struggled as much as I had, because the compilers were mostly untrained as writers, with more, or less, formal schooling. In cases, one or the other had to admit that my translations were better than theirs were.

One important thing Osha and Ifá practitioners have over professional translators, even if they have no mastery in Spanish: our experience of the religious ecology the stories describe and the ritual processes they narrate. Good idiomatic translations depend upon an understanding of a language’s cultural context. We know Lukumí lexicon. As well, despite often inadequate descriptions in the stories, we know the kinds of ceremonies—if not the specifics—and, therefore, can visualize the actions in a story narrative, such as divination, ebó, rogations, works, making osains, addressing orishas and eguns, etc. As well, we practitioners can avoid cumbersome and stereotypical terms and phrases. We practice the Regla of Ifá and the Regla of Osha, not Santería. “Syncretism” has always been relatively superficial. The religion is not a “synthesis of Yorùbá religion and Roman Catholocism,” as journalism, bereft of historical memory, repeats ad nauseum. We do not do “magic” and have no “fetishes.” El Santo is not “The Saint,” but “The Osha,” i.e., “The Religion.” Los santos are surely not “saints” in the Roman Catholic sense, but the orishas, and, even more specifically, the orishas’ fundamentos, which have been “made santo,” holy or consecrated, as in “making santo.”

These differences also apply to readers. The patakín, whether in the original Spanish or in English translation, possess what literary scholars call “divided address.” They speak in different ways to different readerships, such as Babalawos, Olorishas, Aleyos, and general readers. The stories meet different groups where they are, and each group takes away something useful, leaving the rest. The Dice Ifá advice, proverbs, prayers, and ebó framing each story will help some readers, and will glaze over the eyes of others. New York Times columnist William Safire called this the M.E.G.O. effect. Some will try to read a story and say, “WTF? What just happened?” For these reasons, I have varied the fonts and point sizes. They intend to mark distinct registers of information. Odu names and Dice Ifá content is in 11pt, marking it as contextualizing material for the stories, in 12pt. The odu name sits on the right to signal its relevance, but the smaller point size and italicized Dice Ifá mark it as the interiorized murmur of the room of Ifá, thus more difficult to read, and intentionally so. The whole book comes in Times New Roman, but the translation of Iká Meyi in the Introduction, for didactic purposes, is in Courier, thus making historical reference to the typeface of the early Gaitán, Febles, and Arango texts.

One thing is for sure, the patakín take work, lots of it, and that is what this translator encourages of all readers who pick up this book. The best I can do is to share my experience with the English-speaking Osha/Ifá communities, as well as the general Anglophone readership. All mistranslations and errors are my own, and my sincere hope is that readers more competent in Cuban Spanish than I am will offer constructive criticism for more books up the road.

[1] It could be any number of things: “sh*t-eater,”  “as*hole,” or “jerkoff.”. Among friends in jest, it might not be offensive. In seriousness, it might contradict their silliness, inappropriateness, or unrealistic posture, e.g., “Don’t be such a comemierda,” or, tu eres muy bueno hasta comemierda, “You are such a good person, up to eating shit,” or being a hypocrite for pretending to be one. Miguel Ramos, a native speaker, offers idiomatic eloquence: “Comemierda can also mean fool, innocent, ignorant, arrogant, pompous, despicable individual. Hace el papel de comemierda—[the person] plays the role of the fool, innocent, or ignorant one. Come tanta mierda que se indigesta—[the person] eats so much shit (is so arrogant) that [they] get…indigestion. ¡A comer mierda!—go eat sh*t (akin to the English “go f*ck yourself”; Ramos to Brown 2022).