Elizabeth Heritage
Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages edited by Michelle Elvy and Vaughan Rapatahana (The Cuba Press, 2025), 296pp, $30
My earliest experience of translation was Dad reading us his Asterix comic books, which he owns in the original French. A lot of the humour depends on puns that are notoriously difficult to move from one language to another. One joke depended on knowing that pomme de terre (potato) literally means ‘apple of earth’. It was an early introduction to what’s both lost and gained in translation: ‘potato’ doesn’t get its own name, instead it is called ‘like something else but in a different place’.
Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages is a new anthology from The Cuba Press that celebrates the dozens of languages spoken, written and otherwise embodied by New Zealanders (including NZ Sign Language, which is presented in pictogram form). The anthology includes essays and musings on multilingualism by a number of the contributors, but it is essentially a collection of very short stories, each beginning with a brief note from the author. Some stories are flash fiction, others take the form of poems or short memoirs. Many stories are presented in one or more languages on the left-hand page, with an English translation opposite, although some authors chose to write both pieces in a mixture of languages. Others present one piece written in a blend. The stories are bookended by an introduction from the editors and, at the end, a series of miscellaneous essays and ruminations about language and translation.
Some of the author notes accompanying each piece are pithy summations. Vana Manasiadis tells us: ‘My first language was Greek. I started studying Italian in Bologna and te reo Māori in Tāmaki Makaurau. I think tongues are cities.’ Serie Barford provides a story set in Ukraine and declares that it serves as a ‘reclamation of my silenced tongue’. Lynn Davidson argues that ‘Scots words are woven into New Zealand English’, while James Norcliffe states that fidelity to meaning in translation often causes the music of metrics and rhyme to be lost. Marco Sonzogni shares Seamus Heaney’s belief that all language is an entry to further language, and that translation is the door. For Golriz Lucina, born in Shiraz, Iran, but raised mostly in Timaru, language as child involved ‘negotiating … a jumble of multitudes and complexities’.
I was sent a print copy of Te Moana o Reo, which I read silently in my head—that is, I read it with my private brain-voice. But there were a lot of silences even there, as I encountered not only languages I don’t speak, but scripts such as Arabic that I have no idea how to sound out. These repeated and persistent silences made me wish for an audiobook version that could render the full polyglot range of voices.
In story after story, writer after writer seeks to ventriloquise or channel or commune with the spirits of forebears, so, as you might expect, many stories are about the pain and grief of language loss caused by colonisation, migration, and loss of connection with one’s ancestors. Ghazaleh Gol writes, ‘This lack of knowledge of the language feels like a phantom limb I never actually ever possessed.’ Melanie Kwang writes, ‘When I was a child, I thought all adults naturally lost their language through old age, and that was why my parents’ English was broken.’
Other kaituhi speak of the slow and difficult process of attempting to find their way back to their mother tongue. Many feel stuck in beginner mode, such as Shima Jack, who writes, ‘my Chinese tongue is frozen, locked in childhood’—vividly evoking a sense of trauma. In the note introducing his story, Faisal Halabi says: ‘Although I was born into an Arabic speaking household and was fluent for the first several years of my life, the language has been superseded by English following our move to Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s an imbalance I’m working to even.’ His story was a particular favourite of mine. It’s a heartbreaking and all-too-relatable tale of trying to find space in his whānau for his own queerness:
I learn the words to describe the parts of me that I didn’t know were there: homosexual, gay, queer.
I look for their translation in Arabic—but those types of words aren’t there. My mother tells me those types of people aren’t there.
Many kaituhi describe relating to language through food. Sharni Wilson, a Pākehā-Czech writer who has lived in Japan, writes: ‘Language doesn’t work isolated from life. Language needs to be on the plate, steaming, devoured like takoyaki balls or slurped like ramen.’ Diane Brown has Cornish ancestors. Her story ‘The Forgotten Language of Pasty’ finishes with the line: ‘It’s as [if]my ancestors left empty-handed, taking nothing of themselves, but here I am, a child again, my mother handing me a pasty, D on the side, in case I forget who I am.’
I found much of Te Moana o Reo somewhat depressing as it so often references endangered or dying languages or seems tentative, nostalgic or grieving, so the ebullience of Robert Sullivan’s page really stood out. Sullivan is from Ngāpuhi and Kāi Tahu, and his author note begins: ‘My relationship with language is human!’ How succinct is that! I loved his poem ‘Rākaumatohi: e hoa’:
How do I love you, my friends?
Let me count the mountain’s ways,
the heightened plains that bend
up into snowy reaches, playing
on the mind out of sight to send
pillars of light, clouds, rain
on a grateful garden bed
pulling out rocks, making lakes
with his tokotoko, with her cloaks sent
from our māra kai into our food basket
filled with sweetness and kōrero each
to each—we’re peaches, plums,
strawberries and yams, we’re
only the bumblebee’s hums
aroha stumblefooting the air
in this flowering season.
In his essay, ‘A Poem is a Legend’, David Eggleton argues that poetry is a form of translation, and Sullivan’s poem feels in some ways like a translation of the works it references. The opening recalls a famous Shakespearean sonnet, while a later line reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘I can hear the mermaids singing each to each.’ I love that this is followed immediately by lines that echo the beloved children’s book Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. This combination felt so joyful, it made me smile.
With a polyphony of offerings from well over 100 writers, Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages is a substantial anthology. Yet, strangely for a local collection that is so concerned with translation, Te Tiriti o Waitangi features hardly at all. The first kaituhi to grapple with it is Moata McNamara (Ngāpuhi and Te Mahurehure), toward the end of the book, in an email exchange with the writer S.J. Mannion. McNamara describes the Treaty as a process whereby ‘translation attempted, wittingly or otherwise, to defraud. To obscure, through translation, the intentions of the English version … having the two versions of our treaty gives us access to an understanding of what our tupuna agreed and what, in our language, was promised and will forever be expected.’
And Hēmi Kelly’s essay ‘A Tradition of Māori Translation’ confirms that:
The translation of the Treaty of Waitangi was undertaken [in early February 1840] by Rev. Henry Williams and his son Edward Marsh Williams. Both father and son had been living in Northland for seventeen years … They favoured certain words over others in their translation, knowing their Māori landlords would not sign had a term like te mana katoa (complete power) been used instead of te kāwanatanga (complete governance) to mean all rights and powers of sovereignty.
The word kāwanatanga—a new word and concept to Māori—did not fully encapsulate the meaning of the English text.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) is one of the co-editors of Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages. His bio notes that ‘he is a critic of the agencies of English-language proliferation and the consequent decimation of Indigenous tongues’. Rapatahana often writes solely in te reo, or in te reo first followed by an English translation. His story ‘Taku haerenga: My Journey’ appears here in two versions: the left-hand piece starts in English and develops into te reo; the right-hand piece is all in English. Whereas other kaituhi have generally had to work hard to write in their ancestral languages, Rapatahana says: ‘I struggle to write now in [English], the most rapacious of tongues, as it stalks and subjugates other tongues. This language is … A big killer.’ I admire his strong stance.
Reading this anthology, and pondering so many of the confessional admissions about feelings of estrangement from a parental language, made me reflect on my own linguistic environment and choices. English is my ancestral language and the only one I speak fluently. At school in Tāmaki Makaurau I missed the opportunity to learn te reo from kaiako Māori and instead took French and Latin. In this I was copying my parents, both of whom grew up in England where French functioned as a class signifier moving them ‘up’ from working-class to middle-class. This helped demonstrate to me that language choices are often heavily influenced by financial and cultural expectations, instilling a kind of status anxiety that parents end up handing on to their children.
These days, as tangata tiriti, I am trying to use the little reo Māori I have learnt as respectfully as I can. I want to resist the urge to take the easy way out by defaulting to English-only. However, there is so much about te ao Māori that I know that I do not yet understand—how wairua works, for example. My current approach is to nudge up some English words near to it and trust that, in time and with continued learning, the unlanguaged part of me will eventually make the leap. All I’ve got so far is that it’s like something else but in a different place.
ELIZABETH HERITAGE is a queer Pākehā book reviewer and freelance publishing professional. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in the rohe of Te Ātiawa Taranaki Whānui.
Leave a Reply