Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tender.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm, and this is a very special show.

I'm very excited about it.

I received a book in the mail called Like a New Sun, New Indigenous

Mexican Poetry. It's edited by my guest, Vitor Terran and David Shook. It has a foreword

by Elliot Weinberger, who is someone who translated a great deal of Octavio Baas,

and he is kind of brilliant.

Victor Tehran understands English but doesn't speak it.

The other David Shook translated. understands English but doesn't speak it.

The other David Shook translates from indigenous languages and is himself a poet, but a poet in English.

I thought it was so fascinating to learn about indigenous tongues that they exist, that they're on the verge of extinction, that we try to protect them.

Now tell me, Mr. David Shook, what is an indigenous language?

Well, the indigenous languages of Mexico, Michael, are the languages that predate the arrival of the Spanish.

And Mexico has over 50 federally recognized indigenous languages, but there are actually, most linguists believe far more than that. Isma Zapatak, the language that Victor speaks, which is from

southern Wahaka, and has several hundred thousand speakers, is part of a language continuum that

has well over 20 variants that are not mutually intelligible.

They're more different than English and French, for example, but they often get clumped together and called a single language.

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