A few weeks before Semana Santa, Charles Hasty and I flew to Culiacan in Sinaloa to begin a poetry-reading tour, that would take us the length and breadth of the state, including readings in Mazatlan, Los Mochis, Cerro Cabezón, as well as the beach at Navichiste, site of Antonio Guerrero's International Poetry Festival.
Navichiste had grown to almost legendary proportions in my mind, thanks in part to Charles Hasty's wonderful long poem in commemoration of the first festival back in 1995. It is perhaps the most remote poetry venue on the face of the earth. Inaccessible by road, and nearly so by foot, the only realistic way of reaching the place is by fishing launch from the Indian fishing village, Cerro Cabezón, that is if you can persuade one of the fishermen to take you at all. When you eventually get to Navichiste, there's nothing but a beach and a rugged, snake-infested landscape of twisted cacti and ancient hills. No shops or toilets, no fresh water, and no certainty that the fishermen would even come back and collect us, though in our case, Lolo - one of the village clever men, stayed with us, drinking Pacifica (beer), cracking jokes and laughing uproariously at what he'd said.
Reading poetry in Mexico, to predominantly Spanish-speaking audiences, wasn't as difficult as I might've imagined. During our sojourn through Sinaloa, Enrique Martinez - the publisher at the university - shared the podium with Charles and me, reading the Spanish translations of my poems and Charles', which seemed to add an entirely new dimension to the already-dramatic art of performing poetry.
Translating my poems had been a drama in itself. Enrique had asked the writer, Cesar Ibarra, to help us, and then Charles, whose command of Spanish was passable and who understood English better than both Enrique and Cesar, volunteered to help as well.
The enterprise was complicated by the fact that the university was interested in my collection of poems from the Western desert of Central Australia - the so-called "Aboriginal poems". Most of these use Aboriginal words and/or Aboriginalised English which makes the task of translating them extremely difficult. How does one render a line such as "You takem little bitty mouseypull and push em next man" into Spanish? Somehow, Enrique and Cesar managed an approximation, often relying on indigenous slang as a substitute. Some words and phrases were impossible to change, as in the various skin names and so forth, so we left them alone.
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