Laureate Letter 2: Beat & Mother Tongues

Beat Beyond Boundaries

Language is a fascinating door beyond a single perception, leading toward all what is possible. To understand a language is to understand how its speakers perceive, think, feel, and choose what to center in dialogue.

Worse than “lost in translation” is when we cannot locate a text in its original language. In the latter that the spirit of who said it and to whom it was said is laden with deep meaning. The potential Beatverse is full of texts for us to explore in a multitude of mother tongues. Poets translate verses from other languages, and the best translations are the results of careful synthesis, that is, comprehending the original while searching for words that can at least groove with the mother text.

Beat does not, and cannot live by one language alone. New Generation Beats follow in the tradition of poets both who are identified as Beat and those who are in the tradition but have yet to be acknowledged in our Beat discourses. In New York City alone, Beat is alive, as only one example, in the hearts and memories of Puerto Rican poets and writers including Jorge Brandon, Jack Agüeros, Bittman John “Bimbo” Rivas, Nelson Samaniego, Pedro Santaliz, El Reverendo Pedro Pietri, Cenén Moreno, David López. These are just those who have transitioned and all in the spirit of Julia de Burgos. They were pivotal in a broader Beat in Spanish, English, and even Spanglish. These are just those who have transitioned and all in the spirit of Julia de Burgos, and before her the Cuban revolutionary writer José Martí, just as Beats are in the spirit of Walt Whitman.

We can look deeply to find thousands texts in “Beat,” as the word was passed on to us by Herbert Huncke, of which no discussion of the Beat Generation – or the New Generation Beats – is complete without giving him acknowledgement. That sense of “Beat,” broken as we repair ourselves anew, is universal, just as poetry is a cultural universal, that is, verse is heard in every language’s set of words. Open the doors to the ways of thinking that build us, and build the consciousness to unite us. We are up against forces of Anglocentrism, that is, the idea that only the language known as English should be the dominant language of discourse. To speak, write, and create Beat in any language is our way of saying that the moral bankruptcy of linguistic supremacy is coming to an end and language justice is emerging to take its place.

¡P’alante!