Drawings to dream the translation: Translation through images and Yanomami cosmology

Abstract

The book Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman is the result of a collaborative translation project between anthropologist Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman. Although the work aims to convey the shaman’s words in a way that foregrounds the Indigenous voice and represents Kopenawa’s attempt to communicate Yanomami words in defense of the forest, throughout the book the shaman expresses his discomfort with the written word and the excessive value placed on this form of communication by Western culture. Kopenawa further argues that non-Indigenous people do not know how to “dream” the forest and, for this reason, do not defend it. He criticizes the self-centered worldview of “white people” and presents the dimension of dreaming in Yanomami cosmology as an important practice for understanding the forest from different perspectives. In dreams, the shaman encounters the xapiri pë through images (utupë) to learn their words, thereby gaining access to the knowledge transmitted by these beings. By addressing Yanomami dreaming as a translational practice, this article aims to highlight Yanomami cosmology as a method of translation for Western publishing projects aimed at fostering greater engagement with the Yanomami people, while affirming the potential of translation to foster the (re)cognition of different ways of being in the world. To this end, I present Kopenawa’s drawings as a possible means of translating, in book form and for non-Indigenous readers, the words of Yanomami cosmology that emerge from the images seen by the shaman in dreams. As a result, the discussion brings art and translation into dialogue to lay the foundations for an integrative, collective, and holistic translational practice, positioning utupë as an alternative epistemology and conceptualizing the book as a translational space that is not confined to the written word or to Western forms of organizing thought.