selkiette | Cherokee First Person Pronouns in Translation for Horror

“But another part of「me」couldn’t stop to think. Gotta run away, run, run away. Run fast! If we dawdle, this building could collapse at any time, and we’d all die. We’ll die. We’ll die!”
— Yukito Ayatsuji, Another 2001

Dear Reader,

It’s no secret that I love horror novels. I’m iffy on horror games and a big wuss when it comes to horror movies. But if you could inject a couple hundred pages of the stuff straight into my veins every day? I would die happy.

I just finished Another 2001 in translation from the Japanese (which has been a nice break from my current indigi-horror kick). And because of all the Cherokee resources I recently found are on my mind, I was really paying attention to the way the Japanese translated into the English.

That led me to think about how this same story in English might then be translated using the Cherokee.

Specifically, I was considering the last three sentences from this passage on page 519. There is a claustrophobic desperation to it that drives home the anxiety and terror that our main character, Sou, feels. And I was thinking about how Cherokee could make that feeling flow past the boundaries of the characters on the page and into the world of the reader.

You see, Cherokee has five separate first-person pronomial forms. English only has two: the singular first person (I) and the plural first person (we). Who is in the we depends on the context of the situation. Cherokee has five: the singular first (I), two versions of the dual first (we, you and I, and we, she and I without you), and two versions of the plural first (we, all of us including you, and we, all of us without you).

Without further context from this passage, Sou could be talking about himself and one other person (perhaps if the building was abandoned) when he says that “we” need to run or we’ll die. Or he could be referring to himself and everyone that might be reasonably found in a hospital during the work day. In English, at least, readers have to rely on context clues in the story to determine if it’s dual or plural first-person. But readers seldom have to consider whether that “we” also includes the reader. After all, the reader isn’t an active part of the narrator’s reality (and there’s definitely a horror story in that idea of fourth-wall breakage!).

But what if they could be?

“...and we’d all die. We’ll die. We’ll die!”

If we translated into basic present tense here (and only used phonetic spelling), we could have Sou say, “Otsiyousga! Otsiyousga!” That roughly translates* to, “We [they and I] are dying! We [they and I] are dying!” — which was my first interpretation of this passage, and I’m sure the translator’s intent.

But we could also have Sou say, “Otsiyousga! Idiyousga!” — “We [they and I] are dying! We [you and they and I] are dying!”

It rips the reader right into that world, a subtle nod to let them know that through the medium of the story, they are actively being seen.

I would love to see how it could apply to, say, Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, which already makes moves to include the reader as a “playable character” in that world. The possibilities for translation are so exciting.
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*I’ve barely started memorizing the syllabary, so the mistakes I’m sure are made here in translation/conjugation are my shame alone. Focus on the pronoun info, not the verb conjugation (which is definitely wrong), you.

Cherokee First Person Pronouns in Translation for Horror

Thank you!

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