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    Weweni
    Weweni
    Weweni
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Weweni

    By Margaret Noodin

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Depending on dialect, the Anishinaabemowin word “weweni” expresses thanks, exactitude, ease, and sincerity. In addition, the word for “relatives” is “nindenwemaaganag”: those whose “enewewe,” or voices, sound familiar. In Weweni, poet Margaret Noodin brings all of these meanings to bear in a unique bilingual collection. Noodin’s warm and perceptive poems were written first in the Modern Anishinaabemowin double-vowel orthography and appear translated on facing pages in English. From planetary tracking to political contrasts, stories of ghosts, and messages of trees, the poems in Weweni use many images to speak to the interconnectedness of relationships, moments of difficulty and joy, and dreams and cautions for the future. As poems move from Anishinaabemowin to English, the challenge of translation offers multiple levels of meaning—English meanings found in Anishinaabe words long as rivers and knotted like nets, English approximations that bend the dominant language in new directions, and sets of signs and ideas unable to move from one language to another. In addition to the individual dialogues played out beween Noodin’s poems, the collection as a whole demonstrates a fruitful and respectful dialogue between languages and cultures. Noodin’s poems will be proof to students and speakers of Anishinaabemowin that the language can be a vital space for modern expression and, for those new to the language, a lyric invitation to further exploration. Anyone interested in poetry or linguistics will enjoy this one-of-a-kind volume.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2015
    ISBN9780814340394
    Weweni
    Author

    Margaret Noodin

    Margaret Noodin is assistant professor in English and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature. She is also one of the founders of the group Miiskwaasining Nagamojig and ojibwe.net.

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    Reviews for Weweni

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      The poems in this volume are so close to the earth and the heart. So many stunning images.

    Book preview

    Weweni - Margaret Noodin

    Praise for Weweni

    "In Weweni, as the title suggests, Meg Noodin does indeed tread with care as she weaves a lyric vision of Anishinaabe experience—a twenty-first-century vision colored throughout with strands of our vibrant past and hopeful, if changed, future. Through poetry that attends both to an ‘exhausted’ world in which ‘dried berries become rumors’ and an ‘undefeated’ world inhabited by ‘golden-feathered half-breeds,’ this volume brings us into intimate connection with elements that animate our everyday: ice carvings, ‘firm honor beats’ at the drum, ceremonial sticks, ‘sweet water sap of . . . dreams,’ and fragile ‘bones, smaller than sound.’ Offered in two languages—Anishinaabemowin and English—on their journey to ‘un-make war,’ these poems sing stories filled with ancestors, offer advice for leadership and survival, but perhaps most importantly, paint us into a landscape lush with the implacable night sky and the creatures with whom we share this mythic earth—‘panting the same wind.’"

    —Kimberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice

    These are excellent poems in English and in Anishinaabemowin—they give us the bones of the language always backed up by the hush of the trees, the water, the beauty of the land where speaking arose to express our relatedness. This is a book of dreams and cautions that reaches out to the reader time and again with humor, quiet wonder, wit, joy, and companionship. Simply lovely.

    —Heid E. Erdrich, author of Cell Traffic

    "Weweni offers readers a stunning, crystalline collection of poems—full of wisdom, deep and calm, drawn from living languages reaching through time and space to bring us closer to the poetic wonder of living in language. A skilled artist’s work shows here, creating awareness with the touch of word and sound, resonating syllable by syllable, with love of language, known to all of us who have imagined each part of the world, holding some immanent potential for poetic expression."

    —Gordon Henry, enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota and professor in creative writing and American Indian studies at Michigan State University

    "Noodin’s poems are the gifts life can be

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