Now that we’ve discussed the craft of poetry, let’s turn our attention toward the linguistic and cultural diversity of the southwestern and southeastern United States. Though we often think of the United States as a monolingual place, this has not always been the case. Especially during the 19th century, families and cultures used their languages of origin at home and in the community. It certainly was not simply a case of speaking their heritage language at home and English at work (though that often was the case). Where commerce and business were conducted in heritage languages, there formed large literary communities that published magazines, journals, and newspapers read and enjoyed by many. We highlight this non-English poetry of the United States in this section to showcase often overlooked chapters of U.S. literary history.

This focus will have a few effects. It will enrich your knowledge of U.S. poetry, develop your ability to analyze poems through historical and biographical context, and provide you with the tools to start thinking about poetry in translation. Don’t worry! You don’t need to speak any other languages. If you do, that will certainly enrich your experience, but each translation below can be read as poetry, an artistic creation between translator and author. The translations attempt to maintain the meters and rhythms of the originals, even when the translations may not be exact, which is another way of saying that, when translating poetry, sometimes sound means more than sense. Except on such occasions where that proves to be the case, each translation below is as faithful as possible to the sense of the original.

By now you’re surely asking, what languages? What cultures? Well, all three languages are endemic to Texas and the surrounding areas: French, Spanish, and Kouri-Vini. German is another language endemic to Texas, and you can find pockets of German speakers throughout the state, but German is beyond this translator’s abilities, unfortunately. If you know German, and your teacher allows it, maybe you could translate some Texas German poetry for an assignment, or heck, maybe just for fun.

If we could emphasize one thing before we begin the poems, it’s this. These are not foreign languages. They are heritage languages of the United States. Because of that, even if you do not speak the languages these poems are written in, the English translations will still speak to you.

Spanish

We could fill volumes with the Spanish poetry of the United States. Even today, U.S. poetry is being produced in Spanish from coast-to-coast. U.S. poets writing in languages other than English isn’t some new fad. If anything, it’s a return to tradition. There were once-thriving print traditions in all the former Mexican territories annexed by the U.S., print traditions built around communities of readers, writers, and publishers. In fact, certain Spanish forms have also retained popularity in the U.S., including but not limited to traditional Mexican ballads, called corridos, and the décima, a ten-line form popular throughout Spain but maintained in the U.S. by the Canary Islanders of Southeast Louisiana. The contributions of Spanish-speakers to U.S. Arts and letters cannot be underestimated, even though we offer only a small glimpse of that linguistic and literary diversity.

Vicente J. Bernal (1888–1915)

The poems below originate from a 1916 volume titled Las Primicias, or The First Fruits. Bernal lived in New Mexico when it was still part of Mexico, but when the United States annexed the former parts of Mexico, he suddenly found himself a citizen of the United States. Written partly in English and partly in Spanish, Las Primicias offers a portrait of a man attempting to see his home country anew, as if he were a new citizen of a new land.

French

Many of you probably associate French in America with Louisiana, but southeast Texas and Houston also exhibit a strong French heritage. Often portrayed as illiterate speakers of “redneck” French, the truth was quite the opposite. There existed robust literary societies in 19th century Louisiana, with outlets such as L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orléans and L’Athénée Louisianais.^[6] French Louisiana also boasts the first anthology of poetry by Black Americans and America’s first daily black newspaper, Les Cenelles in 1845 and The New Orleans Tribune in 1864 respectively. Though nearly all of the historical French publications from the 19th century disappeared as English supplanted French, there still exist outlets, such as Résonance at the University of Maine and Feux Follets^[7] at the University of Lafayette, that publish contemporary authors writing in French. While you may have never encountered Louisiana French speakers, the language is experiencing an ongoing renaissance.

Hippolyte Castra (Unknown)

Louisiana Creoles are a multi-ethnic and multi-racial group of people who share a common culture based on the Catholic liturgical year, who can trace their ancestry to Louisiana prior to its sale to the U.S. in 1803, and who share a linguistic connection to French and Kouri-Vini. Many Creoles were free people of color fostered on the ideas of the French Revolution, on liberty, fraternity, and equality, a quality evident throughout their poetry. Below you will find Hippolyte Castra’s “The Campaign of 1814–1815,” a quintessential example of the sort of political poetry often produced by free Creoles of color. Hippolyte Castra was a pen name, and though the poem was published in 1911 by Rodolphe Desdunes, also a Creole of color, Desdunes claims it was written before 1840. In this poem you will find the story of a Creole of color who fought for the U.S. during the war of 1812 only to find himself hated afterward for the color of his skin.

Léona Queyrouze (1861–1938)

Léona Queyrouze was a French Creole woman who wrote under the pen name Constant Beauvais. In New Orleans she was known for hosting traditional ‘salons’ that were attended by literary luminaries of the time such as Alfred Merciér, Adrien Roquette (included here in the section on Kouri-Vini), and Lafcadio Hearne. Her poetry is different from many of her contemporaries, a direct influence of her Latin, Catholic roots; while contemporaries like Kate Chopin (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4) brought Anglo-Protestant perspectives to the Creole world, Queyrouze worked from within it, here reflected in the symbolic romance of her poetry.

Kouri-Vini

Though it is well documented that Kouri-Vini began in the mouths of enslaved peoples,^[12] Kouri-Vini was spoken by Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans (and their multi-racial children). This language employs vocabulary primarily from French, but also from English, Wolof (and other African languages), Wyandot, Choctaw, and Quechua sources. Much of the syntax is drawn from English, yet the grammar employs constructions from Wolof and Choctaw. Today, there are communities of Kouri-Vini speakers from Houston, TX, to Mobile, AL, but there are also communities of speakers as widespread as Chicago, IL and Los Angeles, CA. With fewer than 15K native speakers, Kouri-Vini is considered an endangered language, and this spotlight section contributes to its protection and conservation.

Adrien Roquette, Chahta-Ima (1813–1887)

Adrien Roquette was a poet-priest who lived the last few decades of his life among the Choctaw, where he was known as Chahta-Ima, meaning “Like a Choctaw.” Though French trappers, known as coureurs de bois, and French Jesuit priests often lived among Native Americans and adopted their way of life, they should not be romanticized; even though Roquette was accepted by the Choctaw, he was a missionary, an ideological colonizer. Despite this, the poem below provides a unique look at the rhythms and onomatopoeias of Kouri-Vini as spoken within Choctaw communities. Though those communities would have primarily spoken Choctaw, Kouri-Vini served as a lingua franca across French Louisiana, a concept with which Native Americans were familiar, since the Native Tribes of the southeast U.S. spoke Mobilien as a lingua franca for matters of commerce.

R. Paul Cooper (1981–)

R. Paul Cooper was born outside of New Orleans, LA, where he grew up with both French and Kouri-Vini spoken in the home. Like many of his generation, he was surrounded by family, friends, and grandparents who spoke both as their first languages, yet the older generation did not pass on French to the younger generation because many of them were traumatized by schools that punished them for speaking French. This generational torment was so effective, that from the 1970s until now, the number of French speakers in Louisiana has dropped from one million to less than one hundred thousand; native Kouri-Vini speakers number even less than that. For non-native speakers who grew up with the languages, learning them is an act of cultural remembrance and linguistic rebellion. Part of the language revitalization efforts sweeping South Louisiana, the poem below comes from Èdition Tintamarre’s 2022 book of poetry in Kouri-Vini, titled Févi.