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English to Korean: The Psychedelics: Overview of a Controversial Drug Type ํ๊ฐ์ ๋ค: ๋ ผ๋์ด ๋ง์ ์ฝ์ข ์ ๋ํ ๊ฐ์ General field: Medical Detailed field: Medical: Pharmaceuticals
Source text - English The Psychedelics
Overview of a Controversial Drug Type
Rick Strassman, M.D.
Consciousness is a mystery, and the association of consciousness with matter is even more mysterious. How does a particular collection of molecules and energy combine to create awareness? Further, what determines the quality and content of consciousness? These are some of the general questions facing us as conscious beings. I the context of this book, we
address particular questions regarding unusual states of consciousness in which we perceive things that are not normally perceivable.
Consciousness contains an unlimited number of states, several of which humans access in their lives. Wakefulness, deep sleep, meditation, and psychosis are some of these general categories. We may enter these states via built-in biological rhythms, such as the sleep-wake cycle, Perturbations of normal physiologyโfor example, fever, illness, sleep deprivation, starvation, and fastingโalso produce different states
of consciousness. In addition, a variety of natural substances contained in plants as well as certain synthetic drugs affects consciousness.1
Many nonhuman animals consume plants or plant products for their consciousness-altering effects. Examples include fermented fruit-swilling elephants, dazed and confused bees that return repeatedly to wallow in the flowers of psychoactive datura plants, and catnip-intoxicated felines. Some authors suggest that animals possess an innate drive for intoxication.2 We can assume that in the mists of prehistory, early hominids, imitating the animals with which they shared their ecosystem, also partook of plants to enter altered states.
In some of Andrew Weilโs early work, he suggests a specifically human drive to experience altered states of consciousness.3 Some of the methods employed are modifying our biology through environmental or behavioral means, such as sweat lodges, spinning in circles, and prolonged chanting. Another way to experience altered consciousness is by ingesting psychoactive plants.
Throughout the world and at all times, humans have consumed a dizzying array of plants and plant products for their mind-altering effects. We have been drinking wine; chewing coca leaves; smoking opium;
drinking coffee; and chewing, smoking, or snuffing tobacco. Chemical compounds in certain plants are the most proximate causes of these effects. In wine, this compound is ethanol; in coca leaves, it is cocaine; in opium, morphine; in coffee, caffeine; in tobacco, it is nicotine.*
โs, โs, AND โ s
According to nature-based religious traditions, plants possess intelligence. Many modern Westerners who have undergone a deep experience with ayahuasca (a psychedelic botanical brew from the Amazon) can vouch for the apparent presence of a โpersonalityโ in this botanical brew with which they communicate under the influence.
While such phenomena strain the credulity of disciples of materialist science, they nevertheless point toward realms of consciousness containing nonhuman intelligence that we may find useful in our struggle to continue existing on Earth.
*It is appropriate to discuss, although difficult to keep that discussion within scientific confines, why plants produce these psychoactive substances. Even more, what does this relationship between man and mind-altering plants say about the biological and biochemical matrix in which we and the plants exist on this planet?
English to Korean: Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning ๋์๋ฒ : ๋ฐํ์ ๋นํ์ ๊ดํ ํ์๋ก General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Music
Source text - English For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because is serenely disdains
to annihilate us.
Rainer Maria Rilke,
โThe First Duino Elegyโ,
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
COUNTERPOINT:
A Memoir of Bach and Mourning
PHILIP KENNICOTT
IN THE SUMMER it became clear that chemotherapy would kill my mother before the cancer did. She was making frequent trips to the emergency room, her body was weak, and still she had months to go before concluding the drug trial that was her last, best hope against the disease. She was angry and exhausted, and near despair, and finally she agreed with her doctor and her family that it was time to quit the drugs and reckon with death. But, first
she was allowed to live again: Within a few weeks, the chemicals cleared out of her body and she came back to life. After many bedridden months, she began using her walker and then felt well enough to send away the hospice nurses. She would rise in the mornings and take a seat by the large windows looking onto the hills outside her home, and wait for birds to come to the several feeders she tended there. By early autumn, she and my father left
for one last trip to Arizona, where they had spent their winter, among friends, in the sun, enjoying retirement.
The call came a week before Thanksgiving. The cancer had regrouped, and now it was time for her to return home and finish the dying. My mother begged me to stay away and not waste vacation days on a trip home for a last visit. โI donโt want you to see me like this.โ She had a dutiful sense of self-denial, but the request was more theatrical than sincere, and I brushed it off, just as I had all the others since she became ill three years earlier. I found a ticket on the internet and paid extra for the option to change my return date. Scrolling on the sides of the online travel sites were advertisements for Caribbean vacations and cruise packages, images of turquoise water and beautiful, carefree people in swimsuits.
I realized, as I was packing, that when I put these shirts back into the closet, my mother would be dead, and with that strange realization, almost every trivial thing I did took on a sense of tragic finality. Should I pack this sweater, which she once said she liked? It would be the last time sheโd see it. I didnโt know how long it would be, days or maybe weeks, but when I returned home a new, unchangeable fact would have been established in my
life, a connection that had existed for as long as I had would be sundered. I didnโt think much about the clothes I was folding, but I knew I had to bring two essential things: a pair of hiking boots, and some music to keep me company, and sane, in the large, empty house where she was dying.
Without much conscious thought, I threw a recording of Bachโs Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin into my traveling bag. I had no particular reason to pick this music, though I was mildly interested in the young violinist who was brave enough to record these demanding, dense, and complicated works so young in his career. Perhaps I was drawn to the cover of the seemingly clasped in prayer above the familiar, feminine curves of his
violin. It had also been a long time since I had listened to these works closely and I was probably happy to bring music that I remembered fondly, but vaguely, great works that remained still somewhat unfamiliar. Music that you have lived with for a long time becomes cluttered with memory and association. For this particular journey, I wanted to pack light.
Pound for pound, Bach is also good traveling music. One or two CDs contain more to occupy the mind than hours of lesser stuff, and it is more emotionally efficient than any other music, with no filler or extraneous matter. For some reason I canโt explain, Bach is suited to all my moods, no matter where I am, no matter what mode of life I find myself in, work or
play, thriving, surviving, or wallowing in lassitude. His music delights me on the beach as much as it sustains me in a gray desert landscape at the end of November. I could think of a hundred reasons why, while I was there, I wouldnโt want to play Beethoven, Brahms, or Wagner; but I couldnโt
imagine a single reason why I would resist Bach.
When I arrived, my parentsโ house was quiet, and everyone walked on tiptoes and spoke in whispers. The only noise came from the television in my motherโs room, always on, the flickering light clearly a consolation through the night as she passed in and out of consciousness. When she was awake I would sit with her; but much of the time she was lost to the morphine. I never listened to music while I was with her, afraid that I might miss some marker of pain, or signpost of her progress toward death. I tried to tune out the television, droning in the background, and listen to her breathingโโstertorous,โ said one of the hospice nurses brightly, as if pointing out a rare flower on a walk through the forest. Reflected on the
wall above my motherโs head, the inanity of the nightly news, the animated weatherman, the frantic banter of the pretty anchorwomen parsing murder, traffic, and parades, was distilled to a dance of blue forms and abstractions. When I looked directly into the wide, flat screen only a few feet away, into this portal to a world that seemed infinitely remote and meaningless, I began to feel untethered from reality.
During the final days, as my mother slid from terrified lucidity into confusion and finally silence, Bach was the only music I could listen to, the only music that didnโt seem trivial, insipid, or irrelevant to life. It did a strange, spatial sort of work, defining an interior world apart from the world of chatter and noise, creating a space in which I could separate myself from intense feelings about my mother and watch the unfolding of her death without the distraction of what we oddly call the โrealโ world. It kept banal things at bay, while bringing profound things close enough to be felt without being engulfed by
their dread darkness.
When I wasnโt with my mother, or helping out around the house, I listened to the Partita in D minor. The last movement of this five-part work, the great Chaconne, lasts as long as the other four combines, and it became a maze in which I lost myself completely during its quarter-hour span. I returned to it again and again, obsessed with it, sometimes simply hitting the repeat button until after four or five hearings I had to force myself to quit. I listened to it on headphones while walking in the mountains near my parentsโ house, and in bed while trying to fall asleep. It came with me as I drove to town to pick up some new prescription or more cans of soda, which we would pour into a bowl and stir with a whisk until it was flat, and easier for my mother to drink. Hearing the Chaconne in the car somehow made the polyphony more intelligible, The eyes, focused on the road, kept other parts of the brain busy, freeing up consciousness to listen more deeply, to sort out individual lines from the thickness of the general texture. And the music became a filter for the physical world, almost as if someone had Photoshopped out the gas stations, burrito joints, and gift shops, leaving only the passing landscape, dun-colored and dry, with leafless cottonwood trees spectral against the slate-gray skies of November.
Once while I was driving on the highway into Albuquerque, the traffic snarled and I
was jolted out of the solipsism of music, I slammed on the brakes and stabbed at the buttons
of the carโs sound system, trying to turn off Bach, but instead I turned on a station playing
mariachi music. When the adrenaline subsided, I laughed, Albuquerque was founded in 1706,
little more than a decade before Bach likely wrote the Partita in D minor. There is a distant
connection between these two things. The Chaconne was based on an early dance form, the
chacona, likely from Latin America, where some speculate that it was named for the castanets
that accompanied it or perhaps the place where it was first discovered. Like the tango some
three centuries later, the chacona was associated with the lower classes, with vulgarity and
licentiousness and untrammeled physicality.
By the time Bach wrote his Chaconne, the dance form was fully domesticated, and the
name implied a musical form as well as a rhythmic pattern or dance style. A chaconne, in
Bachโs day, implied a repeated bass line over which the composer spun out variations, a
fusion of an often ponderous idฬeฬe fixe in the lower register with virtuosic elaboration above.
But, even in Bachโs enormous, complex, and abstract Chaconne, there is still perhaps an echo
of the old chacona- a rhythmic pattern in three beats, with a distinctive snap of long and short notesโheard in the opening bars. He doesnโt sustain it explicitly throughout the piece, but he states it clearly and unequivocally at the same time that he announces the bass line
pattern on which the entire edifice will be built. Not every violinist stresses this vestigial,
dance-like character of the music, especially the violinists from the early to mid-twentieth
century who played it with operatic pomposity. But the best performances, even the most
epic, are animated by a memory of the dance rhythms, ingrained, even unconscious, but
palpable like a heartbeat.
Itโs easy to read too much, and too little, into Bach. We always seem to get our
measure wrong, anachronistically fetishizing things that would have been of little
interest to his eighteenth century listeners, while slighting what Bach would have
considered essential. I have been trained, like most critics, to be intellectually skeptical
about the connections between art and the artistโs emotional life, especially composers such
as Bach, who wrote music of endless emotional variety, every day, every week of his
extraordinarily productive life, without regard to his own joy or suffering, and in service of an
ideal of religious duty that allowed little room for what we now call self-expression. And yet
as Bachโs Chaconne took over my emotional life, it gathered irresistible metaphorical force.
The music suggested two aspects of life, something essential, immutable, and ever
repeated, and something above that grounded truth, a need for variety, elaboration, fleeting
connections, and change. It seemed to be music about life, but grounded on the
fundamental fact of death, and it felt to me suddenly very profound, far beyond the details of
Bachโs notes on paper, or the violinistโs performance somewhere in a studio, months or years
before I came upon his recording. It carried with it centuries, at least, of commonly felt
experience, enacting simultaneously the fundamental duality of our emotions, despair and
joy, sinking down and clambering up, confronting death and looking back into life, for
pleasure, diversion, and purpose.
----------------
----------------
----------------
WHEN I was young, and first discovering music, I was enamored of the myths and fairy tales that were often told about the great composers: that Mozart composed the Requiem to
encode for the world the anguish of his own demise that Rossini was so lazy and so
prodigiously talented that he preferred to write a new overture than roll over in bed and pick
up one that had fallen on the floor; that Haydn wrote the great crashing fortissimos in his
โSurpriseโ symphony to wake up the dreary, sleeping philistines in his audience. They made
the music seem more dramatic, and connected my experience of it to a larger sense of
history. When I learned to play the piano as a boy, these stories compensated for the tedium
of practice. As a teenager, in retreat from the rages of my mother, who was deeply unhappy
for reasons I then found incomprehensible, there fables made music seem even more
profound. I would pass them on to my friends in vain, breathless attempts to share my
enthusiasm for sounds they found old-fashioned and boring. But as an adult, I became
allergic to them, not just because many of them were wholly fabricated, but because even
those that were true didnโt offer any greater access to the music, and only underscored the
emotions I already felt. They felt like tautologies: the music is sad because Bach was sad.
And yet it is almost impossible to maintain a cautious, intellectually scrupulous relation to the music we love, especially when we are emotionally vulnerable to it. We want it to tell stories, to speak to life beyond its purely aural realm. Music that merely pleases us may be examined with detachment, but when music possesses us in some deep, over bearing way, it is difficult to submit to scholarly scruple. It must have cosmic importance, and transcend the hermetic and abstract codes of sound. For me, on those drives through New Mexico, Bachโs music was absolutely about a dialogue between death and life, an intertwining of the two basic impulses that govern our lives from beginning to end. Even if Bach never conceived of his Chaconne in those terms, he was working within a tradition that delivers to us the possibility of that interpretation. And I chose to hear it that way, and succumbed to the music absolutely needed articles of faith, the Chaconne helped articulate them.
Much of what I was thinking at the time seems banal now. I remember taking some solace from this thought: that the price of admission to life is the acceptance of death. No one lives without dying, and there are no Faustian codicils to this contract. The ticket admits one, it is nontransferable, and there are no refunds or exchanges. For a moment, standing on a rock overlooking the side, arid plains of New Mexico, I tried to think what it would mean not to have that ticket, not to have been born, not to exist. It was unthinkable. Not only is the ticket premised on death at the end, we also have no choice but to accept it, use it, submit to its limitations.
This was consoling, for a while. It suggested the commonality of our experience of death, as if the meaning of life is to realize that we belong to a fraternity united by one thing only, the fact of out death, and this should make us kinder to one another. Certainly, in the months prior I had noticed in myself a new sense of empathy and curiosity about other people who were experiencing death, especially the death of a parent. At parties, in casual conversation, thrown next to a stranger on an airplane, if someone mentioned the death of a parent, I was deeply interested. I asked questions and found myself having genuinely meaningful conversations even with acquaintances whom I didnโt like very much. The shared experiences of losing our parents casts all of us back into the unresolved residue of childhood, making us children again in some fundamental way. At a time in life when you think you have experienced everything, suddenly there is this one enormous, unsettling thing that is astonishingly new. It is no surprise that almost everyone who has experienced it wants to talk about it, and that the fundamental theme of these conversation about grief is, โI had no idea.โ
About halfway through the Chaconne, Bach shifts from the minor to the major key, and echoes in a softer way the opening of the movement. The listener is immensely grateful for the simplicity of the first eight bas of this major-key episode, an episode of calm after a long period of virtuoso display, rapid figuration, and widely spaced chords that encompass the violinsโ tonal range, from growling bottom to the piercing top. But no sooner has the composer allowed us to pause, to consider ideas of tenderness and simplicity, than the animated discourse of musical variations begins again. Mercifully, Bach starts slowly, with stepwise motions, deliberate at first and at a walking pace, moving up then down, almost as if the line is taking stock of itself, checking to be sure that all the essentials are in place. It reminds me of people who feel a powerful sense of duty, who are checking on something they know well, the safety of a home of the care of a family, making sure that everything is in order, everything safe. The simplicity of the line is a reassurance to the listener, a reiteration of the musical essentials, before it again gains speed and complexity and moves on to greater degrees of complexity and elaboration.
If you can believe, as I did at the time, that this passage is essentially maternal, imbued with kindness and care, then what comes next is heartbreaking. In the following variations, Bach begins repeating two notes, A and D, the lower and upper bookends of the first chord of the Chaconne and the essential notes of the key in which it is written. At first these repetitions seem almost accidental, as if they are merely filling in holes in one of Bachโs musical patterns. But their reiteration, their gathering force, and finally their emphatic power dispel any sense of accident. Throughout the completion of the basic arch-like from of Bachโs Chaconneโin which the music moves from the minor key to the major and back to the minor againโthe note A is known as the dominant, the harmonic area of greatest tension, always leading back to D, where the piece begins and ends. The reiteration of A build tension, insistence, energy, making the ear crave the resolution of D. It feels a bit like thirst, an ever-accumulating craving for the resolution of the tonic key.
Throughout this passage, Bach is shifting the harmonic drama, which for most of the piece is contained in the recurring pattern of the bass line, into the upper reaches of the violinโs range. If the music gives us the illusion of multiple voices, it is now the top voices, the ones primarily charged with variation, diversity, and melodic elaboration, that emphatically insist on the fundamental harmonic facts. The distinctionโadmittedly a very subjective one on my partโbetween a grounding of the music in the insistence on mortality, and an elaboration of life above, breaks down. And it breaks down in the major key, in the section that at first seemed so maternal and consoling.
I was tempted to think that Bach was complicating the usual maternal attributes of care and kindness. The motherโs voice was now speaking about death, echoing the musicโs fundamental insistenceโdelivered through the bass lineโon a relentless march of life to its terminus. The feminine voice had grabbled hold of the fact of death, held it up in new light, stripped away some of the accumulated anxiety that gathered around it during its ceaseless repetitions in the bass line. The voice that had seemed to chatter so brilliantly before was now grounded, now speaking with a deeper, discomfiting wisdom. For children, the discovery of death is shocking, perhaps in the form of a schoolmateโs accident, or a grandparentsโ deaths we rediscover it as unavoidable and universal. Ideally, they help us learn to die, sometimes explicitly, giving us insight, consoling us for their death, so that ours will be easier when it comes.
But that wasnโt my mother. Death brought her no wisdom, life brought her little joy, and when she died it was in anguish, without resolution of any sense of peace. Hers should have been what was once called a โgood death,โ after a long life, filled with children and grandchildren, and surrounded by family. My mother had the best treatment that medicine could provide, and when it could provide no more, she had the kindest and most professional care from nurses who knew how to relieve pain and ten to a failing body. My mother died at home, with all her children fully launched in life, secure and perhaps successful. Not one of her children or grandchildren preceded her in death; not one of them deviated from the usual trajectory of middle-class life. There were no broken homes or abandoned children, no children, no chronic gamblers or heroin addicts. We were by no means a perfect family, but if any ordinary person had come in to assess the fullness of my motherโs life, he would have found the balance sheet laden with things that ordinarily make people happy, and mostly devoid of the usual causes of sadness.
But she was unhappy and died that way, unfulfilled and angry about what she sensed was a wasted life. She had wanted to be a violinist, and when I was young she use to play along with my piano, but over time, she gave up on the instrument, just one of many things and abandoned, until late in life even the mention of the instrument would make her grimace with disgust. She also dreamed of being a dancer, but she said it wantโs the decent thing for a girl to show her legs in the 1940s, so nothing came of that. Later she hoped to be a doctor, but her father refused her bus fare to the West Coast, where, she said, she had a scholarship to a good college. A few years after my mother died, when my once-reticent father was surprising all his children by speaking easily and candidly about a past we had assumed was closed for discussion, I asked him about the scholarship story, which I had always doubted. He said yes, it was true, and that my grandfather had indeed crushed his daughterโs dream, and though I never met my maternal grandfather and he was, for me, mainly a figure of myth constructed by my mother, I felt a flash of hatred for him, as if he had entered the room uninvited. After that, my motherโs life was given over to marriage, raising a family, and being a woman in the 1950s and 1960s didnโt help. By the time she was in her forties and had the freedom to do exactly as she pleased, she was embittered, and spent much of her time resentfully cleaning a house that was never dirty. She loved her children, but fretfully and it seemed without pleasure. She was seventy-four when she died, still waiting for the world to sort itself out, to remove its impediments to her happiness.
In the last few days before her death, the futility of this wait struck her with its full, terrifying force. She had always been an atheist, and sometimes stridently so. Now, when we were alone, she asked if I believed in God, if I thought there was anything that came after death. I was horrified by these questions, in part because they struck at my most unresolved thoughts, and also because I didnโt know whether to lie and say the consoling thing, or speak a truth that is unnerving even to a healthy person with no intimation of death on the horizon. So I said I didnโt know, that nobody knows, nobody has ever known, despite all the certainty of religion, and atheism. I said that the only thing in which I had confidence was that death brings an end to suffering, and a cessation of all things, including regret, worry, and fear. My mother died the day after that conversation.
English to Korean: A new book honors female resistance during Brazil's 21-year dictatorship General field: Social Sciences Detailed field: Government / Politics
Source text - English Marli witnessed a military policeman killing her brother. Clariceโs husband was tortured and his death was disguised as a suicide. Damaris was arrested, tortured and forced to watch her partner being murdered in front of their family. Crimeia was a political militant who joined the armed guerrilla forces. These are some of the 15 women who are profiled in a recently published book, โHeroinas desta historiaโ (Heroines of this History), about their experiences during the 1964 to1985 military dictatorship in Brazil.
The dictatorship, which began with a coup d'รฉtat in 1964, led to five military presidents over the course of 21 years, and at least 434 dead and disappeared. The publication is the first of a larger project by the Institute Vladimir Herzog, named after a journalist whose death at the hands of Brazilian army agents in 1975 was disguised as a suicide. His wife, Clarice Herzog, fought for decades against the official version of her husband's death and is one of the โheroinesโ in this recent publication.
Global Voices interviewed Tatiana Merlino, one of the project's coordinators, via email about women's role in the resistance and why it's important their stories are being told during a Bolsonaro presidency.
Global Voices (GV): What role did women play in the opposition to the 1964 Brazilian dictatorship?
Tatiana Merlino: They took part in spaces of resistance in the cities and in the countryside, in universities and student movements, and in women's clubs in the peripheral areas. They joined leftist organizations, fought among guerrilla groups, and even faced their own comrades who did not believe in their capacity to resist. They participated in the Araguaia guerrilla [one of the main armed movements against the dictatorship], in blue-collar workers strikes such as the ones organized in Contagem (the first major strike under the dictatorship in the state of Minas Gerais) and Osasco (Sรฃo Paulo). The one in Contagem was the first and it was led by a woman, Conceiรงรฃo Imaculada de Oliveira, from the Metalworkers Union. In the 1970s, still under Institutional Act Number 5 [AI-5, the issuing that suspended rights and gave the regime power to punish those that opposed them], women from peripheral areas had leading roles while marching in the streets against the high cost of living. The women who fought against the dictatorship were arrested and tortured. They were systematically objected to sexual violence. They were raped, some underwent forced miscarriages due to kicks to their stomachs or for being put in the โdragon's chairโ, suffering electric shock in their vaginas, bellies, breasts, heads. Some of them even gave birth inside the DOI-Codis [department subordinated to the Army].
GV: How did you choose the women profiled in the book?
TM: We started by researching in archives and books about the victims of the dictatorship: the final report of the National Truth Commission (CNV), in the book โRight to Memory and Truth and the Dossier on Political Dead and Disappeared during the Dictatorship on Brazilโ compiled by the Commission of Families of Dead and Disappeared. We read the stories about the 436 dead and disappeared (the Dossier lists 436 and the CNV lists 434) and made a big list with all the cases that had women involved. (I want to highlight the leading part played by the families in the search for memory, truth and justice โ especially female relatives). We made a list with over 70 names. There were certainly women in every one of those cases, but our search could only get to those mentioned in the files.
From those 70 names, we had some criteria to get to the 15 women chosen for this book. We also thought it was important to have diversity among those profiled: women that fought against the dictatorship; those who were not political militants, but became activists after the death of relatives; students, intellectuals, working women, indigenous women; and people who had their relatives killed by police violence.
Another criteria was regional diversity, since we were worried about only having women from the Rio de Janeiro-Sรฃo Paulo axis. We also have stories from other states, which shows the breadth of the violence perpetuated during the civil-military dictatorship.
GV: The book brings together stories of the mothers, wives and sisters of people who were subjected to torture and forced disappearances, calling them โHeroines of this Historyโ. What part did Brazilian history books give them throughout the years?
TM: Brazil has made a transition to democracy and it took the country a very long time to have so-called transitional justice. The work of the National Truth Commission was really important, but it took us decades to create it. So, the onus of searching for evidence about the circumstances around which dead and disappeared person was murdered, who were the killers, witnesses, documents, were all the responsibility of families, especially women, who had a leading role which was not very well documented until now. See, if people are still fighting to clarify the circumstances around the deaths, and if they still don't have justice for the crimes committed, it is even more complicated to make space to talk about their leadership in this fight. That is why this book's approach is new. To this day, these women, with some exceptions, were unknown and treated as someone's wife, sister, etc. It was about time to give them their due place in history โ as heroines. That was our intention.
GV: In the book, you write that it is imperative to shed light on these women's lives while the country is governed by President Jair Bolsonaro. Why?
TM: Because we have a president who denies the dictatorship, worships torture and torturers, attacks the dead and the disappeared. Besides the praise of torture and torturers, there is a strong movement of denial and historical revision. This government has also destroyed the politics of memory and truth when it decided to fire the Union's Regional Attorney, Eugรชnia Augusta Gonzaga, from the presidency of the Commission for the Dead and Disappeared alongside other members, replacing them with dictatorship defenders. The Amnesty Commission [responsible for evaluating compensations due to the violations committed by the regime] was also occupied by deniers and revisionists. What this government cannot destroy, it voids.
The theme of memory and truth is a target of Bolsonaro. This is not news, after all his homages to Ustra [Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra was one of the main torturers during the civil-military dictatorship] preceding his presidency. During Dilma Rousseff's impeachment voting process, Bolsonaro's dedication of his vote in Ustra's name should have been enough to send him to prison for accountability. And he shouldn't have been able to run for presidency since those who defend crimes against humanity can't run.
But he did it, he won, and he continues with his onslaught against the theme of dictatorship and the accomplishments that were conquered over the years. This is why it is fundamental to tell these and other stories about this period: to remember it happened, that they killed, tortured and kidnapped, and that hundreds of families and women have dedicated decades to getting truth and justice for the dead and disappeared.
GV: In other South American countries that also went through dictatorships, such as Argentina and Uruguay, women had a leading role in the fight for memory, truth, and justice. How has Brazil's process compared?
TM: In Brazil, the leadership and main roles were also taken up by women who got together, supported each other, created the Brazilian Committee for Amnesty, the Commission of Families of Dead and Disappeared, entered actions at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, researched morgue files, and exerted pressure to create Bill 9140 [the law recognising those disappeared between 1961 and 1988 due to political reasons, as dead]. They have done and still do a lot, but their fight is not as well known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo [in Argentina], for example, because the countries dealt very differently with the aftermath of the dictatorship period. Here, to this day, we still haven't managed to hold any of the agents involved in the deaths and disappearances criminally accountable. We still have this pendency with the Amnesty Law [which gave equal pardon for political prisoners and government agents involved in the repression]. Even though the Federal Prosecutor's Office has brought dozens of legal actions against agents involved with the regime, the Brazilian Justice system does not accept them with the Amnesty Law as basis. And impunity continues, which reflects the Brazil we live in today.
English to Korean: Masculinity in my genes/jeans ์ฒญ๋ฐ์ง(์ง)์ ๋ค์ด์๋ ์ฌ๋ด๋ค์ General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Other
Source text - English โBe a man!โ said the police officer, when he felt my friend wasnโt answering his questions clearly and loudly enough. The officer was asking about a fight heโd heard was going to take place that Friday afternoon near my school. Meanwhile, higher up the road, boys in their school uniforms stood on the sidewalk in silent anticipation, prepared for combat with iron bars, planks of wood, dog chains, bottles from the village shop, and knives. Those were the boys who at 15 and 16 years old were busy โbeing menโ.
Language is a funny thing. Formal education taught us to have a command of Standard English. In Literature and English classes, through correction and the recitation of prose, we were encouraged to be โmiddle-class, educated, post-colonial men.โ But the boys who were versed in the national (โCreoleโ) language had no time for the ones who spoke Standard English only; they demanded that everyone be a man โof this culture and this soil!โ
Switching registers depended on the social situation as much as the person you were speaking to. On one occasion, two police officers lined up a group of boys on the street to search them because they were โacting suspiciously.โ They gave instructions for the boys to put their hands on their heads and kneel, as they pointed a gun to their adolescent faces. One of the boys communicated his every action in Standard English to show that he was following orders diligently and respectfully. The response he received was, โWhy do you talk like that? You like boys or what?โ Standard Englishโwhich was meant to distinguish him from the poor, the uneducated, those who were more likely targets of state violenceโdid not make this young man any safer.
Iโve never sat down and written exactly what it meant for me to be a man. I didnโt know there was the wordโโmasculinityโโthat summed up the arbitrary definitions and meanings of manhood that could switch from person to person, depending on time, and context. The cry summoning us to โbe menโ assumed there was a DNA of maleness already living in us, sometimes waiting to be activated.
Being a man meant that we were tough, certain, in control and dominant. But masculinity was an idea of manhood that they tried to fit to our bodies like a pair of jeans. These jeans of masculinity were handed out to me over the years. The concept of time, especially the fear of โlost timeโ, is important to manhood. Culture in a patriarchy drives boys to be men as early as possible.
Translation - English Long ago, Momma lived with just her children, a boy and girl, in a village deep in the mountains.
One day, she had to go to work for a rich family on the other side of the hill.
Upon finishing her work, Momma carried home rice cakes covered with sorghum and red beans.
As she was about to cross the hills to her home, she was blocked by a huge towering Tiger.
โAhoong!โ he roared. I wonโt devour you if you give me a rice cake!โ
Momma quickly tossed a rice cake to him.
The Tiger swallowed the rice cake in one gulp and moseyed away.
Momma went over the second hill in a hurry.
But, there he was again, that Tiger towering over her and blocking her way.
โAhoong!โ he roared, โI wonโt swallow you if you give me a rice cake.โ
โFine! Here you go, eat it and take a hike!โ
Momma went over the third hill in a hurry.
But, there he was again, that killer Tiger towering over her and blocking her way.
โAhoong!โ he roared, โI wonโt swallow you if you give me a rice cake.โ
โHere you go, eat it and take a hike!โ
The Tiger waited for her over every hill
To snatch all of her rice cakes.
And then, alas.
He swallowed Momma in one gulp at last.
The Tiger put on Momma's tunic and her skirt and went to the hut where the boy and girl lived so that he could devour them too!
The Tiger mimicked Mommaโs voice saying, โKids, Momma is home. Open the door.โ
The Boy and the Girl thought Mommaโs voice was weird.
โThatโs not Mommaโs voice, why is it so rough?โ
โI have a cold due to the cold winds.โ
Korean to English: ๋ค๋ฝ๋ฐฉ์ผ๋ก๋ถํฐ From the Attic by ๋ ํฌ๋ Nah, Heedoek General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Translation - English 1.Donโt go out from this attic
You canโt look out the window, either
You can only see through the mirror
The world that mirror shows you,
You can become beautiful only on its sleek surface
Be silent, and
Weave a tapestry with the yarns given to you
Until you become the perfect women in this sacred cave
2. I heard a song from somewhere
A sound of a song like an unspooled thread, whether itโs from outside the window or from inside of me
Went near the window and looked outside
Suddenly old scales fell off from both of my eyes
With a breaking noise
Window glasses were broken mirror was broken
Broken pieces of the mirror
Spread becoming several hundreds of pupils
Imminent whirlwinds
Entangled weft and warp wrapped around my body
3.I am not weaving anything at all
Things like a loom, I left in the dark attic.
4. I went down to the waterside.
Gulping down the glass of death
Going towards the deep pool of memory
A certain song came through my lips
With a voice I never heard
My backgroundย is in music (MM) and library (MSIS), I have expertise in immigration, and integrative medicine and work in the fields of literature, healthcare, education, marketing, and culture. As the Korean staff translator in 2018 and 2019 I handled translation, transcription, and interpretation needs for the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center and the Korean Community Services in California. I also have translated via Amara/TED since 2012 and interpreted in legal, medical, and social settings since 2011.ย
