NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

One of the earliest Chamoru translations of an American pop song I ever did.  I came across it recently while I was searching on some old external hard drives.  It is to the tune of the Coldplay song "Clocks"which came out in 2002.  I remember I had started translating the song, working to come up with some basic lyrics.  I was hindered in my translation by the fact that the title frankly, gi minagahet was weird or sucked in Chamoru.  Clocks, didn't make sense in Chamoru. It may barely make sense in English for the song gi minagahet.  "Reloh siha" mungga yu' nu enao lol.  This was very early in my Chamoru learning journey, I was functionally fluent, but still making mistakes all the time and my Chamoru sounded like it was stiff and dry, straight out of a grammar book, because I lacked the basic organic feeling of being part of a language community.  The ways that emerge sometimes for an individual, a family, a village, a people to build off of the rules. To

Translating songs from English to Chamorro has been a favorite hobby of mine for a while. When I was first learning to speak Chamorro this was a fun necessity. It helped me, albeit in small fragments, practice the structure of making short sentences in Chamorro. One of the first songs that I translated was a favorite of mine at the time, "Yellow" by the band Coldplay. The lyrics, like many of that sort of generic, but somehow epic pop songs are incomprehensible. They are meant to be so fehman, but don't really make sense. They feel as if they make some sort of higher sense, but when taking in a literal and direct way, you might wonder how bulachu or bileng the songwriter was when he was penning these lines. Needless to say, after so many years "Yellow" remains one of my favorite songs to sing in both English and in Chamorro. I often sing along in Chamorro as its droning tune and repetitive lyrics wind their way to their conclusion. Note that the translatio