NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Estaba guaha tres na manga ni' hu gof tataitai yan hu tattitiyi kada simana pat kada mes. I fine'nina "Naruto." I mina'dos "Gantz." Yan i uttimo "Berserk." Gi entre este na tres i fine'nina ma tutuhun "Berserk." I yiyinga' tumutuhun ayu gi 1990. Para Naruto matutuhun gi 1999 yan 2000 para Gantz. Lao pa'go Naruto yan Gantz esta munhayan. Makpo' Naruto gi issuen 700 (lao ma fa'tinas ensigidas un nuebu na series) yan makpo' Gantz gi issuen 383 (taya' nuebu na series para este, lao olaha mohon na guaha). Achokka' "Berserk" i mas amko', guiya i mas nateng lokkue'. Gi 25 na sakkan, matto gui' gi issuen 342 ha'. Ya guaha na biahi i yiyingga' ha fa'tinas unu na pat dos na issues gi unu na sakkan. Lao magof yu', sa' gi Fanuchan'an, put fin, ma na'huhuyong regulamente "Berserk" ta'lo. Hu diseseha na sina ma konsigi mo'na taiguini, sa' sen y

I'll be at the Sukicon this weekend at the Phoenix Center at Father Duenas school in Mangilao. I will have a bunch of interesting things to display and even some stuff to sell. Sukicon is a gathering or cosplayers, gaming nerds, anime/manga nerds and even comic book geeks. There is an artist alley and different booths by exhibitors. For me, I'll be displaying/selling the following things: 1. I'll be displaying some of my grandfather's tools. I have a nice complete set of the seven traditional tools that I'll put out, as well as some examples of the 150 year history of Chamorro blacksmithing in my family, most notably a machete that is more than 100 years old, and made by my great-grandfather Mariano Leon Guerrero Lujan (Bittot). I also have some tools that my grandfather made and one or two that I helped him make more recently. This will be interesting as I'm sure most of the people attending Sukicon think of "culture" a bit differently, as usually

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’m traveling this week and so it gives me quite a bit of down time on planes, with little to do other than get airsick. A few years ago I was watching quite a bit of anime and one thing I really enjoyed doing was taking anime theme songs, from shows like Gantz, Naruto and Cromartie High School and then translating them into Chamorro. Each translation was an interesting experiment, since although many of these shows are considered to be low-plebian culture, pop culture animated shadows on the cave wall for the masses, the lyrics to the theme songs tend to have a very epic and sophisticated feel to them.   These songs presented interesting challenges since translating them directly would be difficult and not necessarily match well with Chamorro. But finding ways of expressing similar epic thoughts in Chamorro, while trying to maintain a sense of the language would be fun and worthwhile. I still read manga regularly even if

After months of nothing there are finally some new issues of Berserk.  I only read 3 mangas, Gantz, Naruto and Berserk. The other two are released regularly and are slowly moving towards their conclusions as a series. Berserk is supposed to be in a similar twilight phase, but sometimes there are months between chapters. The excitement of the plot itself has long since dissipated as the characters and the investment in the story becomes to fade in my mind since it has been so long since they last visited me. The most recent issues of Berserk don't continue the main story arc, but instead give us a view of the main character Guts when he was a child mercenary. The story is interesting, although it is only three issues long, but I look forward the main story arc being kick started again. I was so happy to be reading Berserk this morning that I decided to do something I haven't done in quite a while. I took the latest issue of Berserk and translated it into Chamorro. It was f

Achokka' esta apmam desde hu na'funhayan iyo-ku Ph.D. pat esta apmam desde humokkok i umestudiante-ku, guaha na biahi, kada diha na hu alok "Si Yu'us Ma'ase" na makpo' ayu na patten lina'la'-hu. Achokka' hu gof agradesi ayu na tiempo, ya bula ineyak-hu, mas ki 13 na anos umestudiante yu', ya hagas esta listo yu' para bai hu tutuhun i otro na patten lina'la'-hu. Lao, put i chinatsaga' UOG, ti hu tungo' ngai'an nai na bai hu tutuhun ayu gi minagahet, ya ti hu tungo' kao Guahan i lugat nai bai hu tutuhuni. Esta mas ki un sakkan hu kekena'halom maisa yu' guihi, lao sesso ma fama'dagi nu Guahu. Lao para ayu na klasin institutsion, ti gaibali iyo-mu merits pat i bida-mu pat i minalate'-mu. I mas impottanten na arekla na kao manmassa' i esta manggaigaige gi halom nu Hagu? Put este na i meggaina na ma'estro yan ma'estra siha giya UOG, ti mangkapas. Lao ai adai, este na prublema-hu, bai fa

For those of you who may not already know it, I'm a big fan of manga and anime. This doesn't mean I'm an otaku or anything (although normals sometimes call me one), but just that there are a handful of titles or franchises which I really read carefully and follow closely. For instance, in July I wrote a long post about how two of my favorite mangas to read, Gantz and Berserk were going on hiatus for a few months. My geek guts started showing when a simple post about how much I'll miss them ended up being a discussion about the aspects of killing God or Gods in the mangas, or the way in which the main characters seemed to be challenging the very order of things, and how exciting it was to try and see an author make that possible. (Este mina'hasso yu' na hu nisisita umespiha kao esta mana'fanhuyong i nuebu na issue Berserk. Esta maloffan dos meses gi iyo-na hiatus, pues sina esta makpo'.) For a few years now I've been translating manga, most notabl

The gof na'chalek lao gof na'triste lokkue' book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut ends with the following paragraph. If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. For those of you who don't know the book, you should read it, it is a tragic commentary on everything from religion, to colonialism, to the fallacy of objective science. At this point the whole world has been radically altered by a substance called ice-nine, which when is touched to water changes its composition so that it can be solid ice even at room temperature. The protagonist is stuck on the island of San Lorenzo, surrounded by the once ocean, which is now a world of tornadoes. He ha

With some of the stress of the writing and defending a dissertation over now, I can finally enjoy the breaths that I take and try to relax a little bit. As some might be familiar with on this blog, one of the ways that I relax is by writing songs or poems in Chamorro, or translating lyrics from songs into Chamorro. The past month while I’ve been furiously writing my dissertation was the longest period of time since 2000 that I went without opening up my Chamorro dictionary. As I’ve been shut away in my computer for so long, and without doing much talking, thinking or writing in Chamorro, I’ve actually felt at times the language fading from my head. That’s why it was exciting recently, after defending my dissertation, to finally open up the dictionary again and start work on translating another song. This post is the fourth installment of a feature that I call Sakigakke Chamorro! In this feature I take a song from a Japanese anime and translate it into Chamorro. The translation is