These translations from Melanisian pidgin (Tok Pisin) are selections from twelve poems written by the Australian aborigine Eldred Van-Ooy. The poems were published by Van-Ooy as a multi-page advertisement in a socialist Brisbane paper, The Worker, on January 27, 1960—although the poems themselves are all dated as being written in January 1939. Of the twelve poems, I have translated only four: Dreamtime, Naming Things, Homecoming and I'm Tired. Although the others are often quite cleverly constructed, given the incredible limitations of Tok Pisin, they border dangerously on doggerel. I cannot explain this apparent discrepancy in quality. For the curious, I have translated one of them, Nambartu Meri, at the end of this Foreword.
Much of Van-Ooy's history is unknown, though several biographical facts have been gleaned from a short Worker editorial that accompanied the poems. A pure-blood aborigine, Van-Ooy was taken from the outback at birth in 1891 and subsequently raised by a white, middle-class couple, Cinque and Mildred Van-Ooy, on the outskirts of Brisbane. In his early twenties, as an instructor in Hydraulic Engineering at the Queensland Institute of Technology in Brisbane, he achieved a modicum of local scientific fame by designing an ingenious waste-pumping system of vacuum and ball valves that continues to function in the Southern Queensland Water and Sewage Management District despite the fact that it makes minimal use of the force of gravity, the mainstay of all such systems past and present.
I do not know if these poems have ever been formally translated elsewhere. The only knowledge I have of Van-Ooy and his poems comes from the editorial and several inquiries I made on my own. That I was able to piece together any information some fifty-odd years after the fact still amazes me. If Van-Ooy wasn’t obscure, he was close to it.
The poems themselves, despite their simplicity, present the translator with a number of problems. One is the absence of any other pidgin poems against which to gage Van-Ooy’s efforts. (There is no Tok Pisin literature outside of the oral myths and ramblings that have been phonetically transcribed by scholars). Another is determining whether Van-Ooy wished the poems to be read as curiosities, protests, jokes, or as "serious" poetry. All that I had to go on were some microfiche of the pages containing the various poems and editorial, all of which had been forwarded to me in 1985 by an old Australian computer acquaintance, Boyd Munro, who had come across them during the conversion of some old microfiche files belonging to The Worker.
For information on Boyd Munro:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasp_(software)
In addition to these difficulties, there were many others. First of all I had to find some formal way of truly understanding the pidgin. Its vocabulary and syntax for starters. Many words and phrases can be intuitively grasped, but some can’t. For a while, I had no choice but to guess at meanings and then I somehow managed to locate several dictionaries, one in particular being a dictionary on a Melanesian pidgin called Tok Pisin. It was a bit of luck finding it, because the poems (as I subsequently discovered) were written in the same pidgin. Without that dictionary, I doubt if I would have ever been able to accurately translate the poems.
But there were often problems that couldn’t be solved by any dictionary. As I mentioned earlier, I had been unable to locate samples of pidgin poetry in any linguistic or anthropological journals. There was no history, no tradition of pidgin poetry to give me some feel for what Van-Ooy was trying to do. Many times I had to make instinctual decisions as to the essential emotional tone of a poem. This is always potentially dangerous business for a translator, i.e., bleeding into the original, but pidgin is so elemental I had no other choice. I bled all over it.
Related to this is the fact that the language is so lacking in vocabulary, flexibility, nuance and tense that many times there is simply no way to accurately sense the underlying emotional tenor of a poem. Sometimes a poem would strike me as funny, and then a little later, pensive, almost poignant. I found that when you really “entered” the pidgin, by being open emotionally, the language was so fundamental there were many ways for the imagination to go. It was as if the words were reflective crystals. You could never predict the results. This is partly due to the fact that pidgin, to Westerners, often seems funny at first hearing. To get past that perception, and sense the underlying emotional texture of the poem, you have to go beneath the surface. You have to take your chances. You have to open up and enter the pidgin and let it take you on an essentially unpredictable journey. The poem might turn out to be outrageously funny. Or it might turn out to be incredibly poignant. There’s no way to tell.
Pidgin, to put it bluntly, is a very strange language with which to create a written poetry, a poetry in which the words on the page have to do everything. If Van-Ooy had created these poems orally and spoken them to us, or even read them off the page to us, we would have no doubts as to their intended tone, as the poems would fill out emotionally. But just reading them silently on the page can often give you the impression Van-Ooy thought everything around him was a joke.
Despite these inherent problems, I am sure that Van-Ooy’s decision to write the poems in pidgin was very deliberate. Surely it was a signal of some kind. One has only to put oneself in his place to begin to guess the nature of that signal, and hence begin to sense the true tone of the poems. For one thing, the use of pidgin, which is a “half-way” language, surely indicates a desire to at least go “half way” and offer the European (white) reader a more direct way of understanding the aboriginal sensibility. Thus, one sense I had almost immediately (with regard to tone) is that of an "offering", although some might call it a bargaining chip. Connected to that is a sense of alienation and yet a very erect pride of heritage: the insistence that his white readers leave their world and learn a new, but not especially difficult language, if they wished to partake of his.
That sense of alienation becomes even more complicated once you realize pidgin is a “borrowed” language. The aborigines no more speak pidgin among themselves than do the white men who trade with them. The language is really so elemental it can only properly be used for its original purpose of establishing commerce and avoiding conflict between native and white. In short, pidgin is a "No-man's" language, brought out solely for the occasion.
Yet it is the language Van-Ooy chose to communicate in even though he had other choices. As the facts of his upbringing indicate, English was his language from birth. As to whether he knew an aborigine tongue is unknown, yet there is no reason to believe he grew up being completely ignorant of tribal languages. In other words, he had other, more flexible choices (English for sure, and perhaps an aborigine tongue) but he didn’t take them. My sense is he wanted a language that truly fit who he was: a man with no language of his own. “No man”, “Half man”, take your pick.
This becomes even more ironic after you discover, as I eventually did, that the pidgin used by Van-Ooy was not an Australian pidgin but a New Guinea pidgin, which is what Tok Pisin really is. This choice may have been dictated by the fact that the Australian government had all but extinguished pidgin by 1950. Yet there is every reason to believe that there were still places in Queensland where an Australian pidgin could have been easily picked up. Indeed, Van-Ooy could have possibly known both pidgins. After all, the pidgins wouldn’t have been that far apart except for specialized terms. As to how he was able to pick up the Melanesian pidgin is anybody’s guess. My own is that Brisbane’s close proximity to New Guinea would have given Van-Ooy plenty of opportunity to bump into Tok Pisin speakers.
The choice of a New Guinea pidgin therefore seems to have been deliberate. It is my own guess that the choice was made simply because unlike the Australian pidgin, Tok Pisin had not been eliminated. Nor has it to this day. In many ways, it must have stood as a symbol to Van-Ooy of the stubborn will of the New Guinea aborigines to survive on their own terms. And again it was a secret language, known only to "border" people. And although pidgin is an oral language, as are the various aborigine languages (the aborigines have no written language), and thus might seem an appropriate choice to use in place of an aborigine language, Van-Ooy's decision to publish the poems in a newspaper resulted in his having to adopt the written pidgin script utilized by colonial governments in their uncontrollable desire to communicate through the normal channels of newspapers, directives, road signs, et al.
Van-Ooy must have known how rough