This poem was written in his native language by Panuncio Isidoro Rafael, a resident of the town Sayula de Aleman, State of Veracruz, Mexico, and a former school-teacher. The language is Sayula Popoluca, a language of the Mixe branch of the Mixe-Zoque language-family, whose six or seven remaining languages are spoken in the southern region of Mexico. Sayula Popoluca is believed to still have about 3000 fluent speakers, almost all of them living in and around Sayula de Alemen.

In my transcription of the original poem I have had to employ a couple of special spelling-conventions so as to avoid the need to use unusual characters: capital U here represents a high central vowel (which in the standard orthography of Sayula Popoluca is written as a lower-case u with a strike-through); and the apostrophe, somewhat more conventionally, represents a glottal stop. j conforms to Spanish orthographic practice, representing an h-like sound; while the digraph sh is pronounced more or less as in English; the colon represents a long vowel.


Aliri kaj Poemo Sayula Popoluca

Aliri kaj Traduko Dennis Holt

© 2002 Dennis Holt
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