The Latvian Folk Song Translation Project

Around the time that I started working as an artist, I also began translating written work online as a hobby, first translating song lyrics and later branching into poetry.

Always on the lookout for new material, I eventually started revisiting my childhood Latvian school lessons, translating obscure Latvian poetry and folk songs into English. This often led to digging through collections of old, long-neglected books at family homes and Latvian cultural centers. Many of these books had been brought to the United States in or before Soviet times, generally by individuals who needed to leave their country and wanted to preserve their heritage abroad.

Today, the books sit in storage or serve on shelves as idle decoration—but for me as an amateur translator, they are especially useful, because most of the material they contain cannot be found online.

The modern world likes to think that all information exists on the internet, but how many of these relatively obscure Latvian works would be completely lost—absent from the digital archive and therefore the memory of new generations—if they did not happen to exist somewhere in an old box of books?

I am curious to know how many once-famous creative works disappear in a similar way over time, falling into obscurity, and where one can go to find them before they are lost.

For example, what are the visual-arts equivalents of old books stored in Latvian cultural centers? What other diasporas’ experiences mirror my own experience exploring Latvian works? What kinds of historically significant works and cultural knowledge exist an old box away from being discarded and forgotten? And, finally, what are the legal considerations that shape how these works can be preserved and shared?

The Latvian Folk Song Translation Project is an effort to begin exploring these questions through digital transcription, translation, and dissemination of Latvian cultural works at risk of disappearing into un-digitized history.

Background photo credit: Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels