This digital and critical edition of a famous Haitian poem: "Au Pipirite Chantant" by Jean Metellus is a pilot project at Mount Holyoke College in exploring applications of the Text Encoding Initiative for Small Liberal Arts Colleges.

Historical background
In 1804, Haiti broke free from the domination of the French establishing the first black republic on earth. Following in the steps of the United States, which 30 years earlier had conducted a successful revolution against the British, Haiti in a spectacular rebellion of slaves, mulattos and whites, gained its freedom from the French. Today, Haiti is one of the most ramshackle countries on earth, but while its economic and political situation could not be worse, its artists and authors have never been more inspired and prolific. One of them, Jean Metellus, poet and playwright, documents the history of his country in a long lyrical poem "Au Pipirite chantant," a classic of Francophone literature, but very little known outside of France.

This poem offers a vision of the past and present of Haiti. Set in contemporary rural Haiti, it describes the life experience of a peasant and his wife confronted with a contrast between the overwhelming beauty of nature and the nightmarish condition of their everyday existence. Through the use of metaphors, historical references, and stylistic plays on words the poet renders his vision of a world of violence, suffering, and fear.

Text encoding: an alternative to traditional translation of a text
To understand and grasp the multi-layered meanings of a poem the reader needs a close understanding of individual words (through lexicography) as well as multiple references to the broader socio-historical context of the poem. But it is well recognized that translation often betrays the text it tries to render. This is why we have tried to make the poem available to prospective readers in its original form (French) with “mark up” translation in English of individual French words, and “pop up” windows that display video clips giving information about the historical, political, cultural context, as well as illustrations of identical themes painted by Haitian artists. Haitian artists send a similar message, and juxtaposing multi-media helps one to grasp the reality of the situation, and to decode the message of the poem.

We have embedded the translated words, illustrations and video clips within the text in part I. When you put the curser over the individual word in purple color the translation in English will appear under that word. Clicking on the # mark will bring up a video clip and clicking the * mark will open an illustration.

We have confidence that by finishing part I our perspective readers should be able to read the rest of the poem on their own. We hope that our example will demonstrate that text encoding can become an alternative to traditional translation of a text.

click here # to watch a historical background movie