The Popol Vuh

By Michael Bazzett

One of the New York Times’s Ten Best Poetry Books of the Year: A “superb” translation into verse of the Mayan epic (Literary Review).

A World Literature Today Notable Translation

In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.

This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, “the book of the woven mat,” one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted by the K’iche’ people of Guatemala, before being translated into prose—and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett—this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as “the phonetic rendering of a living pulse.”

By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this striking new translation of The Popol Vuh—the first in the Seedbank series of world literature—breathes new life into an essential tale.

“Mr. Bazzett’s translation offers a welcome path into the power of The Popol Vuh as beautiful literature. [He] writes that his intent was to create a more accessible source for students, ‘a version of the myth they could disappear into, a verse version that truly sang.’ He has succeeded.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The book, as a whole?containing an authentic and transparent translator’s introduction, the creation epic itself, and a reader’s companion?should be incorporated into every literary translation program.” —Literary Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781571319180

Book preview

Introduction

Somewhere in a highland cloud forest in the middle 1500s, near the place where the continents of the Americas hinge upon their mountainous spine, a story was written down. The marks were likely made on paper made from bark, with ink darkened by soot. This story was already many centuries old—thousands of years, in fact—and it was etched into the hearts of the scribe or scribes who wrote it. It no doubt tripped readily from their lips in an incantatory rhythm. And it was written down secretly, line by line, the phonetic rendering of a living pulse, and spirited away. So the story goes.

For a century and a half, no outsiders saw this book. Not a whisper of it appears anywhere. Not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez gained the trust of his K’iche’ parishioners and access to the manuscript, and copied the original K’iche’ text down verbatim.

Ximénez wrote that it was with great reserve that these manuscripts were kept among them, with such secrecy, that neither the ancient ministers knew of it, and investigating this point, while I was in the parish of Santo Tomas Chichicastenango, I found that it was the doctrine which they first imbibed with their mother’s milk, and that all of them knew of it almost by heart, and I found that they had many of these books among them. The secrecy is understandable, given that early Spanish missionaries fed hundreds of Mayan books into the flames of their bonfires in their attempt to eradicate superstition and the lies of the Devil.

Ximénez’s manuscript is faded and stained in places, with no sectional organization, and haphazard punctuation and capitalization. The original unknown author had clearly mastered the Latin alphabet of the Spaniards. The Maya were highly literate, with an alphabet both glyphic and phonetic, and facility with the new characters came easily. But there was no attempt at lineation or other conventions of verse; the pages are filled with monolithic columns of uninterrupted prose—as if a river of poetry had been poured into a bucket.

The original manuscript has never been recovered, and its author remains unknown. In a strange and lovely meta-twist, the disappearance of this K’iche’ manuscript, the lost book that served as Ximénez’s source, is echoed in the very tale it tells. The prologue alludes to the existence of an even earlier ur-text:

The original book exists.

It was written long ago

but those who read and ponder it

have hidden their faces.

We are thus left with the copy of an echo. An echo of a lost book that the authors themselves refer to as an ilb’al, an instrument of sight. An instrument of divine vision providing a window into the thoughts of the gods. Such is the story of the Popol Vuh.

Four hundred years after Ximénez transcribed his manuscript, in the spring of 2009, an archaeology student was peeling roots and earth from a stone structure in the ancient Mayan city of El Mirador, in northern Guatemala, when he uncovered two stone panels. He was part of a team investigating the water collection systems of El Mirador, and the discovery of the beautifully carved frieze was utterly unexpected. As team leader Richard Hansen put it, It was like finding the Mona Lisa in the sewage system.

The panels date to 200 BCE, nearly two thousand years before Ximénez put pen to paper. Hansen pointed out that "to find this story in the Preclassic period is beyond belief. For many years it was thought that the Popol Vuh creation story had been contaminated by the Spanish priests who translated it—that the Indians had been influenced by Christianity. This frieze shows that the Maya account of creation was vibrantly established for thousands of years before the Spanish got here. It’s like finding the original copy of the Constitution. I was stunned."

The frieze illustrates a key moment from the epic, where Hunahpu, one of the mythic hero twins, has discovered the severed head of his father, who battled the lords of death and paid the ultimate price. Hunahpu is accompanied by his brother, Xbalanque, as they swim in a river of the underworld. The panel lines a channel designed to guide rainwater into cisterns. It seems fitting to me that this story would compose the veins of a city, gathering its vital fluid, its kik’, to sustain it through the dry seasons.

In the spring of 2009, while the ruins at El Mirador were being excavated, I was researching a new course, thousands of miles to the north. I’ve found that in a twenty-first-century world so utterly saturated with information, my students crave nothing more than the authentic, and I hoped to tap into that hunger with an exploration of myth. Needless to say, the Popol Vuh was high on my list of possible texts. I was intrigued at the prospect of reading it alongside Genesis or the Odyssey, yet the only translations I could find were scholarly prose, dense with footnotes. They are fascinating, vivid work to be sure, but not what I hoped to place beside the poetry of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf or Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh in a literature classroom. My students are bright, lively, and curious: I craved a version of the myth they could disappear into, a verse version that truly sang.

This is my attempt to make just such a thing, to breathe life into old words and resuscitate this story for a new audience, with the end goal of creating a lucid poem that the modern reader can enter and disappear into with minimal framing. As Homer put it, I hoped to help the poem Sing for our time too.

Such a project is not without peril, of course. The Maya believe that ancestors are made to live again when we speak their words—the word they use is k’astajisaj, meaning to endow with life or to resurrect. As Allen Christenson relates in the introduction of his excellent translation: When the words of the ancestors are read, or spoken aloud, it is as if that person had returned from death to speak again. Reading ancient texts is therefore a very delicate matter, filled with peril if the words are not treated with sufficient respect.

I have approached this task with these very words in mind. And I’ve been a little haunted by the thought of the many hundreds of books burned by zealous missionaries while the Maya looked on with rage, despair, and crushing grief as the flames consumed the voices of their grandparents. I have been guided in my choices as a reader and a poet, and thus this has been a literary endeavor as much as a scholarly one. That said, I have hewed with as much fidelity to the text, and its spirit, as possible. The Ximénez manuscript served as the original source, and every line of the poem has its antecedent in the K’iche’.

Any work of translation must drink deeply of what has come before it, and this version is no exception. I am particularly indebted to Allen Christenson’s meticulous and indispensable two-volume translation, which served as the touchstone for this work. The second volume, his literal word-for-word translation from the K’iche’, served as my trot, the scaffold upon which I was able to build this version. I have also read and learned much from the translations of Dennis Tedlock, Delia Goetz and Adrián Recinos, Munro Edmonson, and Sam Colop (to Spanish). Both Christenson’s and Tedlock’s notes were invaluable in helping me decipher and interpret many passages, and Christenson’s essay on parallelisms and chiastic structures was tremendously useful as I sought to unearth a poetic structure from Ximénez’s solid columns of prose.

When read aloud, the rhythm of the Popol Vuh is sinuous and propulsive. The preponderance of this version alternates between a loose three-beat and a four-beat line, as this most effectively captures the elastic nature of the telling, and I occasionally attempt to highlight its momentum through enjambment. To help echo the cadences of spoken K’iche’, with its husky consonants spoken deep in the throat and its marvelous sinewy music, I favored Anglo-Saxon roots over the Latin whenever possible, for their consonantal husk and immediacy, as well as their ability to signify a certain rootedness. When the K’iche’ verb has a particular resonance, difficult to capture in English, I attempt to bring that to light via metaphor. For instance, finding no equivalent for pupuje’ik (which Domingo de Basseta defined in his Vocabulario de lengua quiche as the way in which clouds rise up from the mountains), I use an image to bring flavor to the verb:

To make earth they said, Earth

and there it was: sudden

as a cloud or a mist unfolds

from the face of a mountain,

so earth was there.

Such choices, of course, were endless.

One final decision bears highlighting: I have chosen to end this version when the arc of the mythic narrative, as I see it, completes. The dilemma that launches the story onto its course is quite clear: the world must be created and populated with true humans, so that the first day might dawn. Once the sun rises into the sky and this moment has drawn to a close, the mythic arc draws closed as well and a distinct shift occurs. In the remaining pages of the Popol Vuh, the focus moves from universal myth to a protohistory and a genealogy of the K’iche’ aristocracy, intent on establishing the divine roots of that ruling lineage. While there is much to be discovered in these pages, I fear my imaginary modern reader would find these lists of names and lineages inaccessible and perhaps confounding without footnotes and further context. Thus, as the mythic section of the Popol Vuh closes, so does this poem.

A recurring thought spurred me along during this project: the idea that the Americas deserve their own myth, with a living voice in a new idiom. Indeed, they’ve had their own myth for thousands of years. Often referred to as the oldest book in America, the Popol Vuh is known by many names: the Book of the People, the Book of the

Reviews for The Popol Vuh

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had NO idea what I was getting into with this. My fifteen-year-old had read about this book when he was researching some project for school, so when he saw it at the bookstore he got excited and said we should read it for family story time. Obviously I said yes.So this is a verse translation of the Mayan epic origin story. Did I get absolutely stressed about probably mispronouncing ever single name in the story, despite how many times I looked them up? Yes. Did I have a surprising amount of fun reading mythic poetry out loud anyway? Absolutely yes! And the rest of the family enjoyed it, too!

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Both biblical and atmospheric verse in a great creation/origin story. I now get the references to Xibalba in Aronofsky's underappreciated film "The Fountain".

[petroglyph_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Popol Vuh is a grand mytho-historical cycle, a reflection of an oral history, as told by the K’iche’, one branch of the Mayan peoples. The cycle starts with a creation myth and then continues with the Gods’ repeated failures to create humans, a series of Trickster Twins and their exploits among the Gods and in the underworld of Xibalba, the eventual creation of humans, and an increasingly historical listing of Mayan and allied communities and leaders, down to the eventual Conquest by the Spanish. For anyone familiar with other grand mythological cycles (Greek, Norse, Hebrew), these stories follow a familiar pattern: a deep time that is highly allegorical and full of symbolism and larger-than-life heroes, and that becomes progressively anchored in history as the material approaches the present. As such the Popol Vuh reads like a distinctively Native-American variation on a familiar theme: a standardized history of the people, whose cultural practices have roots in deep time and the forces that shape the universe. Good stuff! The edition I read was prepared and translated by Dennis Tedlock, and it is doubtlessly awe-inspiring. While the text is presented as a smooth, nicely-flowing narrative, the endnotes (whose pagecount surpasses that of the actual Popol Vuh) make apparent the translation difficulties and the cultural references, and provide insight in many of these items’ history in previous editions. Tedlock defends his editorial choices, compares editions and includes the necessary cultural background for an audience of laypeople and specialists. The whole thing must have been a massive undertaking, and Tedlock’s scrupulousness is admirable. An exemplary edition of a fascinating cultural narrative belonging to a civilization now conquered and largely erased.

[erinfanning · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in mythology or Mesoamerican literature.

[jasonsteven1212 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a wonderful read. Not only are these tales deeply allegorical, insightful and truthful but amusing and facinating. I read this three time and then transcribed the entire work.

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Popol Vuh-
The Mayan creation myths are not just entertaining to read, but provide a fascinating look at Mayan culture and history as well, through the dimly remembered prehistory of the people up until their conquest by the Spanish. Popol Vuh doesn’t merely sketch out a story of creation that occurred in the distant past, it links that creation all the way through the time of the European invasion of the Americas and the effective end of Mayan supremacy; it’s as if the Prose and Poetic Eddas were written while Ragnarok was happening, or if the Greek/Roman myth cycle lasted until the Pantheon was overthrown by the next generation of gods. These mythologies had a story to explain their end, but Popol Vuh is a mythology that lived to see its end.

Popol Vuh is especially interesting as a mythological text because it presents us with gods who are fallible from the beginning. It takes numerous attempts before they successfully make humanity, their failures sometimes surviving in other forms (animals) and other times just falling apart into dirt and mud (nicely illustrating the life lesson that sometimes mistakes can actually be productive, but sometimes they’re just a waste of your time and effort. Too many texts emphasize the first part while failing to grasp the second). If there’s a story where one of the Greek pantheon goes up to Hephaestus and says “please make me this thing” and Hephaestus answers “sorry, I have no idea how to do that” I’m not familiar with it. The Mayan gods are not all powerful either, and much of the first three parts of the text concern the efforts of the gods to outsmart the brutal lords of the underworld using their wits instead of overwhelming force. There is no Zeus equivalent here to thrash the enemies of the pantheon, instead creation and existence are a struggle even for the gods, who can lose contests and die when things don’t go their way. Man is presented as far closer to the divine in the Mayan myths than in most other myth systems, as man serves as the “knower” as well as the “recorder.” It is through man that the acts of the divine can be transcribed and the world understood.

There are numerous parallels in the Popol Vuh to other myths and religions- there’s a great flood, for instance, there’s a point where the divine saviors die and are reborn (though after five days, not three) and are more powerful than ever after death, there is a Babel-like segment where the gods fear the power of man and so they handicap them (though by reducing their sight, not by confusing their language), there’s even a Prometheus character here. The Mayan myths aren’t just lesser shadows of the Western myths, however, as throughout the text the Mayan myths feel alive and visceral in a way that I haven’t seen in a very long time. I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses earlier in the year, and though that is a masterfully constructed and excellently written text, it felt more like a literary endeavor than a work of passionate belief. Perhaps Ovid believed in the Roman gods, perhaps he believed in them quite strongly, but it is clear to me that he doesn’t see them in every sunrise, beneath every rock, living in every shadow and animal and house and ear of corn like the author of the Popol Vuh did. If you like reading mythology there are few if any books I would recommend more highly than the Popol Vuh, which is why I’m giving it five stars (only the second 5-star ranking I’ve given out of the 70 books I’ve read so far this year).

The Dennis Tedlock edition is wonderful. The extensive introduction summarizes the events of the main text, so you never have trouble understanding what’s going on. The extensive notes and glossary mean that not only will you be able to look up anything that you don’t understand or don’t remember, but you can also read about the linguistic nuances of the translation and see an analysis of how the Popol Vuh relates to the Mayan calendar. Finally the book is embellished by many pictures and images taken from Mayan artifacts and art, which help to make the story more vivid and the text feel more vital. I could not name a single way in which the text could be made better.

P.S. I have a theory that Tohil is a death god that somehow survived the earlier age and escaped the underworld slaughter done by Hunahpu and Xbalanque, given that Tohil is first introduced by a Xibalban messenger. Just an idea, but fun to think about.

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The introduction and notes in the edition I read (ISBN 0671617710 ) were an excellent guide to a culture I am fairly ignorant of. Translator Dennis Tedlock did an great job at explaining the nuances of the cultural significance of the myths.I found it particularly interesting that most of the stories in the Popol Vuh can be linked to specific astronomical/calendrical events. An incredibly complex and sophisticated world-view.The journeys of the hero-gods into the underworld realm of Xibalba were both funny and horrifyingly grotesque at the same time. Though probably not as horrifying as the semi-historical section towards the end in which the mythic origins of human sacrifice are explained.Tedlock very generously acknowledges the help he received from contemporary Quiché Maya practitioners, particularly Andrés Xiloj who initiated him as Daykeeper, one who is able to perform divinations using the 260-day ritual calendar of the Maya.

[gregory_gwen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

got me in the mood to see Chichen Itza. Didn't actually read it all, though.

[ltfl_jmls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

got me in the mood to see Chichen Itza. Didn't actually read it all, though.

[imnotsatan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Despite what other reviewers have said, I would like to point out that this is the Christenson translation, not Tedlock (though it is based on his work). That being said, this is my preferred translation; it's clear and avoids too much translatorese. It's well annotated and generally well researched.

[simonmagus_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this is the real thing, authentic pre-columbian mayan mythology. of course you already know that if you're reading this. if you don't know that already, get the book in any translation and check it out.