Mayan Literature

An excerpt from, “Apocalypse and/or poiesis: A review of ’2000 Years of Mayan Literature’” By Edgar Garcia, Jacket2.org, October 23, 2011:

In its textile method of approach, 2000 Years emphasizes the tactile dimension of these texts. For the Maya, writing was an extension of body. Cormorant pours blood from her mouth onto paper (a direct transfer of the oral to the textual) that she passes down to her descendents, who do the same, in order to communicate with each other by reading the auguries of the bloodstained, speaking text. This is semantic density. A similar density is found in the Late Classic Mayan pottery which shows examples of what, as Tedlock notes, is today called concrete poetry. “Abandoning sentence structure in favor of a cosmic diagram,” he writes, “the closed code of writing has been opened to the world.” “Lingering on the threshold between sight and sound,” Mayan writers cannulized semantic weight into the shape of words by using their shapes to inflect and pronounce new meanings for the words. In a way, the very concept of words does not satisfy for thinking about the freedom by which Mayan writers could move between visual, logographic and syllabic content, bringing all these together in a linguistic directionality that was unique in that it was nonlinear. Like cities archaeoastronomically designed to highlight, reflect and comment upon celestial movement, concrete Mayan writing designs its materials to weigh in on its message while the message acquires greater density, mass and meaning by the introduction of design.

The weight of language, one of the most distinct elements of classical Mayan thought, is sadly one that was gradually lost in the period of the Conquista. We can trace its diminishment in the attempted standardization and abstraction of glyphs in the Chilam Balam of Maní (page 249 in 2000 Years). J. H. Prynne, in his “Note on Metal,” has pinned the historical moment at which European languages began to lose weight. This is due to the increased abstraction of value. I see a similar reduction of weight in these post-Conquista glyphs. They no longer follow directly from body. They are more abstract. Tedlock is keen to point this out and, taking into consideration that the book provides a comparative context within Mayan literature, readers are offered the educative opportunity to notice it for themselves.

Nevertheless the Conquista was not the end of Mayan literature. Many important texts were transcribed long after the Europeans had arrived. The single surviving manuscript of the Popol Vuh, for instance, was written in 1701. I suspect that at this point when the Gods worry in creating humans they might have the catastrophe of European contact somewhere in their minds. This is at least the context for the text: Mayans writing about creation after the apocalypse had already occurred. What Norman Brown, who wrote of “apocalyptic syncretism,” might have identified as the secret revelation of these texts: “or where the two waters meet, the water of life and the water of death.” Burnt water. In analyzing the Mayan story of creation, Tedlock consults a K’iche’ daykeeper, Andrés Xiloj Peruch, whose commentary suggests that the creation of the earth is trussed by its unraveling: “It’s just the way it is right now: there are clouds, then the clouds part, piece by piece, and now the sky is clear … Haven’t you seen that when the water passes, a rainstorm, and then it clears, a vapor comes out from among the trees? The clouds come out from among the mountains, among the trees.” The earth is revealed in the dissolution of its elements. It is born in revelation. But to be revealed it must be disintegrated. The earth “arose suddenly, just like a cloud, / just like a mist now forming, / unfolding.” The textile unraveling: life woven into its devastation. That is its poiesis. A Mayan poet is ch’amay, a harvester of mist. The harvest, the great loss. A harvester of mist is likewise a Mayan poet. In the preface to his 1978 Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, Tedlock wrote that “the reopening of possibilities in our language” will arise from an openness to the traditions of “the same continent where we are now learning, however slowly, how to become natives.” Regardless of whether such naturalization is even possible, the challenge of attending to indigenous experimental literary models and methods as indigenous to this continent continues to be a tremendous and tremendously rewarding challenge for twenty-first century poetry and poetics. The reopening of poetic possibilities continues.

An excerpt from, “Annals of the Cakchiquels” translated by Daniel Garrison Brinton, 1885:

I may dispense with a discussion of the literature of the Cakchiquel language, having treated that subject so lately as last year, in the introduction to the Grammar of the Cakchiquel, which I then translated and edited for the American Philosophical Society. As will be seen by reference to that work, it is quite extensive, and much of it has been preserved. I have examined seven dictionaries of the tongue, all quite comprehensive; manuscript copies of all are in the United States. None of these, however, has been published; and we must look forward to the dictionary now preparing by Dr. Stoll, of Zurich, as probably the first to see the light.

The Maya race, in nearly all its branches, showed its intellectual superiority by the eagerness with which it turned to literary pursuits, as soon as some of its members had learned the alphabet. I have brought forward some striking testimony to this in Yucatan, and there is even more in Central America. The old historians frequently refer to the histories of their own nations, written out by members of the Quiche, Cakchiquel, Pokomam and Tzendal tribes. Vasquez, Fuentes and Juarros quote them frequently, and with respect. They were composed in the aboriginal tongues, for the benefit of their fellow townsmen, and as they were never printed, most of them became lost, much to the regret of antiquaries.

Of those preserved, the Popol Vuh or National Book of the Quiches, and the Annals of the Cakchiquels, the latter published for the first time in this volume, are the most important known.

The former, the “Sacred Book” of the Quiches, a document of the highest merits, and which will certainly increase in importance as it is studied, was printed at Paris in 1861, with a translation into French by the Abbé Brasseur (de Bourbourg). He made use only of the types of the Latin alphabet; and both in this respect and in the fidelity of his translation, he has left much to be desired in the presentation of the work.

The recent publication of the Grammar also relieves me from the necessity of saying much about the structure of the Cakchiquel language. Those who wish to acquaint themselves with it, and follow the translation given in this volume by comparing the original text, will need to procure all the information contained in the Grammar. It will be sufficient to say here that the tongue is one built up with admirable regularity on radicals of one or two syllables. The perfection and logical sequence of its verbal forms have excited the wonder and applause of some of the most eminent linguists, and are considered by them to testify to remarkable native powers of mind.