Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature

5. Understanding Discourse: Beyond Couplets and Calendrics First

161 Understanding Discourse Beyond Couplets and Calendrics First Lloyd B. Anderson 5 The study of discourse structure lies somewhere between grammar and meaning.1 It concerns devices such as topics, fronting, parallel phrases (couplets), highlighting, and narrative genres. These devices are used to signal what a text or a discourse is about and what the reader or listener can expect to learn. They are used to divide a text into sections, to emphasize, and to contrast. They can also signal elegance and formality. If we are responsive to the discourse structure of Mayan alphabetic and glyphic texts, we discover how content relates to major text divisions (“paragraphs” or “sections”). We can understand texts far beyond a word-for-word glossing. Such a glossing is sometimes called a literal translation, but in fact it is not a translation at all (Anderson 2008; Nida 1964). This chapter will show that we can use discourse structure to radically change the way we understand normal Mayan texts (for example, by subtracting a ruler from Tikal Stela 31). We can also use it as a tool to decipher sentence structures and bits of meaning in writing systems that 5 This chapter is dedicated to Kathryn Josserand, a pioneer in the study of discourse in Mayan hieroglyphic texts. Figure 5.1. Acalan Chontal King List. Extracts from Smailus (1975: 26–33, original pages 22–30). 163 Understanding Discourse are not yet readable. Examples of the latter will include “Isthmian” (illustrated here by the Tuxtla Statuette) and the Cascajal Block. Foundations: Acalan Chontal Parallels with Glyphic Mayan I can do no better here than quote from a summary by Tom Jones (1988: x) of a watershed event in Mayan studies. One afternoon, Linda [Schele] and Kathryn [Josserand] set up an overhead projector in the narrow hallway of the ILAS [Institute of Latin American Studies] building and gave a presentation to an eager and astonished, if also cramped, audience on the earlier seventeenth century Chontal text from the Paxbolon-Maldonado papers, with the aim of demonstrating its parallels with the hieroglyphic texts. As a veteran of the 1985 seminar recalls that session, “I remember it being one of the extreme highlights of that year, because those of us who had been familiar with the normal sentence patterns of glyphs sat there with our jaws dropping open as we were read to from written Chontal in the same order of words with the same content.” What was most striking to those of us studying Mayan glyphic texts was what we can call the Acalan Chontal King List. This sequence of accession statements is embedded in a much longer discourse, the core of which is shown in figure 5.1. The marking of numbered successions with the words we now transcribe as tz’ak and ajaw (numbered successions of lords), the word chumwan , ‘was seated’, and other vocabulary were familiar to us, and more would become familiar with time. Since that time, the links of such a text to hieroglyphic Mayan have grown stronger, even if epigraphers do not now think hieroglyphic texts were written in exactly the Acalan Chontal language. Rather, they were written to a great extent in something resembling archaic Ch’olti’ and Proto-Ch’olan. Though there are continuing controversies, a good overview of languages in Mayan glyphic texts is still Søren Wichmann (2004), which contains additional references. The Acalan Chontal text is a model for the discourse structure of Maya king lists in general and perhaps for those beyond the Maya realms as well. As we shall see, analysis as a king list is also appropriate for both parts of Tikal Stela 31 (Mayan) and the Tuxtla Statuette (“Isthmian”). However, it is not a model for some other Mayan historical texts or for other parts of Tikal Stela 31, some of the discourse structure of which is better analyzed as historical annals. The King List Portion of Tikal Stela 31 The narrative from glyph blocks A26 and B26 through D16 and C17 of the Early Classic Tikal Stela 31 is shown in figure 5.2. This portion is better understood 164 Lloyd B. Anderson as a king list, though later portions mostly have characteristics of historical annals.2 More structural parallelisms are evident if we recognize that several early sections of this stela text begin with a phrase we can translate roughly as “Then [Ruler’s name] succeeded and ruled,” followed by...