Popol Wuj (review)

Luis Enrique Sam Colop's new Spanish language translation of the Popol Wuj is an accomplished resource and a handsome volume for the specialist and the general public alike. From the seemingly trivial, like the tome's binding and typesetting, to the obviously significant, like the correction of errors (and even incongruities) found in previous translations and its emphasis on the text's poetics, Sam Colop's Popol Wuj definitely represents a major improvement over all previous versions.

This review concentrates on Sam Colop's emphasis on the poetry of the Popol Wuj rather than its content, for there are many good summaries of the text—and other versions of it—that can be read elsewhere. Dubbed (somewhat incorrectly in my view) "the Mayan bible," the Popol Wuj is the Quiché Mayan book of creation, the myths and history of the indigenous group from the Guatemalan highlands. The original manuscript is lost but it was copied and translated by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez between 1701 and 1703 and is currently housed in the Newberry Library in Chicago.

The translator is a lawyer, linguist, literary scholar, and poet from Catel in the department of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. He holds a law degree from the Universidad Rafael Landívar, a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Iowa, and a doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His doctoral dissertation, titled Maya Poetics (1994), was directed by Dennis Tedlock, whose English translation, Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (1985), won the prestigious PEN translation award in 1986. Sam Colop has also published Popol Wuj: versión poética K'iche' (1999), a transcription—and the basis of this Spanish language translation—that uses the contemporary alphabet so that today's Quiché speakers can read the text in that language.

Sam Colop's goal in this edition of the Popol Wuj is twofold. On the one hand, he seeks to correct some of the errors and the many imprecisions of previous editions, something he does deftly. On the other hand, and most importantly, he restores the poetic nature of the original manuscript, which is culturally inextricable from oral performance. Sam Colop's expertise in Mayan poetics (and perhaps the fact that he himself is an accomplished poet) undoubtedly contributed to making this translation, if not the best, at least the most beautifully worded version to date. Although the Popol Wuj contains both verse and prose, the complete text in this edition is printed in verse form and is thus consistent with the parallel structures that characterize Mayan versification. Whether lexical, morphological, semantic, or syntactic, these parallel structures of Mayan poetry range from a twofold to a fourfold pattern. To make these patterns and parallels visible, Sam Colop indents the verses differently throughout the text, aligning words, phrases, clauses, and other elements in pairs and juxtaposing them in a way that suggests the oral rhythm of the text. The overall effect of this arrangement of words on the page is not only to render the poetry of the text visible, but also to accentuate recurring themes and sounds and thereby aid the reader, specialist and generalist alike, to submerge him or herself in its musicality and rhythm.

Yet this emphasis on the poetics of the Popol Wuj does not result in a lack of scholarly or philological rigor. In fact, for both the specialist and the curious reader, Sam Colop's text is authoritatively annotated, engaging the scholarly work of other translators and commentators of the Popol Vuh. One typesetting feature that I found both aesthetically pleasing and useful in Sam Colop's handsome tome is that whereas the main text is printed in black, the titles, subtitles, and footnotes (and side-notes, as notes are also printed in the left and right margins of verso and recto pages, respectively) are printed in brown. The two-color scheme allowed me when necessary to tune out the abundant notes and to concentrate on the text itself. Had...