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

6. Drawing and Designing with Words

181 Drawing and Designing with Words Dennis Tedlock 6 When the signs of the Maya script are locked into a relationship with syntax, the reader converts clusters, rows, and columns of marks into syllables, words, phrases, and sentences, reversing the sequence followed by the writer. There may be times when the process of reading a text is slowed down by beautiful calligraphy or an unusual spelling, but the directionality of language is still there, drawing the reader onward. What concerns us here are cases in which Maya writers liberated signs from syntax, creating what might be called graphic poetry. Such works allow the reader to linger on the threshold between recognizing visual signs and converting them into sentences. Some of the signs may have a proper reading order at the scale of words or short phrases, but they draw their larger meaning from their placement in compositions whose organization is not modeled on syntax. Mayan graphic poetry has analogs in present-day avantgarde works that go by such names as concrete poetry, pattern 6 182 Dennis Tedlock poetry, shape poetry, and visual poetry.1 Concrete poets whose medium is the alphabet seek to overcome the arbitrariness of its signs by organizing them into images and diagrams. Many of the signs used by Maya poets are iconic to begin with, and freeing them from their normal roles in texts has the effect of calling attention to iconic features that might receive little or no attention from a reader focused on the task of piecing sentences together. Mayan works that make use of iconicity bear some resemblance to those of Japanese concrete poets, whose inventory of signs includes iconic characters of Chinese origin. Our first example of Mayan graphic poetry is provided by the painting on the outer surface of a Late Classic vase from Alta Verapaz, on the northern edge of the Guatemalan highlands.2 The cylindrical design field is filled out with just two glyphs, repeated in rows that run all the way around the vase without any beginning or ending point. In a single row located just below the rim is a portrait glyph naming the deity best known to Mayanists as K’awiil, or God K, written in mirror image (figure 6.1a). The poet has redesigned the portrait, making it abstract and rectilinear in comparison with a more formal version (figure 6.1b, shown in mirror image to facilitate comparison). The object on the forehead of the formal version is a mirror, and the way the name is written on the tablet in the Temple of the Foliated Cross at Palenque indicates that nehn, the term for “mirror,” is included in the name (figure 6.1c and d, from positions A-15 and N-10). So the full name is Nehn K’awiil, and since images of this deity often take the form of a scepter, I offer “Mirror Scepter” as a provisional translation . In the case of the vase, the writer chose to render the portrait version of the name in mirror image rather than placing a mirror sign on its forehead. The scepter glyph is repeated seventeen times, but this number has no particular significance in Maya numerology or astronomy. Moreover, a viewer of the vase could turn it on its axis any number of times, bringing into view an indefinite number of scepters. If we treat these glyphs as a substitute for the Figure 6.1. (a–d), versions of the divine name Nehn K’awiil; (a) is shown in mirror image for comparison with (b), from the vase shown in figure 6.2; (c) and (d) include signs for the word nehn, as labeled; (e–f), versions of the sign that reads sutz’ as a logograph and tz’i as a syllable; (e) is a standard version and (f) is from the same vase as (b). Drawings by the author. 183 Drawing and Designing with Words dedicatory text (or Primary Standard Sequence) that would occupy the same space on other vases, they evoke an indefinite number of recipients of vases, especially the “sprouts” on royal trees who were destined to be bearers of the scepter.3 The rest of the design field is organized by a grid consisting of three rows and sixteen columns, with each cell occupied by a glyph that depicts the leftfacing head of a leaf-nosed bat (figure 6.1e). Again, as in the case of the...