POPOL-VUH-THE-MAYAN-BOOK-OF-THE-DAWN-OF-LIFE-translated-by-Dennis-Tedlock.pdf

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POPOL VUH: THE MAYAN BOOK OF THE DAWN OF LIFE

translated by Dennis Tedlock with commentary based on the ancient

knowledge of the modern Quiche Maya

PREFACE

Are 4u ua nuta4alibal, nupresenta

chiquiuach ri nantat, comon chuchkajauib

mu4hulic uleu, mu4hulic poklaj, mu4hulic bak.

PREFACE

You cannot erase time.

-ANDRES XILOJ

THE TRANSLATOR of the Popol Vuh, as if possessed by the story the

Popol Vuh tells, must wander in darkness and search long for the clear

light. The task is not a matter of deciphering Maya hieroglyphs, since

the only surviving version of the Popol Vuh is a transcription into

alphabetic writing, but the manuscript nevertheless abounds with

ambiguities and obscurities. My work took me not only into dark

corners of libraries but into the forests and tall cornfields and

smoky houses of highland Guatemala, where the people who speak and

walk and work in the pages of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche Maya, have

hundreds of thousands of descendants. Among them are diviners called

"daykeepers," who know how to interpret illnesses, omens, dreams,

messages given by sensations internal to their own bodies, and the

multiple rhythms of time. It is their business to bring what is dark

into "white clarity," just as the gods of the Popol Vuh first

brought the world itself to light.

The Quiche people speak a Mayan language, say prayers to Mayan

mountains and Mayan ancestors, and keep time according to the Mayan

calendar. They are also interested citizens of the larger contemporary

world, but they find themselves surrounded and attacked by those who

have yet to realize they have something to teach the rest of us. For

them it is not that the time of Mayan civilization has passed, to be

followed by the time of European civilization, but that the two have

begun to run alongside one another. A complete return to conditions

that existed before Europeans first arrived is unthinkable, and so

is a complete abandonment of indigenous traditions in favor of

European ones. What most worries daykeepers about people from

Europe, and specifically about missionaries, is that they confuse

the Earth, whose divinity is equal to that of the celestial God,

with the devil. As daykeepers put it, "He who makes an enemy of the

Earth makes an enemy of his own body."

In the western part of what was once the Quiche kingdom is a town

called Chuua 4,ak or "Before the Building." It is listed in the

Popol Vuh as one of the citadels that were added to the kingdom during

the reign of two great lords named Quicab and Cauizimah. When they

sent "guardians of the land" to occupy newly conquered towns, Before

the Building was assigned to nobles whose descendants still possess

documents that date from the period of the Popol Vuh manuscript. Among

contemporary Guatemalan towns it is without rival in the degree to

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which its ceremonial life is timed according to the Mayan calendar and

mapped according to the relative elevations and directional

positions of outdoor shrines. Once each 260 days, on the day named

Eight Monkey, daykeepers converge from all over the Guatemalan

highlands for the largest of all present-day Mesoamerican ceremonies

that follow the ancient calendar. That Before the Building was already

a religious center before the fall of the Quiche kingdom is

indicated by the Nahua name that Pedro de Alvarado's Mexican-Indian

allies gave it: Momostenango, meaning "Citadel of Shrines." It was

in this town that I began my search for someone who might be able to

light my way through some of the darker passages of the Popol Vuh.

At the same time I began making sound recordings of contemporary

narratives, speeches, and prayers, looking for passages that might

resemble the Popol Vuh.

For fieldworkers in a Citadel of Shrines, visiting sacred places,

listening to prayers and chants, and learning how to reckon time

according to the continuing rhythms of the Mayan calendar can be a

dangerous business. Barbara Tedlock and I almost came to the point

of giving up our various research projects and leaving town when a

daykeeper named Andres Xiloj divined that we had not only annoyed

people at shrines but had entered the presence of these shrines

without even realizing that we must be ritually clean in order to do

so. But it was this same daykeeper, a man who is also the head of

his patrilineage, who took on the task of answering all our

inquiries about the shrines, the people who went there, the

calendar, and the process by which he had divined the nature of our

offense. One day, when we had come to the point of asking for a

detailed description of the training and initiation of daykeepers,

he dropped what seemed to be a broad hint that the best way to find

out the answer to such questions would be to undertake an actual

apprenticeship. After debating the meaning of his remarks all night,

we asked him the next day whether he had meant that he would in fact

be willing to take us on as apprentices, and he said, "Of course."

There followed four and a half months of formal training, timed

according to the Mayan calendar, that left us much more

knowledgeable than we had ever intended to be.

Diviners are, by profession, interpreters of difficult texts. They

can even start from a nonverbal sign, such as an ominous invasion of a

house by a wild animal, and arrive at a "reading," as we would say, or

ubixic, "its saying" or "its announcement," as is said in Quiche. When

they start from a verbal sign such as the name of a day on the Mayan

calendar, they may treat it as if it were a sign from a writing system

rather than a word in itself, arriving at "its saying" by finding a

different word with similar sounds. It should therefore come as no

surprise that a diviner might be willing to take on the task of

reading the Popol Vuh, whose text presents its own intriguing

difficulties of interpretation.

When Andres Xiloj was given a chance to look at the text of the

Popol Vuh, he produced a pair of spectacles and began reading aloud,

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word by word. His previous knowledge of alphabetic reading and writing

was limited to Spanish, but he was able to grasp the orthography of

the Popol Vuh text with very little help. When he was puzzled by

archaic words, I offered definitions drawn from Quiche dictionaries

compiled during the colonial period; in time, of course, he readily

recognized the more frequent archaic forms. He was never content

with merely settling on a Quiche reading of a particular passage and

then offering a simple Spanish translation; instead, he was given to

frequent interpretive asides, some of which took the form of entire

stories. In the present volume the effects of the three-way dialogue

among Andres Xiloj, the Popol Vuh text, and myself are most obvious in

the Glossary and the Notes and Comments, but they are also present

in the Introduction and throughout the translation of the Popol Vuh

itself.

My work in Guatemala took me not only to the town called Before

the Building (Momostenango), but to the ruins of Rotten Cane

(Utatlan), to the mountain called Patohil, to the pile of broken

stones at Petatayub, and to towns such as Santa Cruz Quiche, Spilt

Water (Zacualpa), Above the Nettles (Chichicastenango), Above the

Hot Springs (Totonicapan), Willow Tree (Santa Maria Chiquimula), and

Under Ten Deer (Quezaltenango). To the patron saints and earthly

spirits of all these places I pay my respects, especially to

Santiago and his scribe, San Felipe, at Momostenango; to San Juan

and to the divine Uhaal and Roz Utz stones at Agua Tibia; and above

all to Uhaal Zabal, 4huti Zabal, and Nima Zabal.

Library pilgrimages have taken me to nearby Cambridge,

Massachusetts, to the Tozzer Library at Harvard; to the National

Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

D.C.; to the Latin American libraries at Tulane in New Orleans and the

University of Texas in Austin; to the special-collections library at

Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; to the Museo Nacional de

Antropologia in Mexico City; to the Archivo General de Centroamerica

in Guatemala City; and to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I

saw, felt, smelled, and heard the rustle of the manuscript of the

Popol Vuh.

Such is the magnitude of the present project that it stretched

over nine years; except for one of these years and part of another, it

necessarily took a backseat to the countless complexities of

university life. Most of the Guatemalan fieldwork was carried out

during the summer of 1975 and throughout 1976. Much of my effort to

transform masses of research and multiple trial runs at translation

into a book was made during evenings and weekends at home, and it

was also carried on during all-too-brief retreats to such places as

Tepoztlan, south of Mexico City; Panajachel, on the shore of Lake

Atitlan in Guatemala; and in the woodlands and rocks near Cerrillos,

New Mexico, south of Santa Fe. But even when one is confined to

Massachusetts, there are ways in which the world of the Popol Vuh

makes itself felt. During the months in which I completed the

manuscript for the book you now hold in your hands, I could see

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Venus as the morning star if I looked out the window of my study early

enough.

Thinking back over my work on the Popol Vuh brings a great many

people to mind; I apologize in advance to those who should have been

remembered here but were not. Having learned my lessons about

ancestors from my Quiche master, I will begin with persons who are now

deceased. Robert Wauchope, when I first began my graduate work at

Tulane in 1961, soon became convinced that I should eventually go to

Guatemala to do archaeological fieldwork; he lived long enough to know

that fourteen years later I finally did get to Guatemala, but as an

ethnologist, linguist, and translator rather than an archaeologist. My

first lessons in how to read and interpret manuscript sources from

Spanish America were given to me by France V. Scholes in the

Coronado Library at the University of New Mexico, during the summer of

1964. He and Wauchope enjoyed full careers, but the career of Thelma

Sullivan, the finest of all scholars working with texts in the Nahuatl

language, was cut short; she stood out among Americanists in general

as one of those rare individuals who realize and demonstrate that

precision in translation is not to be confused with mechanical

literalness. Also cut short was the career of Fernando Horcasitas, who

gave a splendid lecture on Nahuatl theater one fine warm evening in

Cuernavaca when Barbara Tedlock and I were waiting for the

Guatemalan border to reopen after the great earthquake of 1976.

And then there is Abelino Zapeta y Zapeta, who in 1979 became the

first Quiche to serve as mayor of Santa Cruz Quiche in centuries. He

offered gracious words of greeting to an international conference on

the Popol Vuh that took place in his town. For the time being it

must also be said that he was the last Quiche to serve as mayor. A

year after the conference, while he was riding home from work on his

bicycle, he was assassinated by gunmen who were seen driving away in

an army jeep. The day may come when the Popol Vuh will be entirely

at home in Santa Cruz Quiche, the town where it was written, but

that day may not be soon.

Turning to those who are still living, and beginning with graduate

school, I first think of Munro S. Edmonson. I have come to disagree

with him about a great many matters affecting the Popol Vuh, as he

well knows, but I have not forgotten his seminar on the Maya at

Tulane, which I took more than twenty years ago. When he offered a

list of possible research topics to the students in that seminar, I

was the one who chose to do a class presentation and term paper on the

Popol Vuh. But my first fieldwork in anthropology took me closer to my

home in New Mexico: I went to the Zuni, who live on the northern

frontier of Mesoamerica. When it came, at long last, to doing field

research among the people whose ancestors wrote the Popol Vuh, it

was Robert M. Carmack, of the State University of New York at

Albany, who introduced Barbara Tedlock and myself to the western

highlands of Guatemala. He did this with a generosity that is rare

among ethnographers- and with a wisdom, still rarer, that led him to

abandon us to our fate once he had gotten us into the field.

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Among the people of Guatemala, I give special thanks to Andres Xiloj

Peruch, who not only traveled with me through the Quiche text of the

Popol Vuh but taught me how to read dreams, omens, and the rhythms

of the Mayan calendar. Thanks also go to his daughter Maria, who has

boundless patience and kindness; to Santiago Guix, who showed the

way down many a path; to Gustavo Lang, who offers a steady hand in any

emergency; to Lucas Pacheco Benitez, who combines a warm heart with an

intimate knowledge of the spiritual properties of stones; to Celso

Akabal, who offers genial toasts at his home near the shrine called

the Great Place of Declaration; to Vicente de Leon Abac, who knows how

the ancient customs originated; to Esteban Ajxub, who eloquently prays

and sings for others; and to Flavio Rojas Lima, who knows how to

make foreigners feel welcome at the Seminario de Integracion Social

Guatemalteca.

In matters of Native American linguistics and poetics, I am

especially thankful for more than fifteen years of unceasing

dialogue with Dell Hymes. Others who come to mind here are Allan

Burns, the first to reveal that conversation is the root of all

Mayan discourse; Lyle Campbell, who went beyond his normal duties in

providing myself and others with an introductory course in Quiche at

the State University of New York at Albany in the fall of 1975 and who

taught me the value of Cakchiquel sources; Ives Goddard, who convinced

me that even the most intractable manuscript materials on Native

American languages may conceal moments of great accuracy; T. J.

Knab, who helped me with Nahuatl loanwords in the Popol Vuh and with

Nahuatl metaphors; and James L. Mondloch, who answered some of my

questions about Quiche syntax.

In matters of ethnography, ethnohistory, and archaeology I think

of Duncan Earle, who revealed that the "mushroom head" of the Popol

Vuh is in fact an herb; Gary Gossen, who knows that in trying to

comprehend the contemporary highland Maya we are dealing with

nothing less than a civilization; Doris Heyden, the first to reveal

the full meaning of the secret cave at Teotihuacan; Alain Ichon, who

excavated the site called Thorny Place in the Popol Vuh; David H.

Kelley, who personally convinced me in far-off Calgary that classic

Maya vase paintings do indeed illustrate scenes from the Popol Vuh; J.

Jorge Klor de Alva, who knows that the "spiritual conquest" of

Mesoamerica has in fact never taken place; Linda Schele, who brought

the hieroglyphic texts of Palenque closer than ever to the Popol Vuh

at the eighth Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in Austin; and

Nathaniel Tarn, who in earlier times played the role of anthropologist

among neighbors of the Quiche and later returned as a poet.

Anthony Aveni, John B. Carlson, and Floyd G. Lounsbury have heard

out my ideas concerning the calendrical and astronomical

interpretation of the Popol Vuh. Michael D. Coe, who well knows what a

calabash tree is, not only provided welcome praise for the translation

but generously permitted the use of the vase drawings reproduced here.

Peter T. Furst and Jill Leslie Furst are steady friends who can be

counted upon to do unexpected things, like raising toads, cooking

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