Cap 2 Translator Traitor

Reading Popol Wuj
Henne, Nathan C.
Published by University of Arizona Press
Henne, Nathan C.
Reading Popol Wuj: A Decolonial Guide.
University of Arizona Press, 2020.
Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/73787.
For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73787
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CHAPTER T WO
Traitor Translator?
Foregrounding the Act of Translation
La traducción es el arte del fracaso.

Translation is the art of failure.
—Umberto Eco
Beim Übersetzen muss man bis ins Unübersetzbare gehen; erst dann wird man sich der fremden
Nation und der fremden Sprache bewusst.
When translating one must get right up to (and attempt to enter) the untranslatable; only then
can one become aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.
—Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
T he title for this chapter, “Traitor Translator?,” is taken from an ironic contradiction
that many translators have pointed to over the years in commenting on the frustrating
trade-offs that are necessary to carry out any translation. The inevitable “treachery” of
the translator is made transparent in the closely related etymology of the Latin words traditore
(traitor) and traduttore (translator). The resulting anguished pun reflects the inherent cost of
translation: a certain inevitable betrayal in the act of translation is laid bare by the way that
Latin juxtaposes this etymological kinship.
Every translation is bound to confront complications, and of course Popol Wuj is no excep-
tion. That’s because the act of translation involves making a long series of necessary choices,
some of which inevitably take the translation a step further from its original cultural context
in order to keep it closer to that culture in other ways. These complications are even more
pronounced when the translation attempts to bridge a gap between two cultures and languages
that developed and evolved for millennia with absolutely no contact between them, like Maya
and European cultures did. What’s more, the catastrophic nature of Contact between these
cultures and the subsequent imbalance of power in the centuries that followed complicate the
exchange even more. The decolonial project in the Americas is thus never far from the act of
42 CHAPTER TWO
translation because it seeks to identify how colonial power has dictated the basic ground—the
language and the interpretive framework—on which translation takes place.
At the same time, the act of translation can invigorate the reading process, especially in the
case of literature. The best literature is always already working to expose the spaces between
words—always already trying to articulate what is inarticulable precisely in the words them-
selves. In this book we will take advantage of the complications of translation in order to
identify the friction among different translations of Popol Wuj and use that friction to peer
beyond the boundaries of what can be expressed precisely in English (and to a certain degree
in Spanish) as a language that developed and evolved out the human experience of navigating
certain spaces and thus making places out of them.
Of course, saying that certain things cannot be expressed precisely in English or Spanish is
not the same thing as saying that they cannot be expressed in these languages. Neither is it to
say that K’iche’ is somehow the so-called “language of God” (Walter Benjamin characterizes
it as the only totalizing language because “[t]he absolute relation of name to knowledge exists
only in God” in his direct creation through word in Genesis [68]). K’iche’—like English, Span-
ish, and every other language—has its own boundaries in terms of what it can express precisely;
they’re just different boundaries. There is no doubt that those boundaries dictate to a certain
extent the underlying principles of a culture’s philosophy. Because we’re trying to understand
Popol Wuj on its own terms, we’ll focus mostly on how the space between translations from
K’iche’ to English/Spanish can aid in the struggle to avoid adopting culturally overriding phil-
osophical principles to stand in for K’iche’ words that resist precise expression. But the same is
true of the inverse, and for the same reason: English and Spanish developed and evolved out
of and with other sets of human experiences, navigating other spaces and subsequently making
places out of them through language. Even those languages cannot express these experiences
precisely, which is what makes literature itself indispensable; it is the continued struggle to
express a fraction of that which language alone cannot. K’iche’ suffers similar inadequacy when
it is the receiving, rather than the donating, language. However, an important difference is that
the academy is built on the poetics (thus philosophies) of Indo-European languages, and the
consequences of the myth of objectivity are farther-reaching as a result.1
The complications at the root of the act of translation are the productive seed of the com-
parative translation method in this book, and they provide a gateway to a deeper and wider
understanding of Popol Wuj. The friction among translations that grows out of the ultimate
inexpressibility of certain cultural visions great and small is the opportunity for an expanded
understanding. I repeat this point here because my critiques of each of the thirteen transla-
tions we’ll use in the book can sound like purely negative criticism, which is not the objective.
Understanding the context out of which each of these translators and translations grew, and
the inherent advantages and complications therein, is simply an opportunity to see that an
objective vantage point for translation is impossible. But here those differences in background,
ideology, and motives serve a positive function because these differences give readers a glimpse
into the spaces that lie in between.
The most common question about Popol Wuj I get from potential readers, teachers, and
students of all kinds is: “Which translation of Popol Wuj is the best?” My short answer to that
question is Tedlock’s for English and Sam Colop’s for Spanish. But really, to me that question
TRAITOR TRANSLATOR? 43
should be about getting closest to the content in the way the K’iche’ intended, not about obtain-
ing the smoothest reading experience in one’s native language. And if that’s the goal, the short
answer won’t do.
My answer to that question has gotten longer and more convoluted over the years as I’ve
come to know these translations better and better. The best answer is that no one translation
can do that (adhere to the K’iche’ faithfully); a reader should read a few different versions (at
the very least two) and think about the differences among/between them in order to be able
to imagine what Popol Wuj might have been in the K’iche’ context and worldview five hundred
years ago (and that’s what the materials in this book are designed to help readers do). Obviously
though, a reader or teacher does need to choose one main translation as the base text to be able
to appreciate the natural trajectory of the narrative in Popol Wuj. Which translation to use as
that text depends to a certain degree on the context and goals of the reading. The sketches of
each translation’s advantages and disadvantages below can help each reader choose according to
her own particular context and goals. These sketches can also help prepare readers to participate
actively in the translation comparisons in the following chapters.
This chapter provides an introduction to the translations, their relative strengths, weaknesses,
ideological (and disciplinary) slants, and the differences among them. What’s more, this over-
view of these thirteen translations foregrounds the act of translation and the many complica-
tions any translator/translation must confront, especially in a case like this, where the transfer
from one language to another requires a leap across more substantial divides in philosophies
and cultures, due to the particular history of sustained isolation, followed by the sudden and in
many ways catastrophic clash of the European and American peoples.2
An Overview of the Thirteen Translations Used in This Book
The comparative translation method that provides the backbone for the decolonial reading
exercises in this book required choosing a set of translations that could adequately represent
the more than forty translations to English and Spanish that have been published. I’ve chosen
thirteen that I think fairly represent what’s out there. These thirteen include: the most widely
distributed and used in English and Spanish, the ones I find to be the best, and a few that
round out the field because of significant differences in funding, motives, or methods. In this
chapter I provide a thumbnail of each translation as a unique way to complete the introduc-
tory material to this book. It makes the most sense to divide these thirteen translations into
three groups in terms of the translators’ backgrounds and resulting ideologies/methodologies:
1) those translated by priests/missionaries/others who had direct associations with Christian
churches; 2) those translated by anthropologists/scholars from outside of Guatemala; and 3)
those translated by native K’iche’ speakers.3 These categories overlap to a certain extent. For
example, in some cases native speakers of K’iche’ are credited as co-authors with others who
fit into one of the first two categories.4 In other cases the K’iche’ authors have been trained as
anthropologists. In still others, the anthropologist-translator is also a literary scholar or writer.
Or the missionary is also intellectually trained. Or the academic is a devout believer in a par-
ticular religion. Obviously these categories are not going to break cleanly.
44 CHAPTER TWO
Although some of the following comments are critical, I need to reemphasize the fact that,
given the different cultural contexts in which the natural languages developed, no one transla-
tion can carry over the philosophical underpinnings of all the concepts in Popol Wuj; it is only
in the spaces between these translations that we can see where the K’iche’ concepts might lie.
Therefore, these critiques are meant to orient the reader for the translation comparisons ahead
and to help readers make their own decisions based on the context and purpose of their reading.
In our case, all the translations are enlightening—regardless of any weaknesses—because they
add nuance to our understanding through the comparative translation method; they help us
trace the contour of what happens when these K’iche’ concepts are converted to Indo-European
languages in the context of centuries of intellectual colonialism. I point out some particular
biases of which we need to be aware in each of these translations; however, we all have biases
that affect how we approach this or any text. The particular biases I point out with each of the
categories and translators below are not arrogantly construed. Each bias I talk about below can
serve as an example of the many different ways that colonial reading practices still hide in our
approaches to Indigenous texts today. I, like everyone else, need to constantly reevaluate my
own reading practice and look at others’ critiques of other aspects of reading to continue to
root out colonial biases that linger as a result of my own cultural and academic backgrounds.
Category One: Translators Affiliated with Western Religions

(Catholic, Protestant/Evangelical, Mormon)
Missionary bias is the most common charge brought against translators of Popol Wuj, mostly
because our oldest extant copy of Popol Wuj comes to us through the hands of a Spanish priest
during the colonial period, when the Church was an indispensable ally in many objectives of
the colonial government. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that without Ximénez’s
intellectual curiosity and brave constitution, we probably wouldn’t have any Popol Wuj at all.
In fact, almost all missionaries I’ve met or read about have admirable qualities that separate
them in some ways from the wider population. In general, they are brave people who are deeply
committed to their beliefs and willing to act on their convictions. Some are also committed to
trying to preserve certain Indigenous cultural values, like language and other customs.
However, the fact remains that a missionary’s main reasons for being among the Indigenous
people of Guatemala in the first place run counter to the philosophical core of the belief sys-
tem that produced Popol Wuj. A missionary is ultimately there to propagate a totalizing belief
system that, at best, implicitly denies the validity of the cosmogony and worldview expressed in
Popol Wuj, and, at worst, actively seeks to label it as evil and directly opposed to God’s principles.
Therefore, no matter how much the missionary validates other cultural values of the Indigenous
people of Guatemala, his ultimate motivation to dismantle and replace a central belief that
formed an important part of the historical foundation for K’iche’ worldview must, at least in
some way, color the translation. As we’ll see, the missionary’s unshakeable belief in the totality
of a single and specifically defined God and his ultimate control over all things does not fit
with the philosophy expressed in Popol Wuj.5 As K’iche’ activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
(1992) Rigoberta Menchú puts it,
Los curas, los sacerdotes, las monjas, no han podido ganar la confianza del indígena
porque hay ciertas cosas que contradicen nuestras propias costumbres. . . . Entonces se
pierde la confianza en los curas y los indígenas dicen, “es que son extranjeros, ni conocen
nuestro mundo.” (Menchú and Burgos 29–30)
The clergymen, the priests, the nuns, have not been able to gain the confidence of
the Indigenous person because [with these church representatives] there are certain
things that contradict our own customs / belief systems. . . . So confidence is lost in
the priests and the Indigenous people say, “it’s that they’re foreigners, they don’t know
our world.”6
Francisco Ximénez (Spanish, circa 1701–3 [1857])

Padre Francisco Ximénez, a Spanish Dominican priest, was the first translator of Popol Wuj.
He copied the K’iche’ text from an earlier manuscript and then translated it into Spanish
between 1701 and 1703 in Chichicastenango (Siguan Tinamit / Santo Tomás Chuilá) in the
department of Quiché in the Guatemalan highlands.7 He had been immersed in K’iche’ and
its fairly close relative Kaqchikel for about ten years in his job as priest of a few different
churches in rural seventeenth-century Guatemala before he started his translation of Popol
Wuj. Over the years he had taken a keen interest in these languages, and by all accounts he was
a natural language student. He wrote prolifically about Maya language grammar, especially
the closely related languages of K’iche’, Tzutujil, and Kaqchikel, and he also wrote histories
of the Maya peoples of Guatemala and Chiapas. In some of these histories he spoke out
against the abusive treatment of Indigenous people by Spanish authorities, including by his
superior, Bishop Toledo (Martínez Baracs 257).
Still, Ximénez’s position as a proselytizing priest with the mission of bringing the Indige-
nous people into the belief system of the Catholic Church certainly affected his reception of
the content of Popol Wuj and his subsequent translation.8 As Néstor Quiroa puts it, Ximénez
“undertook his work explicitly to refute Maya-K’iche’ religious idolatry” (“The Popol Vuh”
468). In his prologue to the Adrián Inés Chávez translation, Guatemalan sociologist Carlos
Guzmán Böckler lays bare the inevitable relationship between Catholicism and the colonial
project: Ximénez was a friar, and “por lo tanto el portador y difusor de una cosmogonía extraña
que pretendía suplantar el pensamiento ancestral americano por un sistema de creencias que,
a la postre, no eran otra cosa que el pilar ideológico que sustentaba a la dominación y a la
explotación del sistema colonial español” (as such he was carrier and diffuser of a foreign
cosmogony that was striving to supplant ancestral American thought with a system of beliefs
that, at the end of the day, was none other than the ideological pillar that supported the domi-
nation and exploitation of the Spanish colonial system) (xx). Carlos M. López uses Ximénez’s
prologue to show that, ultimately, the priest believed that Popol Wuj (and all Indigenous cos-
mogony) was “una prueba irrefutable del error y el engaño de Satán” (irrefutable proof of the
misguidedness and the deception of Satan) (“Nuevos aportes” 129). The relationship between
the Spanish colonial project and the Catholic Church certainly cannot be overlooked, especially
when Ximénez did his translation when Guatemala was still under the direct colonial rule of
46 CHAPTER TWO
the Spanish crown and cross. Still, we owe Ximénez a great debt. Without him we probably
wouldn’t have a version anything like this of Popol Wuj. Nonetheless, it is important to be aware
of his particular biases.
Dora M. de Burgess / Patricio Xec Cuc (Spanish, 1955)

Like Padre Ximénez, Dora Burgess was a foreign missionary sent to Guatemala, but unlike
him, she was sent from the United States and was Protestant (Presbyterian). Since she was a
missionary, her translation shares some similar ideological complications with that of Ximénez.
However, she too provided some important contributions in the trajectory of the translation
and study of Popol Wuj.
Dora Burgess and her husband, Paul, were sent to Guatemala by the Presbyterian Church
in the United States in 1912. They were among the first extended wave of Evangelical mis-
sionaries to go to Guatemala as the result of a formal invitation in 1882 from Justo Rufino
Barrios, the liberal dictator, who was interested in diminishing the power of the Catholic
Church in postindependence Guatemala.9 The Burgesses took a special interest in the K’iche’
language and culture, rather than just serving the German- and Spanish-speaking populations
in the Xela region as the Presbyterian Church had directed. They went against the wishes
of the church and began to devote their missionary activities to K’iche’-speaking people.
At the time, the prevailing wisdom (both in government and in other organizations) was
for Guatemala to assimilate its Indigenous peoples thoroughly into Westernized, Spanish-
speaking (ladino) culture. This thorough assimilation would solve “el problema indígena” (the
Indigenous problem)—as Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias infamously
called it—wherein indigeneity was seen as an impediment to modernization of the country
and to the best interests of the Indigenous people themselves. Most missionary groups active
in Guatemala at the time agreed with this strategy and pushed to assimilate the Indigenous
peoples (Samson 59).
By contrast, the Burgesses made some of the earliest concerted efforts by Protestant mis-
sionaries to reach out to the K’iche’ people by learning the K’iche’ language and translating
the New Testament into it. To do so, the Burgesses developed the first modern written form
for K’iche’. It was not entirely different from the system the Spanish priests had adopted
from the Spanish alphabet during the colonial period—the same one Ximénez had used—but
the Burgesses did make significant changes. They published their K’iche’ New Testament in
1947, and then Dora turned her efforts to a new project. She worked with a local K’iche’ man,
Patricio Xec Cuc, who had been one of the early converts to Protestantism in the Xela (Quet-
zaltenango) area and had studied at the Instituto Bíblico Quiché, an institute the Burgesses
had established to train K’iche’ people to take up the work of the Protestant mission, including
literacy initiatives in rural areas.10 In their introduction to their translation, Burgess and Xec
say that the Burgesses found the Ximénez manuscript in the Newberry Library when they saw
the information in a German encyclopedia in 1946 (xi). But as we’ll see below, either Adrián
Recinos or Leonhard Schultze-Jena had already unearthed that manuscript in 1941; Schultze-
Jena’s translation based on that copy came out in 1944, and Recinos’s came out in 1947, eight
years before the Xec/Burgess translation.
In the decolonial context, it is particularly significant that Xec is the first person who spoke
K’iche’ as a first language to be given credit on the cover of a Popol Wuj translation as a co-
translator. Xec’s work on the translation as something other than a language consultant—who
would have been thanked in the introduction but not credited on the cover as an equal with
the Western translator—gave this version an important legitimacy. It is also significant that
Xec and Burgess published their Popol Wuj as a bilingual text. Everything, including the new
introduction and other supplementary material, is written in K’iche’ and then in Spanish on the
facing page. The idea was to give K’iche’ people access to their own book in their own language,
using the modern orthography, for the very first time. Publishing material in K’iche’ was an
important step since there was almost no non-Christian material in K’iche’ available for the
(still relatively few) newly literate K’iche’ people of this generation. This publication renewed
the K’iche’ status as literary producers rather than just receivers of translated Western literature.
It was the first time in centuries that Popol Wuj was produced by and for K’iche’ people, who
had had such a deep literary tradition before Contact. These factors are important in light of
the general criticism I have levied against purveyors of totalizing belief systems, ideologies that
otherwise complicate the translation process and resulting product.
Allen J. Christenson (English, idiomatic translation

2003, literal translation 2004)
Including Christenson in this category was a difficult decision for me since Christenson is
certainly an academic scholar who has spent considerable time in K’iche’ communities in
Guatemala. He speaks K’iche’ and performs research according to the accepted principles of
anthropology. Certainly an academic researcher can have his own personal religious beliefs
that don’t fundamentally affect how he translates Popol Wuj. However, Mormons make very
specific historical claims—both in scripture and in current common doctrine and practice—
about the provenance of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints and Brigham Young University (BYU, where Christenson teaches) insist
that the academic process align with the fundamental beliefs of that faith, which complicates
this translation in unique ways. All BYU faculty have to sign an honor code that binds them
to the principles of the Mormon faith. In addition, the Academic Freedom Policy dictates that
faculty (and students) “pursue knowledge in the light of the restored gospel as taught by The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”11
This affiliation is especially distorting here because the Mormon faith insists that the Indig-
enous peoples of the Americas descended directly from the Hebrew race (specifically from
Noah, Judah, and Joseph) and left the Middle East for the New World hundreds of years before
Christ (Carmack et al. 22). This history would mean that Indigenous worldviews descended
directly from the Judaic scripture tradition ideologically and philosophically. While a translator
certainly can maintain a personal religious faith and still translate effectively, it’s hard to see how
an expressed belief in the Book of Mormon’s outright claims about the Indigenous peoples of
the Americas wouldn’t affect how someone translated Popol Wuj. Because Mormons believe that
Indigenous peoples in the Americas are the lost thirteenth tribe of Israel, Indigenous cultures
would be directly related to the foundation of Western culture (and would be subservient to
48 CHAPTER TWO
God’s old covenant with the Jews). Mormons also believe that Jesus appeared to the Indigenous
peoples of the Americas two thousand years ago, which would also make Popol Wuj a cultural
offspring of the New Testament gospel).12
If, against all prevailing evidence, this story were true, Popol Wuj would actually have grown
out of the Judaic creation myth and out of the perceived singular truth of Yahweh. In addition,
it would have been directly influenced by the teachings of Jesus Christ. In short it would have
to be a philosophical relative of Judaism and Christianity. Such a relationship is inevitably colo-
nial and would require that Popol Wuj be subservient to the Torah and the Bible. The epitome
of a colonial reading is to see and interpret everything from within the logic of the dominant
culture. Such a relationship can’t help but affect, at least on some level, the interpretation of the
difficult, archaic K’iche’ of Popol Wuj. For example, as we’ll see in chapter 3, how certain words
and phrases are translated in the “creation” scene in Popol Wuj can seriously affect how much
the Maya K’iche’ scene does or does not mirror the creation scene in Genesis. If Christenson
believes, like the Book of Mormon claims, that the Indigenous intellectual tradition is actually
historically related to—and even a direct offshoot of—the Torah, such a reading of the creation
scene would be natural, even expected.
Christenson’s work on Popol Wuj has many positive aspects and, depending on the goals
of the reader, can still contribute to understanding certain aspects of Popol Wuj. For example,
his treatment of the poetic forms of K’iche’ are enlightening; he shows the difference between
chiasmus and couplets in terms of the poetics of K’iche and gives specific examples from Popol
Wuj. His footnotes come out of his extensive ethnographic work in the highlands of Guatemala
and can be very helpful. Among other K’iche’ consultants, he especially credits Vicente de León
Abac, “who, with patience and kindness, guided [him] through the complexity and poetry of
K’iche’ theology and ceremonialism” (idiomatic 12). To me, the most positive aspects of Chris-
tenson’s committed dedication to the work of the immense translation project he undertook
are: 1) that, in addition to his idiomatic version of Popol Wuj in English, he also provided a
searchable literal version, where a reader can see how some of the phrases that might be of
particular interest are actually structured in the original K’iche’; and 2) that he has made both
of his versions available for free on Mesoweb: www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson
/PopolVuh.pdf and www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PV-Literal.pdf. Christen-
son has also provided another useful tool for anyone interested in further research on Popol Wuj.
His K’iche’/English dictionary is available for free at the Foundation for the Advancement
of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI) website: http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary
/christenson/quidic_complete.pdf.
Category Two: Translators Trained as Academics

(both in and out of Guatemala)
The translators in this category are different from the ones in the first category because they
are primarily academics, though all the translators in the previous category were certainly
academics in some ways, too. That is not to say, of course, that the translators in this section
are objective and lack any biases because they are academics. They have different kinds of biases
we should keep in mind. Jacques Derrida famously showed how this academic bias still leads
to a certain “violence” in anthropology that he calls “the anthropological war,” defined as “the
essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures, even when
that communication is not practiced under the banner of colonial or missionary oppression”
(107). Anthropology rips words, phrases, ideas, and concepts from the context in which they
evolved in order to explain them within a system that evolved separately.
All the translators in this section are trained as anthropologists. The most important aca-
demic bias to be aware of in this case is related to the structuralist underpinnings of anthro-
pology as a social science that, ironically enough, actually grew out of an attempt to fix the
fundamental bias of religious translators.
Structuralism developed in the academy as a way to avoid judging cultures based on the
Western values of the academy or on the academic’s own personal beliefs. These social sciences
attempted to achieve an objective perspective on different cultures’ rituals and religions by
approaching them simply as social structures that are fundamentally necessary to allow a large
society (any society, including Western societies) to coalesce and remain united despite indi-
vidual difference. The structuralists made a concerted effort to replace the previous value judg-
ments about, for example, whether a religion was monotheistic (and thus “civilized”) or poly-
theistic (and thus “primitive”). To achieve this, academics attempted to approach all religions
(Western or other) in the same, objective way: as fundamental systems of ritual that evolved
to instill and enforce shared beliefs and actions conducive to overcoming the tendency—the
instinctive drive—to fracture into smaller groups. That fracturing had been necessary in earlier
ages for survival because of limited resources in a particular area. However, the development
of agriculture (among other resource technologies) meant that more people could live within
a given area, and that this tendency or instinct needed to be modified since more people in
a group meant more power. As a result, according to a structuralist view, religion—instilled
and continually reinforced by shared ritual—was simply a necessary structure (one of several
necessary structures) that arose in all societies in order to facilitate that development.
The structuralist approach to anthropology was helpful in many ways because it allowed
structuralists to avoid making the value judgments that almost invariably deemed the rituals of
Indigenous people as pagan and thus primitive in comparison with those of Western civiliza-
tion.13 Structuralism would allow anthropologists to evaluate the function of the religious/ritual
structure in a society without making judgments about the particular beliefs, thus achieving a
different level of objectivity that could satisfy the demands of anthropology as a science. Struc-
turalism was embraced in the academy and dominated research methodologies, theories, and
interpretations in several different disciplines for well more than half of the twentieth century.
In the latter part of the century, however, some anthropologists began to recognize the dan-
gers of structuralism—most importantly that the basic structures underlying the structuralist
approach are invariably determined in and by the Western intellectual tradition and inevitably
condition (culturally distort) the categories themselves. Visionary anthropologists have made
a concerted effort to move away from structuralism, but they haven’t been entirely successful
even to this day. That’s because, to justify calling itself a science, anthropology must establish
a completely objective, culture-free, point of inquiry to make objective and verifiable claims.
But post-structural anthropologists realize it’s impossible to extract inquiries about culture
50 CHAPTER TWO
completely from the cultural traditions (i.e., biases) they grew out of because the supposedly
value-free structures themselves are determined by people (the anthropologists) who, try as they
might, simply cannot completely extract themselves from the intellectual and cultural trajec-
tory that formed their own intellectual processes. Neither can anyone else in any other culture
remove herself completely from the trajectory of which she is inherently a part. Thinking is
inevitably cultural because the process of growing into thinking is informed by basic cultural
institutions. While it’s possible to recognize and compensate for—even to unlearn—many of
the ways that culture colors our thinking, it’s not possible to undo the trajectory that made our
thinking process in the first place. That means that it’s impossible to step completely outside
of that way of thinking and be able to distinguish every place it is infused by culturally deter-
mined processes.
Despite the fact that anthropologists themselves are aware of this catch-22 and are con-
stantly working to find ways to achieve an objective vantage point, they have not been able to
do so (because of the inherent verifiability mandate of the social sciences). That’s why we need
to be aware of underlying bias in their translations. This bias can be hard to see sometimes
precisely because a structuralist view is a very important part of the underlying foundation of
liberal humanism. In fact, in the classroom I find that a basic structuralist view persists as the
default among my university students today, who (desperately?) want to believe that “We’re all
the same! Why can’t we just get along?” In today’s expanding multicultural contexts (includ-
ing—or perhaps especially—in mass media or social media contexts), the liberal humanist
strategy to forge tolerance is founded on a structuralist ideal. By adopting the idea, for example,
that we should be able (at least from a distance) to accept that God, Allah, Yahweh, and so on
could serve as different cultural names for similar beings, the modern liberal student can let go
of some of her belief in the superiority of certain notions as instilled in her by various cultural
mechanisms and, consequently, open up more humbly to the inherent reality of cultural bias.
So, why not just add the deities in Popol Wuj to this category and thus gain the ability to read
Popol Wuj from a decolonial perspective? This move is an impactful moment in many young
people’s lives that signifies an opening out to the world, a major shift in their worldviews. And
that’s the good side of a structuralist approach to other cultures.
But this structuralist approach also carries with it a hidden danger that perpetuates the
intellectual colonialism it seeks to avoid. For example, if someone generously suspends his cul-
turally derived value judgments and adds Popol Wuj deities to the list of these religious deities,
what characteristics about Popol Wuj deities is he automatically (and completely uncritically)
assuming? Yahweh, Allah, and God are hierarchically superior to all other realms of beings. Is
this true of the deities in Popol Wuj? That is, does this supposedly objective, culture-free struc-
tural category for deity subconsciously imply a hierarchical order that might not apply in the
cultural category assigned to that structure in Maya thought? If a reader uncritically assumes
this implied hierarchical order among the realms of being in the cosmogony of Popol Wuj, how
will this assumption condition her subsequent reading practice? We will critically examine
that hierarchical assumption and uncover how it distorts Popol Wuj in chapters 3 and 5. In both
cases we’ll see that not all of our social scientist translators are equally up to the task in terms
of being aware of and compensating for this bias in their translations. Some—and it’s worth
mentioning Dennis Tedlock by name here—have made great strides and have come up with
innovative ways to avoid some of the most common misleading equivalencies that stem from
structuralist translations. Nonetheless, we will see in the exercises below that this bias tends
to creep its way into all these translations at some point. A reader will be well served to train
herself to be on the lookout for this particular bias.
The translations are arranged chronologically in the following section. It should not come
as a surprise that a structuralist bias is more prominent in the older translations.
Miguel Ángel Asturias / J. M. González de Mendoza

(Spanish, 1927)
Miguel Ángel Asturias is, without a doubt, the most renowned Guatemalan literary figure
worldwide. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, and he is credited by several critics
as having been instrumental in the development of magic realism, the literary mode (some say
genre) that launched Latin American literature into the consciousness of nonexpert readers in
the West. Though Gabriel García Márquez’s work (especially One Hundred Years of Solitude)
actually ignited economically what is called the Boom, many critics see a substantial Asturias
influence in Márquez’s work and often point to Asturias as pioneering some of the important
techniques that would go on to fuel the magic realist mode. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that
Asturias won the Nobel Prize in 1967, the year that One Hundred Years of Solitude came out.
Asturias’s unique literary voice was influenced in no small way by his exposure to the aes-
thetics, substance, and worldview of Maya storytelling in his childhood, some of which was
spent in a rural area of Guatemala (Salamá in the department of Baja Verapaz), where his
family suffered internal exile because of its opposition to the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera.
An Achí woman (Maya language/culture) was a servant in the house of his grandparents
there, and she would tell him stories and legends from her culture, which was his first direct
exposure to the kind of content he would find in Popol Wuj. To carry out his translation, he
collaborated with J. M. González de Mendoza, a Mexican who was a fellow student in a class
on anthropology and Maya civilization, which he studied under anthropologist Georges Ray-
naud at the Sorbonne in Paris starting in 1923. Raynaud had translated Popol Wuj to French,
and Asturias and González worked directly from his translation to render theirs in Spanish.
Asturias was the first person born and raised in Guatemala to complete a formal translation
of Popol Wuj that reached a significant number of people, but he was a ladino in what was a
racially stratified society.14 His exposure to Indigenous people and their literary aesthetic (sto-
rytelling) was primarily through the Indigenous servants who helped raise him when he was a
child. The colonial aspect of that relationship should at least be noted. Another complication
that has dogged Asturias’s reputation is the title of the thesis he wrote to complete his law
degree: “The Social Problem of the Indian” (1923). This title and project have made him the
target of accusations of racism, though the word problem in the title is often misunderstood,
especially in translation, as though indigeneity itself were the problem and not the complica-
tions of its clashes with the modern nation-state’s demand for a singular Guatemalan identity.
It seems clear to me that Asturias was genuinely concerned about the welfare of Indigenous
people under the semifeudal finca system in Guatemala, where the Indigenous people were vir-
tual slaves for months out of the year. His thesis was concerned with how to forge a meaningful
52 CHAPTER TWO
place for Indigenous people in a modern nation-state from both an economic and a legal per-
spective. While it certainly includes some troublesome notions of positivism, it was genuinely
progressive for the time (the beginning of the twentieth century) and should be judged as such
despite its perceived problems when we look back at it a hundred years later.15
Much more relevant to me, in terms of the weaknesses of this translation, is the fact that
Asturias and González translated from Raynaud’s French translation of the Popol Wuj and not
directly from the original K’iche’. Georges Raynaud’s French translation, Les dieux, les héros
et les hommes de l’ancien Guatemala d’aprés le Livre du Consei, gets high marks from scholars
because he corrected many errors in Brasseur de Bourbourg’s original 1861 French translation
and because he was an academic (not a man of the Church like Brasseur de Bourbourg).
Still, the idea that a Spanish translation should come through this French translation rather
than directly from the K’iche’ clearly introduces other significant (and ultimately colonial)
problems.
Working under the principles and tutelage of the avant-garde surrealists in Paris (Georges
Raynaud directly, but surrealist theory in general) has its positive and negative points. For
Asturias, it was a way to break away from the Western models that perpetuated colonial mind-
sets by deemphasizing logic as the foundation of analysis of cultures and their myths. “What
surrealism did, as Asturias decodes, was to offer a way of seeing that countered colonial logic
and this was a forceful validation upon which to form postcolonial critiques” (Brough-Evans
46). While surrealism may have freed Asturias in some ways, it was firmly based on emerging
European ideas of the Self in the Freudian model of the subject and its mark on the develop-
ment of culture/myth. As such, surrealism still depends on a European intellectual model. As
Louise Tythacott puts it, Raynaud and the surrealists in Paris “were caught within the ideo-
logical framework of their time and naively reproduced some of the conventional stereotypes
of the primitive” (Brough-Evans 46). A European point of view about how Maya myth both
grew out of and helped (re)produce Maya poetics and philosophy certainly marks Asturias’
translation.
For me, though, Asturias and González’s translation has a quality that endures because its
main translator was a great writer and had grown up around Indigenous poetics: this Popol
Wuj has several isolated literary phrasings that shine in Spanish and capture the poetics of the
original K’iche’ at the same time. In many sections it is a beautiful read, despite the fact that
it was not translated directly from the K’iche’. Furthermore, the influence of the surrealist
movement helped Asturias move off of the positivist trajectory he had demonstrated in his
thesis.16 Still, while the surrealists’ central belief in primitivism may have been motivated by a
desire to erase the colonial relationship between European and non-European art, it has many
of the same problems as structuralism described above. Most importantly, while it celebrates
the primitive, it does so in much the same way that the idea of the noble savage celebrated
the Indigenous, which obviously introduces serious complications to Asturias’s perspective on
Maya literature.
In the end, Asturias and Gonzalez’s translation is the most lyrically beautiful in Spanish,
and some of the decisions that they made were far ahead of their time. It is valuable both as
a primary reading text (in a literature class in Spanish, for example) and as a partner in the
comparative translation exercises below.
José Antonio Villacorta Calderón / Flavio Rodas N.

(Spanish, 1927 [revised 1961])
The translation of Popol Wuj by José Antonio Villacorta Calderón and Flavio Rodas N. was
first published in the same year as Asturias and Gonzalez’s translation, but it was taken from
Gavarrete’s copy of the second Ximénez version. This version is significant because it was
the first translation to Spanish done directly from the K’iche’ by an academic who explicitly
credited a K’iche’ speaker as an important collaborator in the translation project. Villacorta,
the academic, worked from Brasseur de Bourbourg’s transcription of the K’iche’ transcription
that was done by Ximénez, and he credited Rodas (from the K’iche’ town of Chichicastenango,
where the manuscript was found) for his work (7). That credit appears only in the prologue of
the 1961 version, not on the cover or the title page, though Villacorta had apparently shared
credit with Rodas openly since the time of the earlier 1927 publication date (“Adrian Recinos”).
A method similar to the comparative translation method we’ll be using in this book was first
employed for Popol Wuj by Villacorta and Rodas, who revised their original 1927 translation by
comparing the differences among five foreign translations: Ximénez’s, Raynaud’s, and Brasseur
de Bourbourg’s (all mentioned above), as well as two German translations we won’t treat here.
The Villacorta/Rodas version also lines up the K’iche’ text and Spanish translation word for
word so that the reader can see the exact K’iche’ word (sometimes with confusing orthography,
punctuation, and other spacing) alongside the chosen word in Spanish.
Adrián Recinos (Spanish, 1947)

Adrián Recinos was also a Guatemalan (born in Antigua) and a contemporary of Villacorta
(both of them born a couple of decades before Asturias), but Recinos didn’t publish his Spanish-
language translation of Popol Wuj until several decades after Asturias/González and Villacorta/
Rodas. Most people credit Recinos with unearthing the original Ximénez manuscript in the
Newberry Library in 1941 (Quiroa, “Friar Francisco” 258–59), though they do so because of a
line in Recinos’s introduction that doesn’t actually seem to claim this responsibility.17 In fact,
Recinos gives credit to a German Mayanist scholar, Leonhard Schultze-Jena, for having found
first a photocopy of the Ximénez manuscript and then the location of the Ximénez original in
the Newberry, though it’s unclear whether Schultze-Jena went to the library and accessed it
himself or just told Recinos, who subsequently did.
Schultze-Jena let Recinos know of his discovery while Recinos was in the United States, and
Recinos came out with a new translation directly from the K’iche’ as Ximénez had copied it.
Before Recinos found the Ximénez manuscript, all translations had been done from Brasseur
de Bourbourg’s copy of Ximénez’s copy of the 1550s K’iche’ copy. Because, by contrast, Recinos
and his collaborators could see Ximénez’s copy of the 1550s K’iche’ copy (and not just Ximénez’s
translation or Brasseur de Bourbourg’s transcription of Ximénez’s K’iche’), they were able to
leave out both the editorial comments of Ximénez and the peculiar additions of Brasseur de
Bourbourg.
Recinos must have had a native K’iche’ speaker as a collaborator, though he never mentions
this arrangement. He was a ladino, and he would not have spoken K’iche’ (even if he hadn’t been
54 CHAPTER TWO
a ladino) because he was from Antigua, a Kaqchikel-speaking area. Though Kaqchikel is fairly
closely related to K’iche’, it is not the same language. When Recinos put out the translation
of another K’iche’ text, El título de Totonicapán, three years later, he credited the translation of
the K’iche’ part of the work to Dionisio José Chonay and only took credit for the introduction
and the notes. Though Recinos was trained as a lawyer, he considered himself to be a historian
(rather than an anthropologist proper). Still, as a historian at that time, he seems—from his
introduction and other publications—to have believed that his position was objective and that
as an academic he was capable of transferring the K’iche’ ideas to Spanish without significant
loss. He was clearly influenced by the positivism that swept Latin America in the nineteenth
century as part of liberal reforms, and his interest in Indigenous cultures reflects a certain nos-
talgia rather than a belief in the independent validity of alternative ways of being. Many schol-
ars in Guatemala still cite Recino’s Popol Wuj as the most accurate, and his importance cannot
be overstated in terms of bringing Popol Wuj into the mainstream consciousness in Guatemala.
Delia Goetz / Sylvanus Griswold Morley (English, 1950)

Sylvanus Griswold Morley and Delia Goetz were the first to publish a proper and complete
translation of Popol Wuj to English (as opposed to the previous rather loose paraphrases). It’s
somewhat surprising that this publication date, 1950, occurs so late because the U.S. academic
community had led the way in many senses in recovering and rehabilitating the archaeological
remains of ancient Maya cultures. However, those academics didn’t know at the time the extent
to which the contents of Popol Wuj, which was found quite far away from any of the major
archaeological sites, had so much crossover with the content of many hieroglyphic inscriptions
and thus could help fill in the blanks in the difficult decipherment process. Morley was a classic
crossover archeologist: he certainly got elbow deep in the dirt (as opposed to so-called armchair
anthropologists, who spent very little time in the field), but he was also academically trained
and produced top-notch scholarship for the time. Conducting fieldwork—or even just getting
to the sites—was a complicated proposal in the Yucatán and Guatemala of the first half of the
twentieth century, so it took a unique brand of academic who had both the knowledge and the
grit to pull off both sides of the job.
The other, equally famous, U.S. academic Mayanist from that era, Eric J. Thompson, referred
to Morley as “one of the best-known, most creative, and hardest-working Mayan [sic] archaeol-
ogists of his generation,” as Jason Shapiro summarizes it. Writing seventy years after Thomp-
son’s glowing characterization of Morley’s importance to the field, Shapiro agrees that “even
though many of Morley’s interpretations of Mayan archaeology and the nature of Mayan
society largely have been superseded by the work of subsequent generations of archaeologists,”
Maya archaeology benefitted from his work overall (58). This early generation of archaeologists
working in the Maya area simply didn’t have the tools and plentiful academic resources that
have burgeoned in the years since their passing. Morley’s work led him to conclude that, overall,
pre-Contact Maya society eschewed violence and had achieved a somewhat utopian, peaceful
coexistence. He didn’t do this translation until very late in his career—in fact, he died before
it was published—but he had to have begun to see the error of that general conclusion when
he worked through the mythistorical section on the different Maya ethnicities and the ways in
which they violently established themselves in the early years.
Morley would not really have been an ideal choice to carry out a translation of this kind,
except that his fame would have brought some attention to the project. Neither he nor his
partner in the project, Delia Goetz (the writer in the team, whose primary publication work
was writing children’s books about Latin America) spoke K’iche’.18 Goetz and Morley trans-
lated their Popol Vuh from Adrián Recinos’s Spanish-language translation. Of course, going
from K’iche’ to Spanish to English exponentially increases the interference of cultural biases
embedded in language. This distance from the original is the biggest flaw in the translation.19
Dennis Tedlock (English, 1985, substantially updated in 1996)

The first thing to say in introducing Tedlock’s translation is that if a reader is only going to
read one version of Popol Wuj in English, it should be his. His translation digs deep into how,
specifically, K’iche’ words and phrases build meaning, and his copious notes are second to none
in terms of helping spark unique ways of understanding and talking about this text. He deserv-
edly won the prestigious PEN Translation Prize for this project, and I have benefitted from his
considerable efforts in many ways. Of course, that is not to say that Tedlock’s translation doesn’t
have some issues: as I’ve said, every translation, by virtue of the very nature of translation, is
bound to have complications.
Tedlock first got interested in Indigenous cultures when he was growing up in New Mexico
around the Zuni cultures there. He began his university studies with a view toward archaeol-
ogy, but he became more interested in the poetics of Indigenous literatures and finished his
PhD at Tulane with a focus on ethnography and linguistics. He became a leading thinker of
dialogic anthropology and was instrumental (with Jerome Rothberg) in pioneering the subfield
of ethnopoetics. His idea was to use the poetics of K’iche’ ritual speech to understand and
describe K’iche’, based on how language expresses the unique K’iche’ perspective of the nature
of interpersonal and other relationships in their culture.20
Eventually Tedlock turned his main focus to Guatemala, where he and his wife, Barbara,
also an accomplished Mayanist, learned K’iche’ and took the radical step of training as aj
q’ijaab (daykeepers; the singular form is aj q’ij), who are traditional community counselors in
highland Maya communities that are trained in reading and interpreting the various ancient
K’iche’ calendars as a base for their counseling practice. The Tedlocks trained under the aj q’ij
Andrés Xiloj in the town of Momostenango, which to this day has a reputation for having
preserved and followed ancient K’iche’ ways more than most large K’iche’ towns and cities in
the twentieth century.
The Tedlocks decided to train as aj q’ijaab because they were convinced that the story of
Popol Wuj is, in essence, a metaphor that serves as a sort of astronomical guide to help aj q’ijaab
and others trace the movements of celestial bodies throughout the year. The aj q’ijaab could
then use this astronomical information as a guide to the K’iche’ calendars—primarily the chol
q’ij (260-day ritual calendar)—to advise their clients on what days would be most fitting for
specific activities or ceremonies.
56 CHAPTER TWO
If the ancient Popol Vuh [sic] was like the surviving hieroglyphic books, it contained
systematic accounts of cycles in astronomical and earthly events that served as a com-
plex navigation system for those who wished to see and move beyond the present. . . .
When the ancient readers of the Popol Vuh took the roles of diviners and astronomers,
seeking the proper date for a ceremony or a momentous political act, we may guess that
they looked up specific passages, pondered their meanings, and rendered an opinion.
(Tedlock, Popol 29)
This idea of Popol Wuj as a kind of divinatory sky map was new, and it certainly makes sense
in several sections, as Tedlock’s copious notes make clear, especially where he reports Xiloj’s
explanations of the narrative as sky map and where he uses the recent decipherment of the
hieroglyphic record to corroborate. For example, Tedlock convincingly shows how the narra-
tive works (at least on one level) to parallel certain astronomical events. Just to name a few:
the Boys’ decent to Xibalba is the narrative parallel of the setting of celestial bodies; the four
hundred boys who Sipakna kills rise into the night sky as Motz (the Pleiades) (35, 245n); and
Wuqub Kaqix and his wife are (roughly the equivalent of ) the Big and Little Dippers (34–35,
240). Tedlock goes on to explain how the movements in the night sky have to do with the
beginning and ending of hurricane season and with other signals for carrying out specific
agricultural tasks. For example, when Motz (the four hundred boys) falls below the horizon,
it’s time to plant seeds (35).
However, the main fault I find with Tedlock’s translation also comes out of the aj q’ij connec-
tion. Precisely because he trained with an aj q’ij and collaborated with him in translating Popol
Wuj, the astronomical view has a tendency to override all else. I’m convinced that astronomy was
one important function of Popol Wuj, but Tedlock prioritizes this mapping function of the text
exclusively over its other functions in too many cases.21 Studies of the Maya historically make this
mistake—overemphasis on the astronomical angle—and it has skewed our characterization of
the ancient Maya. In 2012, David Stuart, one of the preeminent Maya epigraphers, concluded, “I
doubt astronomy can still hold enough weight to be the powerful, overarching paradigm for the
culture that it once was” (Order 303). He expects that “further decipherments and archaeological
discoveries will balance this long-standing intellectual tendency with a more realistic and earthly
vision of the ancient Maya as real people with a real history” (303). This observation applies to
Popol Wuj, too. A literary text of this depth can certainly serve multiple functions at once, and
these other functions can be lost in Tedlock’s translation because of the aj q’ij slant and its reliance
on astronomical positioning. Still, Tedlock’s focus on ethnopoetics allows him to get out from
under the anthropological biases at times. Overall, he has made a translation that is ground-
breaking. Still, as readers we need to be aware of the limitations of even a very good translation.
David B. Castledine (English, 2001)

David B. Castledine is an outlier in this study. Putting him in the second category of translators
is only for convenience because I don’t know whether he trained as an academic. His name
appears as the translator only once in this edition of Popol Wuj, on the reverse side of the inter-
nal title page, in the tiniest font on the page. Unlike all the other versions, this Popol Wuj does
not dedicate one line to the background, qualifications, training, languages, or processes of its
translator. It’s as if the translator or the translation process didn’t exist, like the translation had
been a straightforward matter of course, a mere formality. A search for Casteldine’s academic
credentials or other qualifying experience turns up nothing, except that his name also appears
as translator—but from Spanish, not K’iche’, to English—of other books aimed at the casual
tourist. I’ve included this edition in these translation comparisons because the market-centered
approach this publisher, Monclem Ediciones, takes toward Popol Wuj (and its dissemination)
dictates the way that many outsiders are exposed to the book. The tourist market is huge in
Mesoamerica, in no small part because of the unique archaeological sites tourists can visit so
easily in Mexico (sometimes literally between beach margaritas). Yet, most tourists do so with
very limited knowledge of, or interest in, the living Maya cultures around them.
Monclem Ediciones is a press that specializes in producing books for that tourist market,
mostly guidebooks for foreign tourists. Monclem’s guidebooks are available in the top seven
languages of those tourists who visit Mexico (German, English, French, Italian, Russian, Jap-
anese, Korean, and Spanish), though its Popol Wuj is only available in Spanish and English.
Many of these tourists’ experience in Mexico consists solely of multiday, all-inclusive guided
tours—from their pick upon arrival at the airport in Cancun to their departure from the same.
These tours include mostly recreation, but they mix in a smattering of “exotic” Maya temples
for good measure.
In this context, Monclem’s Popol Wuj appears to be an afterthought, motivated by the mar-
ket this publisher already caters to, a market that can be molded and shaped to a significant
extent during the course of the all-inclusive tour. Tour guides inevitably mention Popol Wuj
when giving their tours of Maya sites because much of the information that we have about
pre-Contact culture from the Indigenous side comes from Popol Wuj, though the tour guides’
information is often mistaken (at best), or contrived to allow easy access for and maximum wow
factor from the tour group. Guidebooks also inevitably mention Popol Wuj in part to legitimize
the information they have tailored to please the tourists. After hearing the name of Popol Wuj
several times, the well-meaning tourist asks whether an English copy is available. Rather than
cede this business to another publisher of a translation, it’s not surprising that a press like
Monclem would publish one of its own (with little scholarly rigor) in order to capitalize on
that side market that it helps to produce.22
Of course, this is not to say that casually touring archaeological sites, folklorizing Maya culture,
or thumbing through a market-driven version of Popol Wuj is worse than not having any exposure
to Maya culture at all. But it is important to be aware of market forces that dictate the production,
dissemination, and consumption of Indigenous cultures because Popol Wuj is no exception. For
this reason, I have included Castledine’s translation in the following comparison exercises.
Category Three: Native K’iche’ Speakers

as Primary Translators
From a decolonial standpoint, a translator who grows up in the culture that produced the text
he’s translating offers several advantages, not least of which is that he grew up speaking the
58 CHAPTER TWO
language of the original text and can see from that vantage point how the language uniquely
reflects certain ways of being in the world. In the very best cases, these native speakers will
also have come to achieve a certain critical distance so that they can see how that language
not only conditions their own participation in the world but also is conditioned by it.23 That
self-awareness, a certain recognition of the inability to step completely outside of the cultural
structures that conditioned our being, is essential for a native speaker to produce a good trans-
lation. But it’s hard to achieve when the social sciences in the academy have developed over
centuries under the assumption that a verifiable objectivity is possible, especially because the
native speaker translator with access to the translation market (in the case of “minor” Indig-
enous languages) is usually directly affected by social science methodologies. In both cases
below, the K’iche’ translators have achieved useful translations that transcend those of the first
two categories in important ways. However, we still need to think through the particularities
of these translators and their projects.
Adrián Inés Chávez (Spanish, 1979, substantially revised in 1997)

Adrián Inés Chávez was from a fairly small town in the department of Totonicapán (San Fran-
cisco el Alto) and grew up speaking K’iche’ in his home and community. Chavéz’s translation
is radically decolonial in large part because his own worldview was closer to that of Popol Wuj
than was that of any of its previous primary translators. In addition, he went about the transla-
tion project with an emphasis on preserving how Popol Wuj makes sense within the worldview
that is enabled by, and enables, the language that he grew up speaking. Because he was the first
K’iche’ to head a translation of Popol Wuj and this act of preservation was his main priority, his
translation brings to the fore many K’iche’ cultural ways of being in, and communicating with,
the world that no other translation before it had. In addition, he was the first to publish two
translations side by side, one literal and one idiomatic.
“Don Adrián” was a pioneer in several respects. He trained to be a teacher and is credited as
the first Indigenous person to be certified as such by the national government. He founded the
Academia de la Lengua Maya-K’iche’ (Academy of the Maya K’iche’ Language) and pressed
for ladino Guatemalans to learn Maya languages. With this in mind he wrote and published a
literacy program for learning K’iche’. He was unhappy with the alphabets that had been devel-
oped to write K’iche’, so he came up with his own for very good decolonial reasons. However,
it never caught on, and another group of Maya writers (the Association of Guatemalan Maya
Writers, AEMG) came up with and agreed on an alternative alphabet that they could use for
all the Maya languages to facilitate printing. Still, Chávez insisted on continuing to use his
alphabet right up to his death—decades after the nationwide adoption of the AEMG alphabet
by all Indigenous groups in Guatemala.
Chávez presents his translation in an innovative four-column format, and his idea to publish
both a literal and idiomatic translation opens up fertile new territory. This four-column format
is a fantastic tool for any serious Popol Wuj reader; the first column reproduces the K’iche’ text
as Ximénez had it; the second column uses Chávez’s K’iche’ alphabet to convert Ximénez’s
Spanish colonial alphabet to a K’iche’-derived one, but sadly this move makes that K’iche’ text
almost as obsolete as the first column since all other Indigenous people switched to the AEMG
alphabet; the third column translates to Spanish but translates as literally as possible, following
the structures of K’iche’; and the fourth column then converts this stilted Spanish into an idi-
omatically comfortable read for Spanish speakers. The third column—the literal translation—is
the most useful feature of his translation since any reader who speaks Spanish but not K’iche’
can glimpse the poetics of K’iche’, or the ways in which the words fit together to achieve their
meaning. Through this literal translation it is then possible to begin to see how K’iche’ philosophy
might differ substantially in ways that are not apparent when the idiomatic ease of the Spanish
or English reader is the priority of the translator. In addition, this literal translation has made
possible several new angles of inquiry and enlivened conversations about some of the archaic
vocabulary among scholars. I suggest this version for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the
K’iche’ poetics of a particular word, phrase, or scene but doesn’t speak any K’iche’. That literal
column gives unique access in that sense. Christenson’s literal translation in English (see above)
offers the same type of advantage, but his didn’t come out until decades after Chávez’s innovation.
Overall, Chávez should be hailed as one of the twentieth century’s most important soldiers
in the fight to decolonize not only the reading of Popol Wuj but also the understanding of
Indigenous philosophy and culture. Nevertheless, his translation occasionally suffers from his
tendency to stick stubbornly to some of his radical theories that haven’t held up. For example,
he insisted on sticking with the title Pop-Wuj—which he translated as Libro de Acontecimientos
(Book of Happenings/Occurrences)—going so far as to say that the word popol did not exist in
K’iche’ (Chávez xviii), even when subsequent insurmountable evidence contradicted him (see
chapter 1). He was flat wrong in other cases, too. For example, he insisted that each of the two
sets of “Hero” Brothers were actually not brothers, but a single person with two different names.
Though the brothers do often act in tandem, the narrative clearly requires that the brothers act
independently on several occasions. In other cases Chávez’s arguments were reactive, such as all
the time and effort he spent trying to show that Popol Wuj and Maya spirituality is monotheistic
(Chávez xxx). He seems to have done this for two reasons: to counter the prevailing wisdom
in Guatemala that the Maya were uncivilized because polytheism was considered to be a mark
of a primitive people; and, to make acceptance of Popol Wuj more palatable to Christians in
Guatemala.24 Furthermore, he didn’t have good access to the literature on the newly deciphered
hieroglyphic script as it wasn’t widely disseminated in anything but English at the time. As a
result, some of his claims about ancient Maya peoples in the wider Mesoamerican world are
off base, such as in the case of his comparative cosmologies. Having said that, I believe we owe
a great debt to Chávez, and his work has helped immeasurably in my own.
Luis Enrique Sam Colop (Spanish, 2008)

Luis Enrique Sam Colop’s Popol Wuj is the overall best translation to Spanish for anyone who
is going to use only one Spanish-language translation.25 Like Chávez and García, Sam Colop
is a native K’iche’ speaker who fought his way up in a Guatemalan nation-state whose official
state policies were virulently racist against Indigenous people and firmly opposed to Indigenous
worldviews playing any part in the future of the country. Also like them, he directly felt the
legacy of colonialism, which had officially ended some 130 years before he was born, but which,
in practice, lives on to this day in the minds of many ladinos. Sam Colop grew up in Xecam
60 CHAPTER TWO
just down the road from García in La Estancia and just up the road (about thirty meters) from
where I spent my earliest years, in Chuisuk. All three are aldeas (or cantones, hamlets) of Cantel,
Quetzaltenango. Eventually Sam Colop became a leader in the national pan-Maya movement,
which rejected the positivist notion that assimilation was the only way for Guatemala’s Indig-
enous people to shake off the residue of coloniality.26
In preparing for and carrying out his translation of Popol Wuj, Sam Colop established him-
self as a highly respected Indigenous intellectual activist in Guatemala. Then he took a different
path than his immediate predecessor, Chávez, by going into the belly of the beast, as it were, and
completing a PhD program in the United States (at the State University of New York at Buf-
falo) under the direction of ethnopoetics pioneer and translator of Popol Wuj Dennis Tedlock.
This step was important because there not only could he contribute his intimate knowledge of
K’iche’ language and culture to those in the mainstream academy but also, unlike Chávez, he
could understand and use the prevailing theories and vocabularies in the academy at the time
so that he could more effectively impact the developing scholarship on Popol Wuj.
Tedlock had just published his translation of Popol Wuj, a translation that revolutionized
interpretive schemes for Popol Wuj through Tedlock’s reliance on his apprenticeship with aj
q’ij Andrés Xiloj. Certainly Sam Colop benefited greatly from Tedlock’s ideas on ethnopoetics.
His dissertation was on Maya poetics and employed the strategies of the budding ethnopoetics
movement. At the same time, Sam Colop added an academically trained, native K’iche’ ear
and voice to the equation. I expect that some early conversations with Sam Colop benefitted
Tedlock in his work on Popol Wuj as well. By the second edition of Tedlock’s translation, I’m
sure that I hear Sam Colop’s voice resonating through Tedlock’s notes. Sam Colop was already
a poet in his own right, and he was able to repoeticize Popol Wuj on a completely different level.
The first version of Sam Colop’s was untranslated; it reorganized the K’iche’ text on the page
to better represent how it would sound out loud in K’iche’. The collaboration must have been
fruitful on both sides. Sam Colop’s version is also the first in Spanish with extensive notes,
which opened a door for non-English speakers into some of the machinations of translating
this text and the reasons behind certain decisions translators had made differently.
To his great credit, Sam Colop painstakingly corrects several persistent errors in translating
certain words and phrases of Popol Wuj, errors that had seemingly corroborated the Western
myth of Progress. For example, he points out that generations of translators have referred to
the book that the authors of Popol Wuj claim their ancestors brought with them on a pilgrimage
as having come from “across the sea,” which led to speculation that the origin of advanced
Maya knowledge must have come from Europe. But Sam Colop shows that the phrase should
actually be “on the edge of the sea,” a place that he identifies as Chichén Itzá (Popol 17). This
clarification of an error in all the previous translations, like many of his other clarifications,
explodes the myth that all profound and worthwhile knowledge can be traced back across the
sea to Europe.
At the same time, however, Sam Colop’s translation has some of the drawbacks that we see
in Tedlock’s translation. He is a trained linguist (he earned a masters in linguistics from the
University of Iowa), and this grounding in the social sciences in subtle ways affects his interpre-
tation of Popol Wuj. Similarly, Tedlock’s deep roots in anthropology may have affected how Sam
Colop structured, investigated, and defended the ideas in his dissertation. That dissertation
set the tone for his translation project of Popol Wuj, and while the extensive academic training
in the United States gives him an advantage in some ways over other K’iche’ translators who
didn’t have a similar opportunity, in other ways it creates interference. That is not to take away
from the excellent work that Sam Colop did on this translation or to say that these flaws are
fundamental. They aren’t. Instead I simply want to emphasize the advantages of using multiple
translations as a basic principle that acknowledges the inevitable slippage that occurs in any
translation because of the several factors that affect how it and its translator came to be.
These summaries of the translations and the explanation of the specific conditions/con-
texts in which these translators carried them out serve two main purposes in this book: these
critiques make clear that all translations are inevitably affected in some way by outside forces;
and they make the journey of transformation that Popol Wuj has traveled—and continues
to travel—transparent and emphasize the dynamic nature of all texts over time. All writers,
readers in the original language, translators, and readers in translation inevitably participate
in this process. We are not looking for the perfect translation; we’re just trying to look at the
gaps among these translations to better read between the spaces and achieve a perspective that
glimpses things from within the worldview that produced Popol Wuj.
Authority?
Since I’ve talked through the advantages and disadvantages of each of these eleven translators
(or teams of translators) in terms of the contexts in which they carried out their translations,
it’s only fair that I take a moment to illuminate my own relationship with Popol Wuj and the
K’iche’. Like all of these translators, I am inevitably affected by my background, my motiva-
tions, my ideologies, and my limitations. As many aspects of my biography complicate my rela-
tionship to Popol Wuj as authorize it. As post-structuralist anthropologist Quetzil E. Castañeda
says, “fables of the Self traverse risky grounds” for writers who claim academic authority in
their fields while also relying on some other connection outside of the academic subject-object
relationship (16). I was born in Guatemala and raised in Maya K’iche’ communities of differ-
ent sizes, though my family’s roots are in the United States. I spent the first years of my life
in the village of Chuisuc (near Cantel, Quetzaltenango) and later lived in Chichicastenango,
El Quiché (the town where Ximénez first came across Popol Wuj). However, for some of my
early education I was sent away to an English-language school (in the Mam department of
Huehuetenango), which significantly stunted my K’iche’ language abilities. In my adolescent
and young adult years, I lived in Xela, Quetzaltenango, a city where many direct K’iche’ descen-
dants no longer speak K’iche’, wear traditional clothes, or engage in other important K’iche’
cultural practices, though it is still completely surrounded by communities of all sizes that still
do. I finished middle school and started high school there at the relatively privileged Colegio
Inter-Americano (Inter-American School). I moved to the United States at the age of fifteen
at the height of the conflicto armado interno (armed conflict; the official euphemism for the
thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996) during Rios Montt’s Tierra Arrasada (scorched
earth) genocidal campaign against the Maya, a campaign that many Indigenous people could
not and did not escape. There I finished high school, went to U.S. universities, and eventually
62 CHAPTER TWO
went on to get my PhD in comparative literature, where my doctoral work revolved around
some of the inherent complications of studying Indigenous literatures in the academy.
My hybridity makes this book possible in some ways and complicates it in others. As a child,
I absorbed firsthand Maya K’iche’ ways of being in the world and interacting with its different
realms. However, just as much of my experience is different from that of most K’iche’ people
as is similar, despite where I was born and raised. Most notably, because I don’t “look Maya,”
I haven’t suffered the marginalization that is a very real part of that experience in most cases
and that colors everything else. Still, I have actually grown up in the spaces between transla-
tion, and it’s significant that I initially came to Popol Wuj and K’iche’ organically, not through
academic interest. At the same time, I am fluent in English and am able to bridge that divide
to the wider U.S. academy that has marginalized the important work on Popol Wuj of K’iche’
intellectuals like Sam Colop and Chávez. Suffice it to say that I can offer some advantages,
though they are not completely without complications, in terms of my authority to speak for
Maya ways of seeing and being in the world.
The comparative translation advanced here exists in a liminal space somewhat like the one I
inhabit. This method attempts to make transparent the unspoken dialogue among Sam Colop,
Chávez, and other translators in their individual struggles to complete an impossible task. That
unspoken dialogue I amplify provides a different window on K’iche’ worldviews, which evade
precise capture outside the language that enables them. The K’iche’ translators provide import-
ant contours to the “spaces between” that shape this book. I take what they, and others, give us
and talk through how some of these issues look on the multilingual ground that is Guatemala.
I am not an anthropologist, and the conversations I report in this book have not been carried
out using anthropological methodology. It is in the humanities that we can most effectively
decenter the epistemological model that has developed over the centuries and millennia in
the trajectory of Western practice, especially when engaging worldviews that lie outside of
that trajectory. Unlike the social sciences, the humanities can make possible a configuration
of epistemologies and ontologies that explicitly reject the very non-Maya idea of objectivity
underlying the development of the sciences in the Western world. Rather than driving toward
an “objective,” definitive, or immutable conclusion, this humanities approach seeks to provide
different framing that can work in conjunction with the valuable work done in other disciplines
and by people of different backgrounds.
My interactions with K’iche people have taken several forms over my lifetime, both before
and after my 1982 emigration to the United States. I have discussed all the ideas in this book
with my current Maya friends (K’iche’, Kaqchikel, and Tzutujil) and with some of those I grew
up around (K’iche’). Most important of these is my main K’iche’ collaborator and lifelong
friend Abraham García Hernández. García is a K’iche’ community leader, born, raised, and
still living in La Estancia, a cantón of Cantel, Quetzaltenango. García helped found several of
the first pan-Maya organizations that sought to revalidate Indigenous knowledge, philosophy,
and culture in the face of deep systemic racism. These organizations have been fundamental
in forging real social and political change in Guatemala. He was a founding member of: Aso-
ciación de Escritores Mayances de Guatemala (AEMG, the self-determined Association of
Guatemalan Maya Writers, which came up with the current standard alphabet and orthog-
raphy for all the Indigenous languages of Guatemala); Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de
Guatemala (the government-sponsored Guatemalan Academy of Maya Languages); Consejo

de Organizaciones Mayas de Guatemala (Council of Guatemalan Maya Organizations); and
Mesa Nacional Maya de Guatemala, “Q’uq’ Kumatz” (National Guatemalan Maya Round-
table “Quetzal Serpent”). He has worked on literacy projects with different groups and on
different fronts to create published material in K’iche’ so that these literacy projects wouldn’t
prioritize Spanish over K’iche’ (and the other twenty Maya languages in Guatemala that these
people speak as their first languages). He has co-authored and published a K’iche’–Spanish
dictionary and worked on numerous translation projects (both from and to K’iche’). García has
also headed up other governmental and NGO resource and development projects in the Cantel
and Xela areas. He is currently serving his third term as vice mayor of Cantel. He has completed
the course work for a master’s of linguistics at Universidad Mariano Galvez in Guatemala City.
García’s grandfather Marcos García Yac was a practicing aj q’ij. Through him, García took a
keen interest in traditional Maya belief systems and the associated ritual language from an early
age, though his parents later converted to Christianity, and García has spent significant periods
as a regular participant both in Catholic and in Protestant churches in Cantel.
In terms of this project, García has been instrumental most specifically with the parts of this
book that break down prefixes, suffixes, etymologies, other linguistic features, and the cultural
contexts and various current uses (often geographically determined within the K’iche’-speaking
area) of K’iche’ words in ritual and mundane contexts. I could not have arrived with confidence
to the places I have in this book without his mastery of K’iche’ both as his maternal language
and as the object of years of linguistic study and application in the real world. I have also often
asked him to discuss some of the more aggressive arguments in this book with his friends in
the Cantel community or to poll his wider circle about specific words or notions.
García has maintained an active skepticism over the decades about the inevitable slippage
in any modern readings of Popol Wuj, including his own readings and those of his direct peers
(Sam Colop, Chávez, and Xec, as well as Humberto Ak’abal, whose translation was published
in 2016), which can differ widely for a particular key word. The archaic K’iche’ of Popol Wuj
and (especially) the poorly conceived orthography in which it was first recorded alphabetically
create a complicated puzzle. The Spanish alphabet could not accurately distinguish between
certain sounds in K’iche’, especially the four sounds k, k’, q, q’, which were all written variously
with the Spanish c (a letter that no longer exists in K’iche’ orthography) or qu. It was not until
the 1980s that K’iche’ people were able to impose a standardized alphabetical system that
reflected the very different sounds of the Maya languages and made the relationships between
spelling, pronunciation, and, by extension, meaning more transparent.
The orthography of the sixteenth-century K’iche’ of Popol Wuj (which Ximénez copied in the
early eighteenth-century version we have) thus causes quite different interpretations of some
key concepts and has led to contentious disagreements among the leading K’iche’ intellectuals
of Popol Wuj over the years. Many words in K’iche’ sound identical except for those four sounds
(k, k’, q, q’), but those four options can make the resulting word mean four completely different
things.27 Context helps, of course, but this orthographic puzzle has led to several cases where the
interpretations of whole passages differ significantly in the translations of, for example, Chávez,
Xec, and Sam Colop, though they all come from relatively close K’iche’-speaking areas and
are native speakers. García’s open acknowledgment of this opacity and his subsequent healthy
64 CHAPTER TWO
skepticism about his peers’ (and his own) interpretations have led to a remarkable intellectual
openness rather than to the entrenchment that often results from an ultimate insider position
like his. He is always eager to learn new approaches to passages of Popol Wuj that he feels can
enrich his own understanding, an understanding that he sees as inevitably narrowed in some
ways by his own cultural trajectory and his fight for an effective and recognizably Maya sub-
jectivity in an often unapologetically modern—still positivist, even—Guatemala. García was
one of the first enthusiastic proponents of the comparative translation tables and method that
I have put together.
Over the years we have discussed many aspects of the movimiento maya and K’iche’ philos-
ophy specifically, both in general and in terms of my arguments in this book. I have learned a
great deal from García. At the same time, he has enthusiastically thrown himself into under-
standing the novel approaches to Popol Wuj and Maya philosophy I have developed and the
alternative theoretical underpinnings I have introduced, which fall outside of his own academic
trajectory. I am grateful for Abraham’s generosity with his time.

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Reading Popol Wuj

Published by University of Arizona Press

For additional information about this book

Access provided at 4 Apr 2020 17:09 GMT with no institutional affiliation

La traducción es el arte del fracaso.

An Overview of the Thirteen Translations Used in This Book

Category One: Translators Affiliated with Western Religions

Francisco Ximénez (Spanish, circa 1701–3 [1857])

Dora M. de Burgess / Patricio Xec Cuc (Spanish, 1955)

Allen J. Christenson (English, idiomatic translation

Category Two: Translators Trained as Academics

Miguel Ángel Asturias / J. M. González de Mendoza

José Antonio Villacorta Calderón / Flavio Rodas N.

Adrián Recinos (Spanish, 1947)

Delia Goetz / Sylvanus Griswold Morley (English, 1950)

Dennis Tedlock (English, 1985, substantially updated in 1996)

David B. Castledine (English, 2001)

Category Three: Native K’iche’ Speakers

Adrián Inés Chávez (Spanish, 1979, substantially revised in 1997)

Luis Enrique Sam Colop (Spanish, 2008)

Guatemala (the government-sponsored Guatemalan Academy of Maya Languages); Consejo

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