In January 2019, Maya K’iche’ poet Humberto Ak’abal passed away, thus transcending into the eternal silence—perhaps the same silence inhabited by his seismic poems. He was sixty-six.
In life, Humberto published more than thirty books, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages—including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. He remains a towering figure for indigenous and Maya literature, as well as one of Latin America’s most beloved and inventive poets. Humberto wrote extensively about family, time, colonialism, men’s relationship with animals and nature, indigeneity, the plight of the indigenous people in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan genocide. He used onomatopoeia and cacophony to describe his surroundings, and his poems are imbued with devastating political commentary and subtle humor. Carlos Montemayor and Antonio Gamoneda admitted to being fans of Humberto’s poetry, and in 2006, he became a Guggenheim fellow.
One cannot overstate the importance, quality, originality, and poetic sensibility of Humberto Ak’abal. Though his work has been previously translated into English, a new translation shines a new light on Humberto’s devastating poems. This June, Milkweed Editions will publish If Today Were Tomorrow, a book of poems written by Humberto Ak’abal and translated by Michael Bazzett, the author of The Echo Chamber. If Today Were Tomorrow is a beautifully crafted, comprehensive, and faithful approximation and representation of Humberto’s work. I had the opportunity to interview Michael Bazzett on Humberto’s legacy, the experience working between K’iche’, Spanish, and English, and the translation of silence.
José García Escobar (JGE): In 2018, you famously put out your translation of the Maya’s creation myth, The Popol Vuh. Naturally, we find many references and similarities between The Popol Vuh and the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal. Can you describe how translating The Popol Vuh prepared you or helped you translate Humberto’s poetry? Or maybe it was the other way around. I know you’ve worked on If Today Were Tomorrow for many years.
Michael Bazzett (MB): In the opening of The Popol Vuh, when it came time for the gods to create the world, “it only took a word. / To make earth they said, ‘Earth’ / and there it was: sudden / as a cloud or mist unfolds / from the face of a mountain, / so earth was there.”
I’ve always sensed an entire theory of language swirling inside this moment—one that continues, of course, throughout the entirety of the myth—where words are energy, tethered intrinsically to what they call forth. As such, they are not imposed by humans upon the landscape, like labels or sticky notes, but instead uncovered through careful listening and observation of the world around us. If Humberto’s work is built on anything, it is careful listening and observation. One learns very quickly by reading his poems. For instance, in K’iche’, the call of a bird is synonymous with its name, including the little orange & brown plumed bird, “Ch’ik,” who hops “happily / among the fresh shoots”:
Ch’ik is her song,
Ch’ik is her name.
Stones are not mute in his view; they merely hold their silence. Ak’abal finds solace in the singing of rivers and hears names carried on the wind. When wooden church pews creak in “Oración/Prayer,” it is to remind us that they were once trees. Translating his work was full of little moments of recognition like this, that animate language is everywhere in the world around us; we need only listen.
JGE: Do you remember the first time you became aware of Humberto’s poetry? How did this happen?
MB: It was actually on a visit to the University of Minnesota-Morris, where I was doing a reading for The Popol Vuh in the fall of 2018, when the translation was first published. I was a guest in an upper-level Latin American Literature class, and the professor had planned to do a little translation work with his students to enliven things. He’d chosen a few of Humberto’s poems to put on the table; it was a perfect choice, really, given that many of his poems aren’t much longer than a few lines, the language and syntax are generally approachable, and they can often sneak up on you in ways that blossom open and then continue opening. . .
JGE: I imagine that we can trace the following passage from your introduction to that class: “The apparent simplicity of the poems can make them a bit tantalizing to translate.” Did this happen to you? What drew you to Ak’abal’s poetry?
MBE: It really started that night, out among the snowy fields of western Minnesota. I’d had a year-long sabbatical a decade prior, in 2007, where my family and I lived in the colonial highlands in central Mexico, and one practice I employed to help me learn Spanish was translating a few lines of Neruda every morning, with a dictionary. I’d do four or six lines, and just let it accrue slowly. When Saturday rolled around, I’d amble down to the library, where I could get a good wi-fi connection, and pull up various versions of the poem and see how I’d done. It was pleasant, almost like a game, and it hooked me in. In that sense, I’m somewhat of an accidental translator. I feel like many elements of it chose me, as opposed to the other way round.
When I encountered Humberto’s work, his sensibility drew me in completely. He generally works in a colloquial, plainspoken register, and that apparent “simplicity” did initially strike me; so many of his small poems serve as apertures into much larger spaces, and I soon found myself wandering rooms and stanzas marked by his acute vision, his empathy, his incisive critique, his sadness, and his aphoristic wisdom. I also found his irreverence and playfulness irresistible.
I reached out to Humberto in early 2019 about potentially publishing a handful of the translations I’d done, and then was greatly saddened to read that he’d passed away a few weeks later. Over a year later, in the fall of 2020, his widow, Mayulí, and his son, Nakil, replied to my initial query, and we began to correspond.
So, the project really blossomed, oddly, during the pandemic. I started translating a poem each morning, picking up my practice from a dozen years earlier, and it became a sort of ritual again—kind of like Wordle on steroids, with a spiritual and poetic element to ground it. During those dislocating times, my own writing had begun to feel hollow, a little tinny, and underwhelming in the face of all the strangeness, and reading Humberto’s work was centering.
That’s one eternally beautiful thing about translation: find work that speaks to you—and hopefully it will speak through you—and you don’t question whether the work is good, whether it’s worthwhile. That’s a given because your bones and heart have already told you so, and as such, it makes it easier to go to the woodshed and get to work, no matter what’s happening in the world.
JGE: What a beautiful way into Humberto’s poetry, Michael. I’m sure this is only a summary of how it happened, but it’s fascinating to know how his work affected you, inspired you, and provided comfort for you. Naturally, Ak’abal’s poetry has previously been translated into English, most notably by Miguel Rivera and Robert Bly. Did you look at their translations, perhaps not in that initial period, but later on? Did their work help in any way with If Today Were Tomorrow?
MB: Yes, I read their work, and every other translation I could get my hands on, and of course I was able to study Humberto’s own approach, given that he translated so many of his poems from K’iche’ into Spanish. It was all helpful in its way, and then there comes the moment when you have to let all preconceptions go and it’s just you and the poem.
JGE: In your introduction, you write, “The connection to place in Ak’abal’s work is palpable; the language seems to arise from the land itself.” How did you approach building a bridge between Humberto’s place, your translation, and English readers? Did you, for example, have a chance to visit Momostenango?
MB: Though I haven’t visited Momostenango itself, I’ve been lucky enough to visit the highlands and see the cloud forest and those green ravines and milpas. The imagery of the poems, especially as it accrues over the course of the collection, does a marvelous job of conveying the tactile sense of place: the darkness of night, the depth of green, the mist, the gathering of firewood, the birdsong. I merely attempted to amplify that, via clarity of syntax and finding the right plainspoken register for North American ears to echo that landscape.
JGE: Another essential bridge available in Ak’abal’s poems is the one he built between K’iche’ and Spanish. In The Old Song of the Blood, he writes, “My mother’s milk fed me no Castilian.” In a way, he rebelled against Spanish. Can you elaborate on your own distance from K’iche’ and how the poems in their original form, in K’iche’, informed your translation?
MB: I’ve thought a lot about what it means to meet Ak’abal in English and to try to inhabit these poems, bridged, as they already are, between an indigenous language and a colonial one. “Old Song” has been instrumental in prodding and shaping that thinking, especially in how the poem “claims” that colonial tongue:
Esta lengua es el recuerdo de un dolor
y la hablo sin temor ni vergüenza
porque fue comprada
con la sangre de mis ancestros.This language holds the memory of pain,
and I speak it without fear or shame
because it was paid for
with the blood of my ancestors.
That “fue comprada“—bought, earned, paid for—is such a powerful cue, touching upon Ak’abal’s rebellious stance, as you noted, while encompassing a sort of transcendence, too. His sense of time feels vast here, holding both the repeated refrains of nature as well as five hundred years of painful history. He continues:
And if I use this language that is not mine,
I do it as someone using a new key
to open another door and enter another world
where words have other voices,
a different way of feeling the earth.
There is pragmatism in such an approach, yet the image of language as a key offers more; it allows the claimed tongue to become a tool, opening a way for the poem to make its entrance into the reader and the reader to enter the poem, and thus be entranced in both senses of the word.
The idea of being a guest within a poem (as opposed to “hosting” it in English) appeals to me, ethically as well as aesthetically. As I mentioned earlier, spending time in the evocative rooms of Ak’abal’s poems is what originally drew me to this project. Robin Myers has written elegantly about the thought of the “translator as eternal guest,” a mindset where the translator becomes a kind of “long-term inhabitant, an apprentice, a participant-observer,” perpetually residing in a place of never-quite-arriving. This approach resonates with me. When I translate, I am simultaneously a guest in the K’iche’ Maya, in the Spanish, and in the ecosystem of the poem—a stance that reminds me I’m also eternally a guest in English, a language I’m continually learning, inhabiting, and trying to make new. And I’m always a guest in Spanish, which was the main door through which I entered these poems.
That said, while I primarily work from the Spanish, I do occasionally triangulate with the K’iche’ versions. This is particularly useful when grappling with different sonic/acoustical approaches, as was the case with “Kamik/Hoy/Today,” where the plosives of the K’iche’ (Chuxe’ ri waqan, / uxaq che’, xwi uxaq che’) offered a rhythmic solution to “land” the final line in English with more solidity than the vowelly Spanish: “A mis pies, / hojas, sólo hojas.” The consonants and cadence in K’iche helped guide the English toward something a bit huskier: “At my feet, / leaves, nothing but leaves.”
JGE: The use of language and Humberto’s relationship with Spanish is only one of his motifs. In this book, we see a swath of Ak’abal’s major themes and preoccupations: family, time, silence, colonialism, man’s relationship with animals and nature, political commentary, and lots of his unique playfulness and subtle humor. Can you explain the selection process for If Today Were Tomorrow?
MB: The goal of the selection was to show that very breadth from throughout his career, yet the shape of the collection was borrowed from one of his truly seminal books, Guardián de la caída de agua, which received the Golden Quetzal Award in 1993. That work has a lovely arc of dawn to dusk, innocence to experience, which I used as a lattice to help build this new collection.
I ended up translating almost 200 of his poems and chose 135 to be in the book. To be fully honest, sometimes the quality of the translation became a part of the selection process as well—or better put, my limitations as a translator. There are poems of his that I love that I couldn’t find a satisfactory echo or rendering of in the English, and in the end I had to let those go.
JGE: In your acknowledgments, you mention and thank Humberto’s wife, Mayulí Nicole Bieri. Can you talk about her role in this book and how she helped you?
MB: Simply put, she’s been wonderfully supportive and patiently helpful with my endless questions. And sometimes our correspondence holds unexpected turns. Just last week, she sent me a photo with the view from Humberto’s study in Momostenango.
JGE: On that note, I’m curious about your approach to the Guatemalan Spanish (los guatemaltequismos) Humberto used in his poems. You translated most. You kept some, like “güegüecho.” You sometimes translated bird’s names, like “sanates,” “sopes,” “cenzontle,” and “azacuanes,” and sometimes you didn’t. What was the criteria for translating or using the original in Spanish for these elements of Ak’abal’s poetry?
MB: This is something poet Mónica de la Torre was very helpful with when I worked on the manuscript with her at Breadloaf, both in thinking about los guatemaltequismos and the K’iche’. In the end, I think I’d say the primary criteria ended up being to listen to the poem itself: first as an individual, then as a part of the chorus of the book. A word like “güegüecho” is so magnificent and sonically apt, it had to stay, and it made sense contextually.
Even upon first reading, Humberto’s work is as clear as water, and maintaining that element of transparency felt important. Footnotes felt wrong, as the emptiness and silence around his poems feels so crucial. Yet that desire for translucence was constantly dancing with the sense of being transported, of being elsewhere, that imbues so much of his work as well. In the end, I strove for balance and trusted the curiosity and intellect of my imaginary reader.
JGE: Speaking of silence, I’m fascinated by his use of silence—not just structurally but thematically as well. In I Speak, he writes, “I speak to shut the mouth of silence.” His effectiveness, naturally, is partly a result of his brevity and what’s left unsaid. As a translator, I’d be tempted to elaborate and embellish, thus betraying Ak’abal’s succinctness and devastating silences. How did you approach and remain true to his disarming swiftness, to his silences?
MB: This is a marvelous question. Sometimes, I’m tempted to say that when translating Humberto’s work, the key is to translate not the words, but the poem. And his poetry lives in the silences around the work, in the emptiness of the page, like the hollow of a bell. Silence is one of the tools he employs in saying the unsayable.
But, of course, poems are somehow made of words, or at least intimated by them. Your observation about brevity and what’s left unsaid called to mind a favorite quote from Parul Sehgal: “All literature is literature in translation. There is no mother tongue. All of it migrates out of the body, out of a tangle of sensations and intuitions, obscure rancor and desire; we hunt racks of ready-made language for words that might fit.”
In the poetics of Ak’abal, brevity is a way to find that fit. It takes courage and vision and precision to write the way Humberto does; there’s very little to hide behind. I think of the spareness of late Merwin, or Bashō sometimes, yet Humberto’s work is very much his own. He’s inimitable.
JGE: Do you think translating Humberto Ak’abal’s poetry, and perhaps even The Popol Vuh, will have a lasting effect on your work as a poet?
MB: Undoubtedly, yes, on all counts. It already has.
Headshot courtesy of Milkweed Editions and the Star Tribune.
Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry in 2018 by the New York Times. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, Granta, Guernica, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Sun, and The Paris Review. He lives in Minneapolis.
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He took part in 2024’s Tin House Winter Workshop. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region. He writes in English and Spanish, and has translated into Spanish Solito by Javier Zamora and I’m Not Broken by Jesse Leon, both for Penguin En Español.
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