Posts filed under 'Maya literature'

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora!

Join us this in this week of literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora! From recent publications of women writers, to a collection of electronic-inspired poetry, to movements against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, read on to learn more.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Central America 

In December, Nicaraguan novelist and poet Gioconda Belli announced that Libros VISOR had just published a 900-page book collecting all her poetry books. Titled Toda la poesía (1974-2020), it includes a prologue written by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros. This publication came only weeks after Belli won this year’s Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, one of the most prestigious awards given to poets of the Spanish language. 

Earlier, in late November, Alfaguara put out a book entitled Desde el centro de América, Miradas alternativas, which includes short stories by twenty one Central American women. The collection includes the likes of Nicté Sierra, Marta Sandoval, and Ixsu’m Antonieta Gonzáles Choc, from Guatemala; María Eugenia Ramos and Jessica Isla, from Honduras; and Madeline Mendienta and Carmen Ortega, from Nicaragua. The book was put together by writer and researcher Gloria Hernández, who, in 2022, received Guatemala’s highest literary honor: the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. 

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Thread, A Loom, A Skein: Rita M. Palacios on Maya Ts’íib as a Departure from Literature

January 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Ts’íib radically departs from notions of literature because the written word is not the be-all and end-all of society and culture.

Guatemalan scholar Rita M. Palacios’ body of work reexamines the hegemonies that mediate literary, cultural, and knowledge production, particularly in Maya oral storytelling, literature, and material culture. In the book she co-authored with Asymptote’s former editor-at-large for Mexico, Paul M. Worley, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press, 2019), they argued for a decentering from the Euro-American critical vocabulary of literary theory and arts criticism through the lens of ts’íib—”an understanding of Maya artistic and cultural production that includes and exceeds the written word.” Drawing from Maya artists and authors such as Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Waldemar Noh Tzec, and Humberto Ak’abal, whose œuvre range from murals to textiles, from cha’anil (‘performatic’) to ceramics, from monuments to poetry, Palacios and Worley make the case for the ts’íib as one of the various Indigenous-centric departures from and unlearnings of our colonial worldviews on literary production and knowledge systems.  

In this interview, I conversed with Dr. Palacios on ts’íib as a form of autohistorical knowledge production that is beyond the Western imaginary, the Maya and non-Ladino writers and writings within Guatemalan and Central American literatures, and the rightful refusals against translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a conversation on Mexican and Guatemalan literatures with Paul M. Worley, you said

[T]he many challenges (structural racism, censorship, a lack of government funding, to name a few) that writers in countries in the Majority World face directly impact how and what is written, how it’s published, and who it reaches, and so we, readers and critics, would do well to pay attention.

Can you speak more about these gaps and dissimilarities in terms of knowledge production, especially in literature, in the Global Majority versus the North Atlantic?

Rita M. Palacios (RMP): Given the way Western political and economic powers have shaped our world, the anglophone North Atlantic enjoys a certain monopoly over the manner in which we think and write about each other, privileging certain modes of artistic production over others, as well as creators, reading publics, and even the critics. This is not to say that we are helpless or that we are wholly bound by a system that privileges and rewards those who uphold it. It does mean that things are much more challenging for those who live, think, and create outside those parameters.

Generally, when it comes to literature, that which is written, packaged, and sold by the millions is not a literature that aims to represent us all, but a literature that affirms the places (real and imagined) we already occupy and the systems built around them so that we continue to inhabit these spaces, sustaining those big great powers. Despite the challenges their authors face, the literatures of the Global Majority are rich, diverse, and challenging; they are multilingual, multivocal, and multiversal. Rarely are these literatures sold in the same manner as blockbuster novels because of the threat they pose. And these authors recognize the danger of being subsumed into “national” or canonical literatures, as is the case with Mikel Ruíz (Tsotsil) who notes the tokenization of Indigenous literatures in Mexico (2019). READ MORE…

Printed Matter: On Enriqueta Lunez’s New Moon

March 12, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

Ambiguity across the trilingual text is a way of asserting the sovereignty of Indigenous languages in dialogue with English and Spanish.

New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik by Enriqueta Lunez, translated from the Tsotsil by Clare Sullivan, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019

Although there is an increasingly large corpus of Latin American Indigenous literature in translation, these translations seldom make it into print. While the digital medium offers advantages—global circulation, the ability to include audio and video of spoken word performances, the capacity to cheaply reproduce multilingual volumes—print remains a vital avenue for the publication of these works as in many circles it still possesses a prestige that digital lacks. Within Indigenous literary movements themselves, authors tend to set print publication of their works as an important goal, even as they clearly value digital publication as an important and effective tool that facilitates their ability to reach a global audience. Most Indigenous literatures that do make it into printed translations do so in anthologies such as Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris’s In the Language of Kings (2002), Allison Hedge Coke’s Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, or Nicolás Huet Bautista and Sean Sell’s Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories (2017).

Published in December 2019, Clare Sullivan’s translation of Tsotsil Enriqueta Lunez’s work in New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik, is perhaps only the third single-author volume of an Indigenous writer from Latin American to be published in English translation, the other two being Sullivan’s translation of Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (2015), and Nathan C. Henne’s rendering of the Kaqchikel writer Luis de Lión’s Time Commences in Xibalbá (2012). Although the publication of these works over the last decade demonstrates how little Indigenous literature has been translated and how much more work there is to be done in the area, it also shows that interest in reading these authors in translation is slowly gathering steam, as Wendy Call’s translation of selected poems by the Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, In the Belly of the Night and other Poems, is due out later this year from Pluralia. In other words, New Moon speaks to the increasing prominence of these voices in the global literary market.

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“Ch’ayonel almost means boxer, in Kaqchikel”: Translating Eduardo Halfon Into a Mayan Language

February 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Eduardo’s people and my people, Jews and Mayas, have been historically persecuted. . . So, it wasn’t that hard to get all the nuances of his story.

The work of Eduardo Halfon has been translated into English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and many other languages. However, this year, thanks to the work of educator and translator Raxche’ Rodríguez, his most celebrated short story, and the one from which his entire bibliography sprouts out, El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer) has found its way to Maya readers. Entitled Ri Aj Polo’n Ch’ayonel, Halfon’s semi-autobiographical story about a grandfather telling his grandson about the origin of the fading tattoo on his arm was published in August by Editorial Maya’ Wuj.

The result is a tiny yet gorgeous pocket version, which includes Eduardo’s original story in Spanish and Raxche’’s translation into Kaqchikel—one of the twenty-two Mayan languages recognized as official languages. With a limited run of five hundred copies, Ri Aj Polo’n Ch’ayonel is a little gem that’s now part of the impressive body of work of Eduardo Halfon, recently shortlisted for the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

I got together with Raxche’ in late November. He said he was in a hurry—his bookstore and printing and publishing house Maya’ Wuj was working double-time to finish the books commissioned for 2020’s first trimester. But after realizing the grinding of all the machines inside would keep us from hearing each other, he suggested doing the interview somewhere else.

We went out, walked past a mortuary, a park, a couple of bakeries, the national conservatoire, and found our way inside a gloomy restaurant playing jazz.

“Just so you know, I thought it’d be easy,” Raxche’ said, holding his head. “The translation; I thought it’d be easy. It was everything but,” he said, and he chuckled.

“How did this book come to be?” I said, as a waitress, as swift as a bird, laid two glasses of rosa de Jamaica on our table.

“FILGUA,” Raxche’ said. “FILGUA and Humberto Ak’abal.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 22, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Paul M. Worley, and Scott Weintraub

From the contemporary to the ancient, this week's roundup of literary news covers Argentina, Latin America, and Hong Kong.

This week, we’re taking a look at the precise and haunting work of a thrilling young Argentinian writer, celebrating and revelling in Latin American Indigenous literatures, and queuing up for a veritable mélange of literary and artistic events in the international hub of Hong Kong. It’s been a pretty good month.

Scott Weintraub, Editor-at-Large for Chile, reporting from Buenos Aires and Berlin:

On January 1, 2019, the New York Times reviewed Megan McDowell’s powerful translation of Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin’s book of short stories, Mouthful of Birds (originally titled Pájaros en la boca). In this review, the Times reveals what fans of contemporary Latin American fiction have known for years: that Schweblin’s haunting, claustrophobic writing is fascinating and addictive. Admittedly, Schweblin had previously received ample praise from critics in both the Spanish-speaking and Anglophone world. Among other accolades, we might consider: in 2010, the British magazine Granta named her a top young Spanish-language writer; Schweblin is a winner of the prestigious Juan Rulfo short story prize; she appeared on the Bogotá 39 list (2017), which lauded the top 39 Spanish-language authors under 40 years of age. READ MORE…