Siete poemas/Wuqub’ taq pach’umtzij

Rosa Chávez is one of the most prominent indigenous poets from Latin America. She is of mixed Maya background—the daughter of a K’iche’ father and a Kaqchikel mother—which she describes as “being of two hearts.” She was born in Guatemala in 1980, at the height of the state’s genocide of Maya communities, and spent her formative years with her father’s family in El Quiché, the department most impacted by the repression. In a country where clothing and language, as opposed to skin color, are the primary markers of racial difference between indigenous people and westernized Ladinos (non-indigenous people), her family chose not to teach her their Maya languages. They hoped that developing a command of Spanish would ensure her safety and afford her better opportunities. After the Guatemalan Peace Accords were signed in 1996, she moved to Guatemala City, where she began a long process of, in her words, “reconstituting my identity as a Maya woman.” Writing poetry became an important way for her to express and reclaim “what I had lost”: Maya spirituality, practices, and K’iche’, the paternal language that she grew up hearing.

All but the last poem are from El corazón de la piedra/Ri uk'u'x ri ab'aj (Heart of the Stone, 2010), which Chávez views as a direct product of her search for identity. This collection explores Maya tradition and cultural continuity, and provides a complex and expansive portrayal of Maya women. The book was published in a bilingual format, with translations into K’iche’ by her colleague Wel Raxulew “to name and show that indigenous languages and communities are alive.” Reading K’iche’ translations of her work aloud during her literary performances is one of the ways Chávez continues to reclaim her paternal language. Although I translate her work primarily from the Spanish, I consider the K’iche’ versions of short poems that Chávez says she conceived of in K’iche’, those most rooted in the Maya cosmovision, and in places where there are multiple possible meanings. The English translation process has been highly collaborative and is ongoing. I meet with the author to discuss every poem, and she provides context and answers the questions I have.

“Los ojos de los desaparecidos” (“The eyes of the disappeared”) features an epigraph with the words of Chávez’s grandfather. His son Enrique, the poet’s uncle, was one of thousands of people forcibly disappeared by the state.

In “En las líneas de nuestras manos” (“In our palm lines”), the speaker draws on notions of destiny and imagery related to corn, both central to Maya cosmovision, to express her desire. Corn is a staple food and sacred symbol because, according to the Popol Vuh, the gods and the grandmother Xmucane created the first humans (four men and four women) from corn. The four colors of corn correspond to the four cardinal directions, which are in turn associated with the universe. Corn also serves as a symbol of rebirth, the cycle of life and death. When the hero twins of the Popol Vuh, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, depart from their grandmother’s house, they plant corn so that she may know they are safe. If the crop dies, they have died, and when it grows again then they have revived.

In the second line of the poem, the Spanish elote refers to a fresh and tender state of the cob, when it is often boiled, and the mazorca refers to a ripe and hardened state, when the corn is used to make tortillas. English does not offer such a rich variety of words specific to corn and its texture, so I opted for the recognizable images of “cobs” and “ears.”

Another image that recurs in Chávez’s poetry is the snake, which is also connected to rebirth because of its regular shedding of skin. In “Patoja de piel invertida” (“Queer-skinned girl”), a young woman’s sexual life follows this same cycle of renewal. The Spanish invertido/a, (literally, flipped or inside-out; derived from nineteenth-century sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s theory of “sexual inversion”) is a pejorative for same-sex desire in many Latin American countries. After speaking with the poet, I chose to use “queer” because she also had other dissident sexualities in mind, and it is a term that she identifies with (cuir in Spanish).

Snakes make a reappearance in “Que mi corazón florezca” (“May my heart bloom”). The beginning of this poem mentions nij, a natural dye that is traditionally made by combining the body fat of nij (llaveia axin), orange-colored insects, with the ashes of different tree species. This dye is usually black, but can also be yellow or red, and is used to decorate calabash gourds and rattles that are then carved to represent quotidian and mythological scenes.

The final poem, “Ut’z Baby,” code-switches between Guatemalan Spanish (in the highly intimate vos form of address) and K’iche’, and incorporates words imported from the United States. Rejecting identarian borders and assumed power structures, the speaker takes control of a romantic encounter and tells her kaxlan (Ladino, non-Maya) lover how to kiss her. This poem was originally published in Uk’u’x kaj, uk’u’x ulew: Antología de poesía maya guatemalteca contemporánea, edited by Emilio del Valle Escalante [Emil Keme] (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2010).