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Ancient Classics: The Popol Vuh

Reference

The Popol Vuh - Creation and Hero Twins

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Perspectives

Popol vuh : the sacred book of the ancient Quiché Maya

This is the first complete version in English of the "Book of the People" of the Quiche Maya, the most powerful nation of the Guatemalan highlands in pre-Conquest times and a branch of the ancient Maya, whose remarkable civilization in pre-Columbian America is in many ways comparable to the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Generally regarded as America's oldest book, the Popol Vuh, in fact, corresponds to our Christian Bible, and it is, moreover, the most important of the five pieces of the great library treasures of the Maya that survived the Spanish Conquest.

Specters of Conquest

This book intervenes in transatlantic and hemispheric studies by positing "America" as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly, still are present. That apparent paradox results in a haunted America, whose conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. Readers of scholarship by transatlanticists such as Paul Gilroy and hemispherists such as Diana Taylor will find new conceptualizations here of an America that knows no geographic boundaries, whose absences are collective but not necessarily interrelated by genealogy. The five principal texts at hand - Columbus's diary of his first voyage, the Popol Vuh of the Maya-K'iche', Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. Interspersed too are shorter studies of narratives by William Carlos Williams, Rigoberta Menchú, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel García Márquez. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in narratives ostensibly contextualized by the Conquest. The book concludes by proposing that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the great American novel. After Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures, America will never seem the same.

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry

Here is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world. Editors Cecilia Vicu~na and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present a fresh and expansive selection of Latin American poetry, from the indigenous responses to the European conquest, through early feminist poetry of the 19th century, the early 20th century "Modernismo" and "Vanguardia" movements, laterrevolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the experimental, visual and oral poetries being written and performed today. Here readers will find several types of poetry typically overlooked in major anthologies, such as works written or chanted in their native languages, thevibrant mestizo (mixed) creations derived from the rich matrix of spoken language in Latin America, and even the mysterious verses written in made-up languages. In addition to the giants of Latin American poetry, such as Cesar Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Haroldo and Augustode Campos, and Gabriela Mistral, the editors have included a selection of vital but lesser known poets such as Pablo de Rohka, Blanca Varela, and Cecilia Meireles, as well as previously untranslated works by Simo n Rodriguez, Bartolome Hidalgo, Oliverio Girondo, Rosa Araneda, and many others. Inall, the anthology presents more than 120 poets, many in new translations-by poets such as Jerome Rothengerg, W.S. Merwin, and Forrest Gander-specially commissioned for this anthology, and each accompanied by a biographical note. The book features both English and original language versions of thepoems, a full bibliography, and an introduction by the editors. Sure to stand as the definitive anthology for decades to come, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry remaps the territory, offering new ways of looking at a poetry as diverse and complex as Latin America itself.

The Maya and the Popol Vuh