Seven Poems by Humberto Ak’abal

Translator’s Statement

Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) was a K’iche’ Mayan poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala. The highlands are lush, with mountains covered in cloud forest, the trees draped with bromeliads and furred with moss, well adapted to taking a sip from the sideways-drifting morning fog. The connection to place in Ak’abal’s work is palpable; the language seems to arise from the land itself, where stones speak, wooden benches remember being trees, and there is laughter in a rain shower. As Ak’abal himself said: “My words hold the dampness of rain, /the tears of morning dew, and it cannot /be otherwise, because they were / brought down from the mountain.”

This connection to land via language calls to mind the great epic of the K’iche’ Maya, 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.” An entire theory of language is embedded in this mythic moment, when words are not labels, like post-it notes, to be affixed to what they name. In this cosmogony of the K’iche’, words are a form of energy—tethered intrinsically to the thing they call forth—and as such they are not imposed by humans upon the landscape, but instead uncovered through careful listening and observation of the world around us.

Given language’s ability to summon, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the Popol Vuh’s ultimate test of what makes people truly human is their ability to name, with accuracy and gratitude, the ones who brought them into being and the place from which they come.

Ak’abal’s work does just this, with clarity and subtlety. It has an essential, almost elemental simplicity that can make it a bit tantalizing to translate. There is an immediacy to the poems, and a colloquial straightforwardness to the diction that allows the reader to quickly grasp the initial sense of the moment. Yet, there is an ineffable quality to the work that remains elusive, a sensibility that mixes playful, earthy observations with musings on time and memory that evoke Heraclitus: “watching how the water leaves / and how the river stays.”

Given that, for the most part, Ak’abal wrote in K’iche’ and then translated himself into Spanish, there is a duality to his poetry with different cadences bridging the colonial divide with a contraconquista energy. So, there is a completely different cultural syntax at play here. K’iche’ Maya has no verb to be. Past, present and future often coexist simultaneously and dream and memory intermingle. This may feel strange to a sensibility marinated in a sequential construct of time.

Ak’abal’s work is widely known in Guatemala and has been translated into over a dozen languages. His book, Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall), received the Golden Quetzal award from the association of Guatemalan Journalists. In 2004, he declined to receive the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature because it was named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, whom Ak’abal accused of encouraging racism. And claimed that his views on eugenics and assimilation: “offend the indigenous population of Guatemala, of which I am part.” In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

I’m grateful to his family, particularly his wife Mayulí, for their support and encouragement in this endeavor. My hope is that these translations might help Ak’abal’s poems find a broader audience in English so that readers might, as Carlos Montemayor put it, “penetrate that other reality that we do not know, and understand. . .that this indigenous soul lives and breathes in our own reality at the same time as our time, with the same life as our life, loving and understanding the same continent that we love but do not understand.”