A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ but rather it absorbs them, stripping them of their philosophical and religious cores. This approach assimilates K’iche’-Mayan epistemology within the Christian one, which constitutes a strategy of making the former disappear, given that the validating reference is Western, not native. This recognition is gained only to the degree to which it resembles the paradigm brought by colonizers and perpetuated by the Creole-ladino elite, not by its own distinct values.

In Guatemala, in 1927, J. Antonio Villacorta and Flavio Rodas published Manuscrito de Chichicastenango (Popol-Buj). Villacorta was a historian, anthropologist, linguist, and paleographer, who also had a turn in the administration of the state as Minister of Culture during the government of General Jorge Ubico (1913–44). Flavio Rodas, native of Chichicastenango, was familiar with K’iche’ vocabulary, but in Edmonson’s judgment had serious grammatical limitations (1971: x). This was the second bilingual edition of the Popol Wuj, and in it the authors used a new orthography, rephoneticizing the text to adapt it to modern Castilian prosody. Nevertheless, the element of this version that had the most impact was the theme of the native speaker as competent authority to handle the language of the Ximénez manuscript. From here onward, the legitimate voice is to be that of the native. But it was the open debate over this edition that started the concern over fidelity to the original K’iche’ text.

      This bilingual edition marks the start of the indigenist phase of Popol Wuj studies, which coincides with indigenism as a movement that opened the way in the intellectual climate of Central America during the 1920s and 1930s. This movement sought a national inheritance for Guatemala, and the Popol Wuj fit this ambition very well because it recovered a “soul” that had sunk deep into the past. The Prehistoria e historia antigua de Guatemala that Antonio Villacorta published in 1938 is along these lines. But at the same time, this interest in a “glorious” indigenous past became disconnected from the reality of the natives of the twentieth century. For Villacorta, and in general Guatemalan indigenism, the indigenous reality belonged to a pre-Columbian past and did not have any projection into contemporary history. Therefore, the Popol Wuj was read as a “classical text” – that is, something of interest and competence to intellectuals.

      Adrián Recinos, another of the founding members of the Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, published for the first time in 1947 what has been the most widely distributed translation within the Spanish language. He had been working on it for many years, obtaining the highest fidelity with the meaning of the manuscript. Recinos, knowing that in 1928 Walther Lehmann had rediscovered the bilingual manuscript of Father Ximénez (Schultze Jena, 1944: iv), visited the Newberry Library. There he worked with the Ximénez original and put aside the Brasseur version, avoiding following in the footsteps of Noah Eliécer Pohorilles (1913), Georges Raynaud (1925), and Villacorta y Rodas (1927).

      This translation, indigenist in philosophy and documented academically in his implementation, was very important because it allowed a wide distribution of the text among the intellectual community and middle-class Creoles and ladinos, who in general were strongly racist in Guatemala. The elegant prose of Recinos gave access to the Popol Wuj locally in the same way that the translation into French (Brasseur, 1861; Raynaud, 1925) and German (Pohorilles, 1913; Schultze Jena, 1944) had done in Europe. It must also be noted that the wide impact that this work had both within and outside of Guatemala is due also to the important work of distribution undertaken by the Fondo de Cultura Económica de México. This publisher incorporated the text, which was previously virtually unknown to the entire continent, in a deliberate effort to promote a sense of national, regional, and Latin American cultural identity.

However, even in this era of modernity, marked by scientific discourse and indigenism, many of the contradictions and ambiguities that had arisen during Spanish colonialism persisted.

      Globalization versus Mayan Resurgence

      “Globalization” spans from the height of the Cold War to the present. Among the K’iche’ this period of history has continued to be very turbulent and tragic time. There was a departure from the historical, sociological, and judicial discussion that characterized the governing periods of Juan José Arévalo (1944–50) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951–4), who had been active participants in the implementation of fairer policies with the indigenous people, and the region slipped directly into civil war. The dictatorship of Coronel Castillo Armas launched a strategy of isolation and repression of the natives, using as excuses the paradoxical outcome of the indigenist policies of the Arévalo and Arbenez governments and the simplistic arguments of Cold War doctrines imported directly from the army and ultraconservative sectors. Between 1960 and 1980 these elites also developed a policy of appropriating land and exploiting indigenous workers that progressively transformed itself into a campaign of extermination perpetrated by the elite and the army, both predominately ladino.

      The failure to recognize native rights generated responses from indigenous communities by diverse political groups, generally leftist, various churches (some postconciliar sectors of the Catholic Church and some liberal Protestant churches), and some activist groups with indigenous roots. From this movement guerrilla groups arose – never very numerous – Grupos de Base (a Catholic-inspired organization, with much influence from liberation theology), social movements and unions (mostly on plantations and farms), and groups for the recovery of language and traditions.

      The repression led by the army against this widespread movement was called a “civil war” despite the fact that the vast majority of those killed or missing were unarmed civilians. In fact it was an ethnic war against natives, especially the K’iche’ (83 percent of the victims from 1962–96 were Mayans, and of those almost 50 percent were K’iche’, according to a report from Proyecto Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica). The worst period was under the dictatorship of General Efraín Ríos Montt, from 1982–3, with genocide that continued almost until the end of the decade. The K’iche’s refer to those years as “the time of violence.”

      In the midst of these collapses and the repositioning of hegemonies at world and regional levels, reinterpretations of the Popol Wuj continued. One of the topics of debate was how to resolve the issue of the translations; the other was about the influences and eventual appropriations to which the text might be subjected, whether from political, religious, cultural (endo- or exo-ethnic), or other types of organizations or institutions.

Continuing in pursuit of a faithful recuperation of the K’iche’ text, in 1955 Dora M. de Burgess and Patricio Xec published a new K’iche’ version in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, with the backing of the evangelical church. According to Paulo Burgess, a missionary at the church, the goal was to return to the natives the right to read “their sacred book” in their own language and not in the Castilian of Recinos (1955: iii). The missionary believed that the publication could illuminate some of the aspects missed by the “savants,” owing to the fact that Patricio Xec Cuc had gone over the vocabulary with young students at the Instituto Bíblico Quiché from all over the K’iche’ region (ibid.).

      In 1962 Antonio Villacorta wrote a second edition of the manuscript, this time translated word-for-word in a hyper-textualist approach, seeking complete semantic “purism.” He calls it “Crestomatía Quiché” – that is, a collection of writings chosen with educational aims, which seems to suggest the importance he gave to the dissemination of the text amongst the newer generations of Guatemalans.

      After having worked from 1945 on the rephoneticization of Mayan writing and having created special characters to represent the phonemes of the language, in 1977 Adrián Inés Chávez published a new version of the Pop-Wuj (Libro de Acontecimientos, or Book of Events). In 1997 he reedited it under the title Pop Wuj. Libro del Tiempo (Book of Time). It is a translation in four columns: a literal transcription, a phoneticized transcription, a literal translation in Castilian, and a Castilian version employing syntactical СКАЧАТЬ