#dennis tedlock

[leehallfae]

“in the sky, on the earth, / the four sides, the four corners, as it is said, / by the maker, modeler, / mother-father of life, of humankind, / giver of breath, giver of heart, / bearer, upbringer in the light that lasts / of those born in the light, begotten in the light; / worrier, knower of everything, whatever there is: / sky-earth, lake-sea.”

— popol vuh: the mayan book of the dawn of life (trans. dennis tedlock)

[dijeh]

Popol Vuh

trans. Dennis Tedlock

[dijeh]

Popol Vuh

trans. Dennis Tedlock

[dijeh]

Popol Vuh

trans. Dennis Tedlock

[leehallfae]

“we tend to think of myth and history as being in conflict with each other, but the authors of […] the alphabetic text of the popol vuh treated the mythic and historical parts of their narratives as belonging to a single, balanced whole. by their sense of proportion, the egyptian book of the dead would need a second half devoted to human deeds in the land of the living, and the hebrew testament would need a first half devoted to events that took place before the fall of adam and eve. […]

to this day the quiché maya think of dualities in general as complementary rather than opposed, interpenetrating rather than mutually exclusive. instead of being in logical opposition to one another, the realms of divine and human actions are joined by a mutual attraction. […] for mayans, the presence of a divine dimension in narratives of human affairs is not an imperfection but a necessity, and it is balanced by a necessary human dimension in narratives of divine affairs.”

— dennis tedlock, introduction, popol vuh: the mayan book of the dawn of life (trans. dennis tedlock)

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Happy birthday to Dennis Tedlock, born this day 19 June 1939!

Tedlock was a poet and translator of Mayan culture. He was associated with ethnopoetics and the general convergence of anthropology and literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a convergence some found freeing and others considered decadent. Here is one of them (the poems, that is):

The Two Of Them

The Zuni

& the anthropologist

walk a narrow road

to the tip of the mesa

to see the Hopi Snake Dance

between two sheer drops

the Zuni says

to the anthropologist

— Both sides!

You jump one way

& I’ll jump the other.

picture via Roam Agency

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Dennis Tedlock, via D.A. Larue

[carlilly-blog]

Popol Vuh: the Mayan book of the dawn of life

Translators Preface:

My work took me not only into darkcorners of libraries but into the forests and tall cornfields and smoky houses of highland Guatemala, where the people who speak and walk and work in the pages of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche Maya, have hundreds of thousands of descendants. Among them are diviners called "daykeepers," who know how to interpret illnesses, omens, dreams, messages given by sensations internal to their own bodies, and the multiple rhythms of time. It is their business to bring what is dark into "white clarity," just as the gods of the Popol Vuh first brought the world itself to light.

What most worries daykeepers about people from Europe, and specifically about missionaries, is that they confuse the Earth, whose divinity is equal to that of the celestial God, with the devil. As daykeepers put it, 

"He who makes an enemy of the Earth makes an enemy of his own body."