On “Versions from the Popol Vuh: An Excerpt”

This is an English version of the opening of the Popol Vuh, or Popol Wuj, as it’s known locally. The phrase means something like “Council Book” in K’iche’, and it’s one of the oldest books in the Americas. It tells the story of how the world was made, and how everything came to be. A book-length poem, if that's the word, retelling stories that had been passed down for generations. Retellings that were written down in the mid-sixteenth century, in K’iche’ but in the Latin alphabet, by a small group of cultural guardians whose names are lost to us. They were putting these words down in response to the decimation of their culture by European colonists, particularly Christian missionaries, who were flooding K’iche’ territories. Any original text in K’iche’ hieroglyphics—a system of writing they’d developed more than fifteen hundred years before the Spanish showed up—was destroyed by zealous priests, or lost. And the version that they wrote down in K’iche’ in the Latin alphabet was kept from European eyes for one hundred and fifty years before a priest in the early eighteenth century was allowed to borrow it and copy it down, making alongside it a Spanish translation. The text he copied from has since been lost, though it might still be hidden in the highlands of Guatemala. Any English version is an echo of an echo. Part of what makes them feel so urgent, these stories of beginnings, is that they were being transcribed in a time of endings. Into the alphabet of the invaders. With apocalypse in the air. The K’iche’ live to this day in southwestern Guatemala.