On Translating Humberto Ak’abal

Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua received the Golden Quetzal award in 1993, and in 2004 he declined to receive the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature because it was named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, noting that his views on eugenics and assimilation “offend the indigenous population of Guatemala, of which I am part.”

What does it mean then to meet Ak’abal in English?

My initial impulse in grappling with this question is to take cues from Ak’abal himself, who notes in his poem, “The Old Song of the Blood,” that his “mother’s milk fed [him] no Castilian,” yet he translated his own work from his Indigenous K’iche’ Maya to Spanish. As he put it, “if I use this language that is not mine,/I do it as someone using a new key/to open another door and enter another world/where words have other voices.”

Such an approach holds pragmatism, certainly, but the image of language as a key offers more; it allows the poem to “entrance” the reader, as well as the reader to enter the poem.

Ak’abal’s poems possess a directness and essential simplicity that can make them a bit tantalizing to translate; there is an immediacy to the work, and a colloquial straightforwardness to the diction that can allow a reader to arrive rather quickly at an initial sense of the moment. Yet these are poems that operate in multiple registers, that keep opening doors in my mind long after I’ve read them, and there’s an ineffable quality to the work that remains elusive, a sensibility that mingles distilled images with earthy observations, often nested in musings on time and memory.

The idea of being a guest within a poem (as opposed to “hosting” it in English) resonates with me as a translator. I like particularly that the metaphor is spatial, allowing the poem to remain the little “room” of space-time that I encounter, initially, as a reader. In the case of “En el Suelo” (translated in this issue), I’m joined by a little moonlight that’s slipped in through the cracks, a fellow participant, an observer, a luminous glimmer that settles on the floor and lingers for a while.