Hotel Real de Minas
Camino Viejo Al Panteón 1
San Antonio
33700 San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico
Often referred to as the “oldest book in America,” the Popol Vuh is known by many names: The Book of the People, The Council Book, the Sacred Book of the Maya. Carlos Fuentes even referred to it as “the Mayan Bible.” But the K’iche’ etymology of the name offers an image richer than any of these approximations: the words “Popol Vuh” derive, literally, from “the book of the woven mat,” a metaphor elegant in its simplicity. The story serves as a meeting place, a mat where people gather to hear its truth be told.
As it has many names, the Popol Vuh is also many things: it is a work of startling cosmic perspective, a masterpiece of world literature, a founding myth of the Americas, a heroic epic embedded into the cocoon of a creation story, the seeds of a cosmology, and so on. But first and foremost, the Popol Vuh is a rattling good story. In this workshop, students will engage the delights of the Popol Vuh in a brand-new verse translation by Michael Bazzett, the first in the English language, so that the myth can now “sing for our time too.”
Michael Bazzett
Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named one a New York Times Best Book of 2018. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, and Best New Poets. He is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives in Minneapolis.
By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.