Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya - Mesoweb

intended to conjure up an image in the mind, to give new life and breath to the gods and
heroes each time the story was read. The beauty of the work depends not only on the story
itself, but on how the story is told. As Munro Edmonson points out, Mayan texts are meant
to be “read and pondered rather than skimmed over” (Edmonson 1982, xiii).
Yet the beauty of Quiché poetry may sound awkward and repetitive when translated into
European languages. Some translators in the past have ignored or failed to recognize the
poetic nature of the Popol Vuh, particularly its use of parallelism, and have tried to improve
its seemingly purposeless redundancy by eliminating words, phrases, and even whole
sections of text which they deemed unnecessary. While this unquestionably helps to make
the story flow more smoothly, in keeping with our modern taste for linear plot structure, it
detracts from the character of Quiché high literature. Welch points out that “in many ancient
contexts, repetition and even redundancy appear to represent the rule rather than the
exception” (Welch 1981, 12).
The first modern scholar to recognize parallelism in Maya literature was Sir J. Eric
Thompson, who noticed that Precolumbian hieroglyphic texts seemed to contain redundant
glyphs. Because the ancient Yucatec Maya books of Chilam Balam have similar redundancies,
he concluded that these parallel glyphs were intended as a “flowing harmony,” and were
“interpolated to improve the cadence of a passage” (Thompson 1950, 61-62).
Miguel León-Portilla was the first translator to arrange portions of Quiché and Yucatec
Maya documents into poetic verse (León-Portilla 1969, 51-55, 75, 92-93). His recognition of
the literary nature of Maya texts was a significant advance over previous translations which
virtually ignored the presence of poetry. Nevertheless, his criteria for separating individual
poetic lines, or cola, was somewhat haphazard, and he failed to recognize the presence of
most forms of parallelism in the text.
In his translation of the Popol Vuh, Munro Edmonson arranges the entire text into parallel
couplets. He asserts that “the Popol Vuh is primarily a work of literature, and it cannot be
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