Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya - Mesoweb

oom and give them a living voice. Such power must be approached with great seriousness,
and all care taken to be faithful to their original ideas in any transcription or translation. At
the end of our work sessions, he politely dismissed the gods and ancestors involved in that
day’s reading with his thanks and asked pardon for any offense we might have given.
Most of the people who lived on the American continents prior to the arrival of
Europeans lacked a written script. Even in Mesoamerica, where there was a long tradition of
hieroglyphic writing among some of the ancient cultures of the region, such as the Maya and
Zapotecs, other neighboring cultures preserved their history and theology principally through
the spoken word, passed from generation to generation. This was true even of highly
sophisticated cultures such as the Aztecs, whose painted texts relied primarily on a rebus or
picture form of writing incapable of recording abstract ideas phonetically. Yet the concept of
oral poetry held by the Aztecs is exemplary of the view of such discourse throughout
Mesoamerica, including the Maya.
For the ancient Aztecs the highest form of sacred communication was poetry, what they
called xochicuicatl (“flower-song”). These were delicately beautiful hymns meant to be recited
orally, often to musical accompaniment. In paintings, Aztec poets are depicted with speech
scrolls issuing from their mouths. These scrolls are often colored a rich blue or green,
symbolic of the precious nature of the poets’ words as if they were composed of jade or
sacred quetzal feathers. Aztecs looked upon poetry as the actualization of a creative act
inspired by divinites who were called upon to be present at the performance. Thus the poet
Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin of Tecamachalco believed that his songs came from heaven, but
lamented that his own words could not express them as they came undefiled from the gods:
From within the heavens they come,
The beautiful flowers, the beautiful songs.
Our longing spoils them,
Our inventiveness makes them lose their fragrance. (León-Portilla 1980, 257)
Such songs exist only at the moment of their performance, their sound hanging briefly in
the air, then fading to silence. It is only when they are spoken that they reveal their divine
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