The Popol Vuh

One of the New York Times’s Ten Best Poetry Books of the Year: A “superb” translation into verse of the Mayan epic (Literary Review).

A World Literature Today Notable Translation

In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.

This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, “the book of the woven mat,” one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted by the K’iche’ people of Guatemala, before being translated into prose—and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett—this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as “the phonetic rendering of a living pulse.”

By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this striking new translation of The Popol Vuh—the first in the Seedbank series of world literature—breathes new life into an essential tale.

“Mr. Bazzett’s translation offers a welcome path into the power of The Popol Vuh as beautiful literature. [He] writes that his intent was to create a more accessible source for students, ‘a version of the myth they could disappear into, a verse version that truly sang.’ He has succeeded.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The book, as a whole?containing an authentic and transparent translator’s introduction, the creation epic itself, and a reader’s companion?should be incorporated into every literary translation program.” —Literary Review

© 2018 Milkweed Editions (Ebook): 9781571319180

Translators: Michael Bazzett

Release date

Ebook: 9 October 2018