Update (4/2/2026): “Ri ubix ulew” has now been published online by Translation Review.
My essay, “Ri ubix ri ulew: Translating Humberto Ak’abal between Languages and Worlds,” has been accepted for publication in the journal Translation Review. The article analyzes the differences between K’iche’ and Spanish versions of poems by Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal, highlighting linguistic and epistemic differences across languages and communities in contemporary Guatemala. The article also highlights Ak’abal’s own theory of language and translation, and the importance of Guatemala’s recent history of violence and genocide for Ak’abal’s life and work. The publication will also include original English translations of Ak’abal’s poems produced in collaboration with Pablo Francisco Hernandez of Cantel, Guatemala.
This paragraph sums up the essay’s thesis:
Each poem has been chosen to illustrate the distinctions between the Spanish and K’iche’ versions of the original texts, both written by Humberto Ak’abal. I argue here that these differences are not incidental to Ak’abal’s unique style of dualistic artistic production, as a poet who wrote simultaneously in K’iche’ and Spanish. Rather, linguistic disparity is essential to Ak’abal’s practice as a poet and intellectual who wrote as a member of Guatemala’s Maya population and an advocate for their linguistic and cultural inheritance. Ak’abal’s insistence on the distinctiveness of K’iche’ in comparison with Spanish and other European languages has been labeled as “strategic primitivism” with real but limited political usefulness.[i] This essay will argue that it is better understood as an artistic project that deliberately accentuates the sense of language itself as a practice drawing together incommensurable but nonetheless communicable worlds. This artistic project also conveys a social project, but one that aims beyond essentialism to renew Maya culture and reckon with the ongoing violence and dispossession of indigenous cultures in the modern world.
[i] Barrett, “Ideophones,” 415.