Tag: Translation

Ri ubix ri ulew: Translating Humberto Ak’abal between Languages and Worlds

 

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.

Miguel Ángel Asturias, Week-end en Guatemala

Amazon.com: Week-end en Guatemala (Spanish Edition) eBook : Asturias, Miguel Ángel: Tienda Kindle

Week-end en Guatemala

I’ve just signed a contract with Verso Books to translate this wonderful book, Week-end en Guatemala, by Miguel Ángel Asturias (Weekend in Guatemala in my translation). Written in the immediate aftermath of the US-sponsored overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the book conveys the white-hot fury set off by these events that would fuel Guatemala’s civil war, and Latin American’s Cold War, for decades to come.

When Asturias won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967, publishers considered translating this book to introduce an English-speaking audience to his work. Given the Cold War, Asturias’s dubious politics as critic of US imperialism, and his recent winning of the Lenin Prize from the Soviet Union, this book was considered too hot to touch. Instead, Americans were introduced to El Señor President and Hombres de Maiz, as well as the less critically well-received Banana Trilogy.

Week-end is a perfect distillation of Asturias’s style, displaying his strident anti-imperialism alongside his well-known (and controversial) indigenism that has brought criticism from Guatemala’s Maya population for claiming to speak for them. While still characterized by Asturias’s fanciful depiction of indigenous people, Week-end makes the indigenous population the heroes of the story, who rise up and overthrow the US-installed government in the name of democracy. While much has changed since Asturias wrote this book, his description of indigenous resistance bears striking similarities to the 2023 indigenous rebellion that protected Guatemala’s fragile democracy from elite attempts to subvert the will of the country’s indigenous population.