Seedbank

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 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, 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.

"My language was born among trees, it holds the taste of earth; my ancestors' tongue is my home." -from "The Old Song of the Blood" A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak'abal, a K'iche' Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala. Featuring both Ak'abal's Spanish translations from the indigenous K'iche' and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango-mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak'abal's unpretentious verse models a contraconquista-counter-conquest-perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. "In church," he writes, "the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews." Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it. Attuned, uncompromising, Ak'abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation-in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers "tell us / what earth is like / on the inside." Even in the birds, who "sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying." At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K'iche' indigeneity and Ak'abal's lifetime of work.