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Milkweed Poetry
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Translator
Michael Bazzett
Length
1 hour 44 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Michael Bazzett & Magdalena Kaluza
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Learn more“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.
Humberto Ak’abal (1952–2019) was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named book of the year by Association of Guatemalan Journalists and received their Golden Quetzal award in 1993. In 2004, he declined to receive the Guatemala National Prize in Literature because it is named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, whom Ak’abal accused of encouraging racism. Ak’abal, a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, passed away on January 28, 2019.
Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry by the New York Times. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.
Magdalena Kaluza spends much of their time organizing people power towards a world where life comes first, and where everyone’s needs are met. A Maya K’iche’ and Polish/French-Canadian queer punk, Magdalena was raised between Phillips, South Minneapolis and Guatemala. Magdalena loves cooking, dancing, playing with their partner & stepkid, and making poetry, puppetry, and art about a world healed and free.
Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry by the New York Times. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.
Reviews
Praise for If Today Were Tomorrow
“These poems by a K’iche’ Maya writer—translated from K’iche’ to Spanish by the poet, then to English by Michael Bazzett—are odes to Guatemala’s landscape: a bird who sings for rain, a “humpbacked tree,” moonlight on adobe.” —New York Times Book Review
“Ak’abal hints at a landscape more vivid and palpable than what the eye can behold, one that is located deep in the folds of a thought.”— Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Blog
“These poems are seeds, compact, succinct, stunningly rich, and containing more than meets the eye. They feel timeless in their embrace of the inheritance of the past, the urgency of the present, and a forward leaning gaze of the future. Each poem contains the key components to conveying the subject at hand and allow the full resonance and understanding to take root from the distilled, vital droplet of a poem. Bazzett has made a perennial garden of Ak’abal’s work that will sing through many seasons of readers.”—Claire Jussel, West Trade Review
“Ak’abal, drawing on the animated symbolism of his tradition, mixes a rawness with a passionate precision. The poems have occasion beyond observation.”—Jesse Nathan, Poetry Society of America
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