In the Translator's Workshop: Featuring Michael Bazzett on the Poetry of K’iche’ Maya poet, Humberto Ak’abal
- Michael Bazzett
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Amit Majmudar, George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism
George Steiner wrote one of the most perceptive books we have on translation and based its title on one of our most profound parables on ambition and communication: After Babel. As a sometime translator myself, I know first hand the Babel-like misunderstandings that bedevil all those who would dismantle and rebuild a tower of words.
I am aware, accordingly, of the poet-translator’s background sense of the endeavor’s futility, one that writers have lamented for hundreds of years. In Don Quixote (quoted here in John Rutherford’s translation), the priest who helps burn Quixote’s books of chivalry remarks, “...He [the translator] left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.”
As Cervantes notes, a translator’s problems compound specifically with poetry, so deeply dependent on nuances and idiosyncrasies in the language of its composition. Readers rarely learn about the “inside baseball” behind a translator’s choices and sacrifices, about dilemmas of etymology and connotation, about the slippages between counterpart, counterfeit words. In poetry translation, when it’s done correctly, no detail is too pedantic, no feature of syntax or diction is irrelevant, and no choice is trivial.
I reached out to poets who translate from languages or cultures far afield from English: Norse, Russian, Ki’che’ Maya (Castilian), Chinese, Sanskrit. I asked the poet-translators to focus on a line or stanza and share the nitty-gritty of moving poetry between the original and English. This series features the translators' mini-essays, showing us how much thought and hard work go into what poetry translators do.
Amit Majmudar
MICHAEL BAZZETT: On the Poetry of K’iche’ Maya poet, Humberto Ak’abal
Translating the poetry of K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal can sometimes feel like trying to grab a beam of sunlight. It comes through the window so clearly—so solidly, even—landing bright and clean-edged on the floor, yet no matter how carefully you try to grasp it, or peel it away, you come up empty-handed.
Or perhaps a handful of moonlight would be more apt, given it’s an image offered by Ak’abal himself:
EN EL SUELO
La luna
busca algún agujero
en las casas de adobes
entra
y se sienta en el suelo.
The single sentence of the poem, translated straightforwardly from Spanish, might read:
The moon / looks for any little hole / in the adobe houses, /enters, / and sits on the ground.
Or it might read:
The moon / seeks holes / in houses of adobe, / comes in, / and sits on the floor.
Or:
The moon / looks for holes / in the adobe houses, / enters / and sits down on the ground.
The plainspoken register here is typical of Ak’abal. His poems often read as succinct proverbs. And so I was drawn to a colloquial yet somewhat terse English in my translation, seeking to echo both the matter-of-fact tone and its syntactical snugness:
ON THE FLOOR
The moon
finds holes
in adobe houses
then slips in
to sit on the floor.
The essence of this poem, as it lands on my ear, (and in my mind’s eye) is that animate moonlight. This is what spurs my little moments of disobedience. Tweaking the verbs is an attempt to highlight the agency of the moon, while also heightening the universality of Ak’abal’s observation, (as is quietly suggested by the plurality of “las casas de adobes”). I’m trying to translate the poem, instead of the words. Thus the steady unblinking eye in the night sky not only looks for/seeks (buscar) any little opening, but inevitably finds it, then slips in and sits down. The hinge of the “and” in Spanish is traded for the propulsion of a “then” to quietly amplify this momentum.
By the end of the poem, I feel its universality has become wondrously and anecdotally specific (as is intimated by the singularity of “agujero”); it only takes one little crack to let in such light. Though the moon has been peering through the openings in earthen houses for centuries, this instance offers a renewed image, one located in a consciousness I’m happy to be inhabiting—and one that never announces itself through the personal pronoun “I,” letting the moonlight take the reins.
Ak’abal is a master of brevity, his insights often arriving with a disarming swiftness (much like that moonlight), yet his poems serve as apertures into much larger spaces, so that a reader soon finds themself wandering rooms and stanzas marked by his acute vision, his empathy, his incisive critiques and irreverence, his aphoristic wisdom. I feel my mind wandering, in the best senses of the word, when I’m inside his poetry. The poems themselves can feel less like semantic constructions than ways of seeing, echoing Jorge Luis Borges’s observation: “Poetry is not the poem, for the poem may be nothing more than a series of symbols.” Ak’abal’s poetry often lives and resonates in the silences around the work, in the emptiness of the page. Silence is one of the tools he employs to say the unsayable.
This use of silence is particularly resonant given the larger place it holds in Ak’abal’s work, i.e. the invisibility, dispossession, erasure, and deafening silence that accompanied his indigeneity. Ak’abal identified powerfully as K’iche’ Maya, writing extensively in his indigenous tongue, as well as composing in Spanish (which he referred to as Castilian), liberally translating himself in both directions. He once commented on this linguistic fluidity in an interview: “I sometimes write when I’m far from my village, so what moves me, what I see, I write in Castilian. Meanwhile, when I’m in my village, I inevitably write in my mother tongue, the Mayan K’iche’, because only in it can I find the necessary elements I need to convey what I feel. One doesn't conflict with the other; I have it within me, and it’s a practically natural way of speaking” (Huamán Mori 2010).
This fluidity feels instructive, especially when contemplating what it means to translate poems that already live in two bodies. Or what it means to inhabit poems, bridged, as they are, between an indigenous language and a colonial one. In pondering such questions, I took my cues from Ak’abal himself, whose poem “The Old Song of the Blood” speaks to this tension directly, when he says of Castilian:
Esta lengua es el recuerdo de un dolor y la hablo sin temor ni vergüen zaporque fue comprada con la sangre de mis ancestros.
This language holds the memory of pain, and I speak it without fear or shame because it was paid for with the blood of my ancestors.
That verb “fue comprada”—bought, earned, paid for—powerfully embodies Ak’abal’s claim of title, yet also offers a sort of transcendence: I can choose to use this tongue as I see fit. The poem continues:
And if I use this language that is not mine, I do it as someone using a new key to open another door and enter another world where words have other voices, a different way of feeling the earth.
I hear echoes of the linguistic fluidity noted in his interview here, where his usage of language is rooted in place, an extension of both geography and context, where words can have “other voices” and “a different way of feeling the earth.” The word isn’t so much signifier, then, but the energy and animacy it carries. Ak’abal’s image of language as a key offers even a bit more: it uses the claimed tongue to gain egress into other worlds, opening a doorway for the poem to make its entrance into the reader (much like that moonlight, yes?) as well as allowing the reader to enter the poem, and thus be entranced in both senses of the word.
Michael Bazzett is a poet and teacher. He is the author of five full-length poetry collections, two chapbooks, and two books of poetry-in-translation. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, Guernica, Copper Nickel, The Sun, Tin House and 32 Poems, among others. His verse translation of the Mayan creation epic The Popol Vuh (Milkweed Editions, 2018) was longlisted for the 2019 National Translation Awards and named one of the best books of poetry in 2018 by The New York Times. His translations of Humberto Ak’abal’s poetry include If Today Were Tomorrow (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and selections published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Latin American Literature Today, Poetry Northwest, and The Common.
