author: Victor Montejo
translator: David Unger
illustrator: Luis Garay
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 1999
grades 6-up
Maya
If you follow the story of the creation and
survival of the Popol Vuh —the sacred book of the Maya, one of
the oldest and most profound and influential books of the Americas—you will
also follow the trail of the creation and survival of the Maya themselves. In
the language of the K’iche’, Montejo writes in the introduction, “pop” means
“straw mat,” a Mayan metaphor for “power,” and “vuh” or “wuj,” means “paper,”
so Popol Vuh essentially means “the Book of Power.” This
sacred text was created thousands of years ago, both orally and in Maya
hieroglyphic script.
When the Spanish came to conquer, their trail of
destruction included the burning of the Mayan sacred codices. But the stories
survived in the Mayan oral tradition, and in 1558, they were again put into
writing by a young Mayan man who had learned to write the K’iche’ language in
Latin characters. The Popol Vuh was lost, found in 1701,
translated into Spanish, then lost again for more than a century, resurfaced in
1854, was taken to Europe and translated into French, lost yet again, bought
and sold a number of times, and finally found its way back to the Americas,
where it is now housed in Chicago’s Newberry Library. This surviving Popol
Vuh is written in parallel K’iche’ and Spanish, and a number of
different versions and interpretations exist.
Victor Montejo, a retired professor of Native
American Studies at the University of California at Davis, is a poet,
storyteller, human rights activist and anthropologist, studying in depth his
own Jakaltek Mayan people. After the destruction of his village of
Jakaltenango, in which Guatemalan soldiers killed his brother[1],
Montejo’s name appeared on a death squad list and he was forced to flee to the
US. Since then, his life’s work has been to make known, in a variety of ways,
both the Mayan traditional stories[2] and the continuing human
rights violations confronting the Maya. The oral stories of the Popol
Vuh, in the Jakaltek language, remain in his memory and course through his
blood.
In his adaptation of the Popol Vuh,
Montejo has made a written version of these stories accessible to children for
the first time. The stories—of gods and demigods and the creation of the
natural world—are told in four parts. The first and third parts consist of the
creation stories of the earth, the animals, and the humans. After a few false
starts—the clay people and the wooden people have to be destroyed because
neither has the ability to give proper thanks—the Creators and Makers, the
fathers and mothers of all things, settle on the corn people, who alone have
both language and limited vision.
The second part (which takes place before the
creation of the humans) tells of the adventures of Jun Junajpu and Wuqub’
Junajpu, the first set of twins, whose encounter with the Lords of
Xib’alb’a—the gods of the underworld—ends in disaster; and the twins’
descendants, Junajpu and Ixb’alanke, the Amazing Twins, who finally defeat the
Lords of Xib’alb’a—not only because they have magical powers, but also because
they’ve learned the lessons of the past and rely on the animals and insects for
information and assistance. Part Four is a narration of the founding of the
tribes, the story of the death of the first fathers, and the genealogy of the
K’iche’ kings and their descendants. The book ends with a helpful glossary of
gods, demigods, the lords of Xib’alb’a, the human world, animals, plants and
places.
Montejo’s book features an excellent translation by
Guatemalan-born writer and translator David Unger; and Spanish-speaking
children will enjoy hearing and reading Montejo’s original Spanish-language
adaptation, Popol Vuj: Libro Sagrado de los Maya (Groundwood,
1999).
Talented Nicaraguan artist Luis Garay has rendered
the full-page illustrations and several double-page spreads in deep, rich
acrylic colors, on a palette of mostly browns, greens and blues. His amazingly
detailed paintings of lush jungle scenes depict the gods and demigods, for the
most part, as ordinary-looking human beings—including the fearsome gods of
Xib’alb’a, whose only difference from everyone else is their masks. Like
traditional oral stories, Montejo’s tellings do not talk down to young readers
and listeners; rather, these vivid images and characterizations will captivate
them.
In the Popol Vuh, children learn, and
adults are reminded, not only how things came to be, but also how everything is
related; there is subtlety and complexity, and the young reader, who is assumed
to be intelligent, is gently teased into understanding what is to be understood.
I would not hesitate to read this beautiful book with younger children.
However, because of the nature of the stories, I would not assign it as
individual reading—any more than I would any other sacred text. Highly
recommended.
—Beverly Slapin
A few words about traditional stories and the Popol
Vuh
Sacred traditional stories embody and transmit the
mythos of a people: they tell of how things came to be and they relay—sometimes
directly, sometimes indirectly—instructions about right relation to the world.
For millennia, people with the kind of “oral memory” who could preserve these
stories, detail by detail, year after year, were entrusted to transmit them.
Over time, the stories have changed, yet they are still passed on, like an
original seed, from generation to generation.
As children mature, the stories grow in meaning for
them. Mayan children might ask an elder relative to tell them a particular
story, over and over, and each time they hear the story, they learn more. A
child might ask, for instance, “Grandma, tell me the one about how the mosquito
helped the Amazing Twins.” The elder does not recite a moral; to do so would be
to insult the child’s intelligence and autonomy. And it would not occur to a
child to ask what the story is supposed to teach. As children mature, they
learn. There’s plenty of time.
It’s been said that, once a traditional oral story
has been put into print, it is no longer traditional because it no longer has
the flexibility of orality. It’s also been said that, because of the centuries
of invasion and occupation of the world’s Indigenous peoples, there is probably
no totally “authentic” telling of anything anymore.
As with traditional stories such as the Popol
Vuh, there will always be questions. After the Spanish destroyed the sacred
Mayan codices, did the Catholic Church change and subvert the teachings of the Popol
Vuh? In its written form, did the Church rework the ancient story to make
it fit into their theology so that it would be easier to
convert the Maya? In Montejo’s version of the Popol Vuh, there
appear to be analogies to the Christian concepts of “virgin birth,”
“resurrection” and “hell.” Is it possible that the Popol Vuh, which
is older than Christianity, already contained these concepts? We may never
know.
—BHS
(posted 4/7/13)
[1] In his Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village (Curbstone,
1987), an eyewitness account of the army attack on his village and its tragic
aftermath, Montejo describes the daily reality of dictatorship and repression.
[2] See, for instance, El Q’anil: Man of Lightning (University
of Arizona, 2001) and The Bird Who Cleans the World and other Mayan
Fables (Curbstone, 1991).
author: Victor Montejo 
