If Today Were Tomorrow
Poems
Humberto Ak'abal author Michael Bazzett translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Milkweed Editions
Published:8th Aug '24
Should be back in stock very soon
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“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.
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
Praise for The Popol Vuh
“Milkweed’s Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
“For nonscholars, the first test of any translation is simply whether it’s pleasurable to read, and Bazzett’s limpid, smoothly paced version is more than satisfying on that score. And it’s a good thing to be reminded, perhaps especially now, and perhaps especially by a text originating in Guatemala, that ‘However many nations / live in the world today, / however many countless people, / they all had but one dawn.’”—New York Times, Best Poetry of 2018
“Mr. Bazzett’s translation offers a welcome path into the power of The Popol Vuh as beautiful literature. . . . [his] arrangement and format give the work its own authentic-sounding rhythm and cadence, something that is lost a bit in the recent scholarly editions. . . . Mr. Bazzett writes that his intent was to create a more accessible source for students, ‘a version of the myth they could disappear into, a verse version that truly sang.’ He has succeeded.”—Wall Street Journal
“With Bazzett’s translation, The Popol Vuh has been reincarnated . . . in a clear, elegant English that allows the reader to visualize the epic adventures of the Hero Twins and the universal story of human creation. It’s a boon for readers everywhere.”—Rain Taxi
“[Bazzett’s] translation of The Popol Vuh is a superb demonstration of literary translation, and the book, as a whole—containing an authentic and transparent translator’s introduction, the creation epic itself, and a reader’s companion—should be incorporated into every literary translation program.”—Literary Review
ISBN: 9781571311610
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
200 pages