Ma(r)king Popol Vuh

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In their introduction Ma(r)king the Text: The presentation of on the literary page, Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry point out that to mark a text is also make it; [and] features such as punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, white space and marginalia, marks that traditionally have been ignored in literary criticism, can be examined for their contribution a text's meaning (XVII). The Newberry Library recently disbound and digitized the oldest surviving text of Vuh. (1) In its disbound state, one may plainly observe a number of paratextual markers that have not been addressed in print editions, but that call into question the popular perspective that is Indian auto-ethnography. This paper seeks raise awareness of these marks and their for traditional assumptions of Vuh's survival and its narrative/textual boundaries. To give a brief background, is a mythistory of the Quiche Maya of central highland Guatemala. (2) Once subjugated by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524, the task of pacification largely fell the Catholic monastic orders who, in their zeal, often destroyed or suppressed much of the culture. Traditional evangelical approaches proved less effective among the Maya where native culture and religion were seemingly indivisible from language itself. But the Dominican Order was arguably suited for this challenge because it had embraced target-language competency as a core tenet since the thirteenth century, and, given the inter-relatedness of culture and language, some missionaries seized upon learning the native (hi)stories for this purpose. Nevertheless, such practices carried some risk as evidenced by the Inquisition's scrutiny of Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagun concerning his Florentine Codex. Today, writings from the colonial period that deal with Indian culture are mainly seen either as missionary apologetics or as Indian subversion. (3) The position most commonly taken on is that a missionary-educated Indian used his knowledge of European alphabetic writing capture and preserve the oral recitation of an elder sometime in the 1550s. Roughly a century and a half later, Dominican missionary Father Francisco Ximenez is thought have obtained this phonetic redaction from a parishioner, which he then transcribed and translated in parallel columns of Quiche and Spanish. What is not generally understood is that Ximenez incorporated the mythistory within a broader ecclesiastical treatise written expressly for priests. This treatise, titled Tratado segvndo de todo lo qve deve saber vn ministro, superintends Popol Vuh and an appended scholium. In turn, Tratado segvndo is bound with and preceded by a Quichean grammar, Arte de las tres lengvas. (4) The modern editorial presentation of can be traced French cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg whose 1861 French edition first coined the title and divided the content into parts and chapters. But more importantly, Brasseur published apart from Ximenez's adjoining material that, together with the exuberant Americanism of the nineteenth century, emphasized as an Indian auto-ethnography rather than as a missionary exposition. The construction and presentation of Ximenez's manuscript went unrecognized for the following eight decades. Even after Ximenez's manuscript resurfaced in the 1940s, Vuh's narrative and textual boundaries seem be defined by its nineteenth-century parameters, which were the co-incidence or co-presence of the parallel Quiche and Spanish. Imposing rigid textual and narrative boundaries on the manuscript is problematic because Ximenez is always present by way of his translation and the contextual permeation of his leading and trailing discourse. Assuming that the Quiche transcription controls the narrative boundaries dismisses Ximenez's involvement and disinherits his paratextual contributions. …