Rabinal Achi: A Fifteenth-Century Maya Dynastic Drama

Abstract

Rabinal Achi is an English translation of Alain Breton’s 1994 French translation of and commentary on a Quiché-Achi Mayan drama still performed in the Guatemalan town of San Pablo Rabinal. The book consists of four main sections. The introduction explains the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of the two extant scripts of the drama, outlines what we know about the late pre-Hispanic historical period in which the drama is set, briefly summarizes the drama’s events and characters, and presents Breton’s approach to translation. Part 1 reproduces in facsimile “The Pérez Manuscript” — a manuscript of the play written in 1913 and still used to perform the drama today. Part 2 re-presents the drama’s text in a facing-page transcription (on the left) and translation (on the right), with easily consulted footnotes below. Finally, Part 3 offers a commentary on the drama, providing maps of places mentioned in the text, proposing a series of symbolic interpretations based on close linguistic readings (such as on the relations between kings and warriors), and suggesting that the play’s fifteenth-century events are retold within the framework of an “exemplary history,” making reference to ancient origins in which wandering hunters in the pre-sunrise darkness of the primordial world become civilized. These four main sections are framed by a preface written by ethnohistorian Robert Carmack, an extensive glossary, a bibliography, and an index.I was asked to write this review in part because I had previously reviewed Dennis Tedlock’s 2003 Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice. A comparison of these two editions will be useful here, not simply because both books offer differing translations of the same basic script, but also because both translations were begun at the same time and were undertaken in collaboration with the same Maya expert: José-León Coloch. Coloch, a resident of San Pablo Rabinal, is the current custodian of the Pérez manuscript and is responsible for its current performance. Breton met Coloch in May 1987 and began working with him on a French translation in 1988 (work that continued in 1989, 1990, and 1992). Tedlock began working with Coloch on an English translation in 1988 and 1989 and returned to Rabinal in 1998 to see several productions of the drama staged by Coloch. I imagine that a careful reading of Breton’s and Tedlock’s translations and notes side by side would allow for the partial emergence of a third translation: one favored by José-León Coloch himself. Both Breton and Tedlock make extensive reference to Coloch’s input in their notes and also point out when they have chosen readings that Coloch disagreed with.But despite the coeval origins of both translations, these two editions of the Rabinal Achi are distinct, complementary rather than redundant. The principal difference between the two editions is their interpretive focus. Breton emphasizes a philological and (as he himself admits) structuralist analysis. Tedlock emphasizes performance and history: how do the extant scripts of the Rabinal Achi (written down in 1855 and 1913) relate to theatrical traditions of the past (pre-Hispanic and colonial) and present? For example, each author highlights the poetics of the drama in different ways. Breton’s poetic presentation is based solely on the formal structures preserved in the text itself (couplets and parallelisms, for example). In contrast, Tedlock modifies this internal poetic structure according to how such embedded poetry was amplified or modified when spoken by actors during actual performances in 1998. Where Tedlock discusses the linguistic details of his translation in endnotes and presents the entire text only in English translation, Breton presents both the Quiché-Achi text and its translation side by side. This format alone makes an important contribution to Mesoamerican studies and makes it possible for even nonspecialists (or beginning linguists) to appreciate the language and poetics of the Quiché-Achi script. Breton’s footnoted presentation of parallel transcription and translation also makes less problematic this edition’s status as a translation (into English) of a translation (into French) of a Quiché-Achi play. The original Quiché-Achi text is always present, Breton’s glossary defines Quiché-Achi words by reproducing the (untranslated) Spanish definitions provided in colonial linguistic sources, and Breton’s footnotes occasionally make reference to ways Quiché-Achi phrasings have French parallels (e.g., pp. 218, 240). In other words, the reader of this English translation is never far from the Quiché-Achi original, the Spanish vocabularies used by Breton to translate that original, and indeed the translation’s 1994 French incarnation.All this is not to say that Tedlock ignores the details of translation, or that Breton ignores history and context. Breton makes frequent reference to archaeological and ethnographic material, and Tedlock’s linguistic endnotes (around 20,000 words) are slightly more extensive than Breton’s linguistic footnotes (around 15,000 words). Rather, each author chooses to foreground different things.My main reservation with Breton’s edition is that it never fully grapples with colonial history. Breton’s introduction barely references the colonial period (focusing instead on the pre-Hispanic past and on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the play’s scripts). He even argues that although it was “transcribed into Latin characters during the colonial period, [the Rabinal Achi] suffers from no European influence” (p. 4). But there are many reasons to believe that this drama is something more than a miraculously untouched pre-Hispanic artifact. As early as the 1920s, Georges Raynaud suggested that the script’s repeated use of the number “12” represented a colonial “mutilation” (replacing the Mesoamerican “13” with a symbolically Christian numeration). More recently, Tedlock’s Rabinal Achi considers the play as a colonial product on multiple levels. Indeed, the very act of writing down a fixed script for actors to memorize, and the failure to transcribe the music that once accompanied this dance-drama, should both be considered dramatic, if almost invisible, colonial interventions into a pre-Hispanic genre. In other words, the subtitle of Breton’s translation — A Fifteenth-Century Maya Dynastic Drama — is significant, and diagnostic.