Scandals in the House of Birds: Shamans and Priests on Lake Atitlán

Abstract

Nathaniel Tarn. Scandals in the House of Birds: Shamans and Priests on Lake Atitlkn. Marsilio, 1997. The full title of Nathaniel Tarn's new book reveals much. Lake Atitlan lies in the central highlands of Guatemala, surrounded by volcanoes and hills. The Maya have been living here for centuries. The shamans in the subtitle are aj'kuna, or medicine men, of the Maya, in charge-among other thingsof the spiritual lives of the people, kept through variety of ritualistic, healing, and sometimes trickster-like activities (whoring and drinking seem popular). The priests in this tale are Catholic priests. The House of Birds is the place-name for where these Maya live. The scandals of the title involve all of these elements-: one of the chief objects of worship for these Maya is two-and-a-half-foot-tall idol called the Maximon. The use of this idol is hilariously recorded in Time article from 1951: The raw-boned Tzutujil Indians of mountain-bound Santiago Atitlan... have religion of their own, mixture of undigested bits of Roman Catholicism and queer survivals of paganism. Their favorite deity is raffish, four foot idol named Maximon, who smokes cigars, wears four hats and leer. Smoking is the least of Maxim6n's vices. With gleeful perversity, the Indians assign to him an uninhibited libido and rollicking disregard for the Ten Commandments. (2) The Maximon was kept outside the local Catholic church, Santa Cruz, in a bundle above the roof trellis (1), so that anyone entering the church would pass underneath the Maximon. During Holy Week, 1950, Father Godofredo Recinos came from across Lake Atitlan to perform services in the church. He was horrified by what he saw. Six weeks later, he returned, and beheaded the Maximon. Scandals in the House of Birds is the epic re-telling of this event, along with the subsequent theft of the Maximon, in which, more than anyone else, poet and anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn is the central figure. There is really no one quite like Tarn in American letters, even in the ranks of experimental American poets. Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock seem to come closest, in terms of range and varieties of interest. But neither of them has Tarn's pedigree. Born in Paris, raised in England, schooled in France, Tarn wrote first in French, by his own admission twentyfifth rate versions of his idol Apollinaire. He studied anthropology in Paris with Levi-Strauss, then came to the University of Chicago, where he obtained degree with Robert Redfield. In 1952, he went to Lake Atitlan. After that, to Burma. Finally, he was back in England, writing poetry. By now it was 1962. He was connected with group of poets called-as far as I can tell, unironically-The Group. In 1967, he gave up the pursuit of academic anthropology altogether. At this point, he became the editor of one of the more enduringly interesting publishing ventures of the time: Tom Raworth's experimental Goliard Press teamed with the more staid Jonathan Cape publishers to produce Cape Editions, series of small, handsome paperbacks of rich variety of subjects, themes, and writers for the times: from the poetry of Neruda, to Olson's Mayan Letters, to Barthes, LeviStrauss, to Malcom Lowry, to Francis Ponge, to Trakl, to Fidel Castro, to Adalbert Stifter. Imagine nowadays Sun & Moon given kind of carte blanche by Random House to publish series of whatever they want and you get something of the picture. And this is all before Tarn was really even known for anything. His first major sequence, The Beautiful Contradictions, wouldn't appear until 1969. What else? Most people-even those who follow the experimental poetry scene-know Tarn as translator, principally as the translator of Pablo Neruda. The effects of this fact are interestingly elaborated in his somewhat polemical essay Translation/Antitranslati on/Culture/ Multiculture: Some Contradictions? which appeared in the Disembodied Poetics anthology of the Naropa Institute. …