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If Today Were Tomorrow: Poems
"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.
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Milkweed Editions
- Publish Date: Jun 25th, 2024
- Pages: 312
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.90in - 0.90lb
- EAN: 9781571311610
- Categories: • Subjects & Themes - Animals & Nature• Subjects & Themes - Places• Caribbean & Latin American
About the Author
Ak'abal, Humberto: - Humberto Ak'abal (1952-2019) was a K'iche' Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named book of the year by Association of Guatemalan Journalists and received their Golden Quetzal award in 1993. In 2004, he declined to receive the Guatemala National Prize in Literature because it is named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, whom Ak'abal accused of encouraging racism. Ak'abal, a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, passed away on January 28, 2019.
Bazzett, Michael: - Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry by the New York Times. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.
Praise for this book
Praise for The Echo Chamber"Michael Bazzett is one of my favorite living poets, mostly because his metaphors astound me. At the heart of his new collection, The Echo Chamber, is the myth of Echo and Narcissus, which Bazzett cleverly ties to our current age of selfies, likes, and hot takes. His poems consistently catch me off guard, make me laugh, and leave me speechless."--Maggie Smith's "Top 10 Poetry Books of 2021," Orange County Register"At times darkly funny, lyrical, allegorical and specific, Bazzett's [The Echo Chamber] is an always memorable reflection of who we are now."--Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books"Funny as a knife, sharp as a punchline . . . These poems transform and enlighten."--David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry"Michael Bazzett's remarkable fifth book is a testament of his awareness and hard-earned poetic grace. He is a poet of unexpected observations and dynamic lyricisms, and these often funny, often difficult poems linger on how contemporary mythos is created: by selfies, by repurposing, memeing, and retweetings. This is work that dwells in the complexity and grotesqueness of being seen--and of seeing ourselves--through the fractured mirrors of pop culture and consumption. This beautifully wrought book is a reminder that after all of the likes and shares, the myths we create for ourselves are as temporary as the hashtags we use to boost them."--Adrian Matejka"With a virtuoso deployment of allegory, parable, dialogue, soliloquy, and performance, and via the mechanics of the joke, the poems in The Echo Chamber boom and toll with history and myth, and into the scorching present tense. "I walked down to the 7-Eleven / for a Big Gulp in lieu of coffee / and this ill-considered choice // was history," he writes in the opening poem, enacting the wry confluences that characterize the collection. Bazzett's sensibility is satirical, with a penchant for the surreal. War, background noise from the television to those privileged enough not to be in the thick of it, "thrums up through your espadrilles," accompanied by "seared tuna with lemons, halved / and roasted on the grill." Indeed, violence, with white needle teeth, seethes beneath the surface of tenderness here, and swirls at the nucleus of myth. Bazzett has a singular gift for ripping off the Band-Aid, rooting and unmasking himself, you and me, and God. The Echo Chamber is a masterwork of truth-telling." --Diane Seuss "If he's not already acknowledged as such, The Echo Chamber should establish Michael Bazzett as one of our best cartographers of human strangeness. Through time-traveling speakers, tumors shaped like angels, men seeking old testament gods in personal ads, and all our private thoughts written in blood, these poems unleash a powerful imagination to make us see our world in a new way. This book is many things: funny, unsettling, always surprising, and profound." --Matthew Olzmann"In the ancient world, the person who proved most dangerous is the one who couldn't feel shame--such a different sense of that word than now we hold, and perhaps we're worse off for it, less attuned to others, more easily drowning in the shallow depths of self, as Narcissus himself might offer witness to. In poems of wide variety and sly ethical purpose, Michael Bazzett does a most unexpected thing: he gives us access to our own hypocrisy. That sounds like a downer; it's not. The poems are rich in humor, biting in satire, Kafka-esque in strangeness, and tender with human feeling. The Echo Chamber is a book of intervention, placing itself between ourselves and our obsessive self-reflection, which--if I'm as honest with myself as the books says I should be--is just what we might most need."--Dan Beachy-QuickPraise for Michael Bazzett"Bazzett's poems keep pleasantly surprising me with their innocent brutality. I'm not sure I have any way to clearly describe this except to say that it is the sort of heart stopping honesty about humanity we see in work like Donald Barthelme's 'The School' or Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Lesson.' Both of these are short stories, I understand, but I'm okay with that because Bazzett's talky, lyrically twisted narratives seems to ride the same sort of line between story and poem that we see in Borges and chunks of Calvino."―Camille Dungy, The Rumpus"Like any good surrealist, Bazzett uses laserlike precision to craft his images."―Minneapolis Star Tribune"To read Bazzett's poems is to reach through the thick veil separating us from the most tender, timeless, and true parts of ourselves that we both dread and cherish."―Tarfia Faizullah"Bazzett [is] as a keen questioner of the eye and ear; a poet fully able to construct and inhabit this world, and those beyond, through lush aural and visual engagement. With the lyrical dexterity and sonic authority of a master craftsman, Bazzett gleans epistemic truths from both natural and preternatural sources and delivers crisp, unforced poems of sheer beauty. Readers will find themselves rapt by Bazzett's audacious and perfect storm of song, symbol and earnest sight."―Airea D. MatthewsPraise 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"The Popol Vuh as translated by Bazzett is an extraordinary work that belongs on the shelves of all folk interested in The Classics. It also proves that we need to start redefining our definition of that term to include works that aren't limited to one point of view."--Blogcritics"A creative and fascinating version that's a pleasure to read: Michael Bazzett has made intriguing choices and invested a huge amount of work. The result is both poetic and--in many cases--moving."--Allen Christenson, Brigham Young University