“Humberto Ak’abal was and is today an extraordinary example of overcoming, and an indispensable figure within whom Pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America are reconciled”
Among the most enriching friendships granted to me by my long-held dedication to poetry was, without a doubt, my friendship with Humberto Ak’abal. I met him in person in June of 2001, when he came to Carmona to present Todo tiene habla (a broad-ranging anthology of his poetry, part of the book collection of the journal Palimpsesto, which Chari and I have directed since 1990 in this pentamillenarian city in the province of Seville). With that publication, the late Maya poet became a frequent contributor to the journal with poems, stories, and articles. The growing admiration for his work around these parts was bolstered by the unforgettable readings and talks he gave in the first decade of this century at the various literary events to which I had the pleasure of inviting him, such as the second and third editions of “Sevilla, Casa de los Poetas,” which took place in Andalusia’s capital in November of 2005 and October of 2006, respectively. There, alongside the likes of Eugenio Montejo, Carlos Germán Belli, Félix Grande, Antonio Gamoneda, and Óscar Hahn, his presence shone with its own light.
This long-held poetic and human relationship, sustained by an unfaltering exchange of letters, deepened our mutual appreciation and was interrupted only by his sudden and unexpected death. Our close bond, lasting almost twenty years, revealed to me a man who was always attentive, warm, good-natured, modest, and communicative, just as, outside of his texts, he never aired his profound suffering.
When I first read a few of his poems—which were very brief—in an issue of Bogotá’s Revista Casa Silva, I did not suspect for a moment that they were self-translations from the Kʼicheʼ, nor that they would take on their fullest meaning in conjunction with a body of work rooted heart-and-soul in the myths and traditions of his indigenous culture. These were poems on the brink of becoming, despite their delicate intimacy, the voice and memory of a people buffeted by the violent and unceasing winds of history. Nonetheless, we must not conflate Humberto Ak’abal’s ethnicity with the aesthetic value of his writing, as some critics are sadly wont to do. His origins are of interest inasmuch as they nourish the language and subject matter dearest to this true poet of two languages and one world. The subtlety and the deliberate ingenuousness I then found in his poems led me immediately to seek out their author and, after familiarizing myself with his poetry, to propose to him the aforementioned anthology.
“AK’ABAL’S POETRY, THROUGH THE ORAL EXPRESSIONS OF HIS PEOPLE AND HEALTHY DOSES OF REPETITION, SINKS ITS ROOTS INTO SONG AS WELL AS STORY, BINDING THEM TOGETHER AS IF WITH A MAGIC SPELL”
While preparing this book, I realized I was entering into a world as personal as it was nontransferable, made up of the recurring connections that tether down the inner coherence of any authentic body of work. What’s more, I could confirm that the Guatemalan poet’s faithfulness to his formal and thematic registers was such that, unlike those authors who feel the need to create a different ambiance in each book, he constructed one single ambiance, unfurling inwards rather than outwards: a reflection of his circular notion of existence. By commingling the simplicity of a conversational tone with the most pristine lyricism, his registers’ range of nuance—from feints both humorous and sententious to descriptive details and straightforward dialogue—saves the whole, never breaking its foundational unity, but entirely lacking in monotony or stagnation.
Ak’abal’s bilingual condition is relevant not only to the fact that he translated his own poems; it also determined the perspective from which he wrote them. Poems like “Sombra” or “Rija―La casa” would make no sense in his mother tongue: they follow a hybrid verbal formula in which didactic intention also becomes an aesthetic resource with which to reveal—to those who do not belong to Maya culture—the spirit of imbrication that the K’iche’ maintain with natural beings, elements, and everyday environments:
Sombras
La sombra de una casa,
de un árbol,
de un muro
o de una roca…,
en nuestra lengua se dice mu’j
La sombra de uno
se llama nonoch’,
es la compañera,
la que uno trae cuando nace
y la que se lleva cuando muere
[Shadows
The shadow of a house,
of a tree,
of a wall
or of a rock…,
is called, in our language, mu’j
Your own shadow
is called nonoch’,
she is your companion,
the one you bring with you when you’re born
and the one you take with you when you die]
All of Ak’abal’s poetry retains this pedagogical desire—sometimes more on the surface than others—and puts forth, at its base, a tapestry of characters, customs, and beliefs so truthfully woven that what might strike us as a mere superstition is accepted as a primordial sign, inherited from long experience of the reality the poet recalls or lives himself. A reality imbued with a sacred dimension in which, in his own words, “everything has speech”1 and beings both animate and inanimate find their meaning, whether adverse or favorable, within a current of time that puts the past, present, and future in mutual communication, in a cosmovision replete with signals.
The authenticity of these poems is born, to a great extent, of the understanding and endearing (but not complaisant) attitude with which Ak’abal refers to all aspects of his surroundings and, consequently, of the lack of categorical conclusions or affirmations—save for in a smattering of aphoristic or socially critical poems—that might push him into quaintness, or even worse, papier-mâché exoticism. Ak’abal almost never opines: he presents doings, situations, sensations, and characters, leaving just enough silence such that the unsaid might float atop the said like a tacit, suggestive tremor. This starkness is what gives his poetry its intimate and individual character. Ultimately, the poet speaks of his world in order to recognize himself and, through its ancestral habits and vestiges, to make us feel his unease and the uncertainties of his own life. So it goes in poems such as “Viento de hielo” and “La cuerda del silencio,” in which espantos (which could be called “frights” or “terrors” in English)—a sort of premonitory sign, a masked or intuited presence, physical and imaginary at once—are, in Ak’abal’s words, “ways to understand the inexplicable with its context of symbols.”2 Espantos suddenly pause the normal course of things, thereby recovering, with the force of an elemental image, the primeval innocence of fear. This same innocence—which is a simple recognition of the all-encompassing mystery—makes his poetry a welcoming way to be in the world, imposing oneself upon nothing.
Onomatopoeia plays a central role in Ak’abal’s work, allowing him to hear beings and things and, thereby, to understand and handle them. His onomatopoeia is never gratuitous: it is integrated into the poem’s phrasing to complete its meaning, not to reiterate it, adding a physical sensation not quite transmitted on the semantic level, such as, for example, in his lullaby “Kitanatana”:
Kitanatana, kitanatana, kitanatana;
nuyuj, nuyuj, nuyuj;
dormite, mijito, dormite.
Kitanatana, kitanatana, kitanatana;
dormite, dormite.
Si llorás
se van a despertar
los pajaritos
y ellos de noche no cantan.
Kitanatana, kitanatana, kitanatana;
nuyuj, nuyuj,
nuyuj…
[Kitanatana, kitanatana, kitanatana;
nuyuj, nuyuj, nuyuj;
go to sleep, little one, go to sleep.
Kitanatana, kitanatana, kitanatana;
go to sleep, go to sleep.
If you cry
the little birds
will wake up
and they don’t sing at night.
Kitanatana, kitanatana, kitanatana;
nuyuj, nuyuj,
nuyuj…]
The ultimate expression of this resource appears in “Cantos de pájaros” and “Voces del agua,” poems relying entirely on the regular repetition of syllabic groupings to recreate, in the former, the polyphonic concert of the birds, and, in the latter, the varied sounds of the rain, the river, the pond, and the pool. Sound and sense, as Valéry aspired, are fused. Ak’abal does not tell us what things are saying: he holds them up to our ear. Perhaps his onomatopoeic poems—which attained their fullest beauty when the poet recited them in public with his smooth, psalmodic intonation—imply the total decantation of his animistic spirit.
This spiritual richness does not leave out the consciousness of material poverty. These are two sides of the same coin, whose edge might be the brief form of almost all his poems. Brevity marries in as much with contemplative silence or delicate sentiment as with the evidence of precarity, when an image, in both cases, is enough to say it all, without insistence. For example, “La luna en el agua” comes close to the ungraspable fleetingness of a haiku:
No era bella,
pero la sentía en mí
como la luna en el agua.
[She was not beautiful,
but I felt her on me
like the moon on the water.]
Meanwhile, “Solot” approaches the rugged outdoorsiness of a flamenco copla:
Yo me peinaba con un peine
hecho con un manojo de raíces
de un arbusto llamado solot,
mi espejo era un charco color de lodo.
[I was combing my hair with a comb
made of a bundle of roots
from a tree called the solot,
my reflection was a mud-colored puddle.]
This same gift of brevity—which silences more than it asserts, which shows more than it insists—is present, despite this piece’s unusual length, in “La carta,” whose narrative qualities point to the dramatic defenselessness of certain stories by Humberto Ak’abal; qualities already implicit in many of his shorter poems, such as “El pedidor,” “La muñeca de paja,” “El puente,” and “Mi vecino,” not lacking nascent plotlines.
Brevity and ingenuousness lend these verses the air of unpretentious notes, written as if with a single stroke. Nonetheless, both are the result of an expository order that distributes, with technical boldness, the formal and thematic elements that must be highlighted so as not to lapse into the anecdotal. This explains Ak’abal’s tendency toward strophic balance and the sensation he creates of not reading translated poems, poems born, as the Maya poet tells us, from “the gaze of a boy in the words of a man.”3
Ak’abal’s poetry, through the oral expressions of his people and healthy doses of repetition, sinks its roots into song as well as story, binding them together as if with a magic spell in which the nostalgic present recalls the harmonious past of his ancestors with such revitalizing force that everything appears to be still in its place, even while the present day is different, disbelieving, and corrupt. So it is that, in “El juramento,” we hear this plea from his elders to the gods: “Do not let yesterday / go far away.”
There can be no doubt that having learned Spanish at a young age, in primary school, put Ak’abal in touch with the cultures of all eras. In the long term, and after an arduous intellectual passage, he returned to his mother tongue with complete awareness of its meaning and its creative possibilities. Without having mastered Spanish—with which he took his first steps into poetry, with classical rhyme and meter to boot—he would never have recreated, in K’iche’, the myths and traditions of his people, with which his inner world identified itself. This is why he envisioned his poems in either of the two languages. It is also why, at any given moment, both languages, in his own words, “are fused in me, each nourishing the other,”4 making him a poet of convergences, thanks to this intimate mingling of idioms.
Humberto Ak’abal was and is today an extraordinary example of overcoming, and an indispensable figure within whom Pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America are reconciled.
1 “A un lado del camino,” included in Todo tiene habla, poetic anthology of Humberto Ak’abal (Palimpsesto collection, Carmona, 2000). Pages 15-18.
2 “El otro que está allí,” epilogue to El pájaro encadenado by Humberto Ak’abal (Talleres K’ururup, Guatemala, 2010).
3 “Un fuego que se quema a sí mismo” (Palimpsesto, No. 21, Carmona, 2006). Pages 41-43.
4 “Una poesía de confluencias,” prologue to Las palabras crecen by Humberto Ak’abal (Biblioteca Sibila-Fundación BBVA, Seville, 2009). Page 6.
