ABSTRACT
The Maya K’iche’ book of creation, known as the Popol Wuj, challenges foundational categories of literary, historical, and anthropological study: the stories reflect a decidedly Mayan cosmovision), but the book’s history cannot be disentangled from Spanish colonial power or Guatemalan national ideologies (González 2014). The Popol Wuj is a story in translation; in the sixteenth century, bilingual Maya elites like Cristóbal Velasco, Nim Ch’okoj Cavec, translated pre-Columbian engravings and oral traditions into an alphabetic K’iche’ and Spanish narrative. The copy made by Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez (1666-1728) is the only surviving testimony of the work. Since then, Ximénez’s manuscript has been translated into 25 languages and some 1,200 print editions, from scholarly works to children’s books, none of which can convey the text’s layered histories of translation and remediation. In collaboration with the Newberry Library-OSU, we developed a thematic research collection around the Popol Wuj, an ongoing project known as Multepal, so named for the principle of collaboration in the Mayan worldview. As researchers in the US and Guatemala use TEI to mark up physical and thematic elements, we link to deities, material cultures, and places (real and metaphorical).
