by Claire Jussel
June 25, 2024
If Today Were Tomorrow by Humberto Ak’abal; Milkweed; 312 pages; $20.00.
If Today Were Tomorrow presents a rich swath of poetry collected from the work of celebrated K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal and translated from the Spanish by Michael Bazzett. This book, which offers each poem in both Spanish and English, is the latest installment in Milkweed Editions Seedbank series which gathers literature from around the world that speaks to the relationship between humans and environment. Bazzett’s new translations bring Ak’abal’s words, as well as the ravines, rivers, birds, and people of the western Guatemala Highlands that sing out from his poems, to an extended group of readers.
Ak’abal’s poems and the mother language that he wrote in are both deeply enmeshed with the place from which the poems and words emerged. In the Ars poetica poem “Apprentice,” Ak’abal writes:
My words hold the dampness of rain,
the tears of morning dew, and it cannot be
otherwise, because they were brought down from the mountain.
In his introduction to If Today Were Tomorrow, Bazzett notes that in Ki’che’ Maya each word is an embodiment and summoning of the subject, not merely a label. The resonant animacy of this language presents a particular difficulty in translation.
Ak’abal, who wrote in Ki’che’ Maya and translated many of his poems into Spanish himself, writes about the complications of translating his work into the colonial language with awareness and grace. He said of Spanish that “this tongue is just one more key / for singing the old song of my blood.” Under the bends of a double translation, the reverence and vitality of Ak’abal’s words might have been flattened, but Bazzett’s English translations deliver a harmonic resonance, and Ak’abal’s poems are once again tuned to a new key.
Bazzett’s succinct and illuminating introduction also sheds light on the guiding principle for his translations. “K’iche’ Maya has no word for poet, only singer. This observation invites deep listening, a tuned ear to his music, which is what guided me in this process… I listened for the song beneath the poem.” With Bazzett’s careful attention, the translations resonate without losing the directness of Ak’abal’s poetic voice.
Ak’abal’s poems are often short and direct, and with this brevity and clarity illuminate and commune with the subject of each poem. In this poetic mode, especially within the original context of the highly animate K’iche’ Maya language, each component word of each poem is in itself a poem, and one that requires a precise and familiar understanding about the subject(s) at hand. The simplicity of language both emphasizes the essential power of language and invites the reader to seamlessly slip into the poems. Ak’abals poems consistently speak to the vitality of the world around us, especially in small, simple scenes, such the poem “Poncho”:
This morning
the sky was wrapped
In a tattered grey poncho,
full of holes
leaking
little drops of light.
This directness does not betray the complexity and nuance of the world, but rather brings it into relief and renewed attention. Within a few short stanzas, those words realize the world.
If Today Were Tomorrow brings us into the mountains and ravines, the socio-political post-colonial climate of Guatemala, into the human reckoning of the passage of time, age, loss, and memory, into the space where day and night meet, where the moon lands on the water, into the turning of seasons, and collapses any notion that these are disparate motions in the world. Some poems arrive with a riddle-like playfulness:
Dawn
is a little animal
that come in noiselessly
It’s so tiny
it slips under the door.
Others land with the reassuring weight of a comforting adage: “It’s not that stones are mute: /they just keep quiet.” Ak’abal often applies blunt humor, sharp pressure, points of scorn, grief, or reckoning. While there is no air of the overwrought in this collection, a deep sincerity permeates through the poems in lines such as “my eyes welled / with a wild love.” Though they are often small packages, the closing lines of Ak’abal’s poems land over and over again and invisibly spill beyond the text to resonate with sustained wonder, inquisitiveness, rage, and surprise.
These poems are seeds, compact, succinct, stunningly rich, and containing more than meets the eye. They feel timeless in their embrace of the inheritance of the past, the urgency of the present, and a forward leaning gaze of the future. Each poem contains the key components to conveying the subject at hand and allow the full resonance and understanding to take root from the distilled, vital droplet of a poem. Bazzett has made a perennial garden of Ak’abal’s work that will sing through many seasons of readers.
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Words Brought Down from the Mountain: Language, Land, and the Legacy of Humberto Ak’abal in If Today Were Tomorrow
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Cameron Wilkins from Unsplash
Claire Jussel is a poet, writer, and artist from Boise, Idaho. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Wizards in Space, Split Rock Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and SEISMA Magazine. She currently resides in Ames, Iowa where she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University.
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