The Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya -Delia Goetz 1950 1st edition 2nd printing

Regular price $40.00

Shipping calculated at checkout.

Condition:  Good: Good condition for a used book! Some wear. Green linen boards w/trace edge rubs.  Light edge wear primarily to corner tips & upper/lower spine. See images for the condition of this book. Stated1st edition 2nd printing.

Blurb: The Popol Vuh is the most important example of Maya literature to have survived the Spanish conquest. It is also one of the world's great creation accounts, comparable to the beauty and power of Genesis. Most previous translations have relied on Spanish versions rather than the original K'iche'-Maya text. Based on ten years of research by a leading scholar of Maya literature, this translation with extensive notes is uniquely faithful to the original language. Retaining the poetic style of the original text, the translation is also remarkably accessible to English readers. Popol Vuh is a text recounting the mythology and history of the K iche people, one of the Maya peoples, who inhabit the Guatemalan Highlands northwest of present-day Guatemala City. The Popol Vuh is a foundation narrative of the K iche before the Spanish conquest of Guatemala.

 In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: "Earth." There are no inhabitants, and no sun--only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.

This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book of the woven mat," one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose--and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett--this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as "the phonetic rendering of a living pulse."