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In January 2019, Maya K’iche’ poet Humberto Ak’abal passed away, thus transcending into the eternal silence—perhaps the same silence inhabited by his seismic poems. He was sixty-six.
In life, Humberto published more than thirty books, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages—including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. He remains a towering figure for indigenous and Maya literature, as well as one of Latin America’s most beloved and inventive poets. Humberto wrote extensively about family, time, colonialism, men’s relationship with animals and nature, indigeneity, the plight of the indigenous people in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan genocide. He used onomatopoeia and cacophony to describe his surroundings, and his poems are imbued with devastating political commentary and subtle humor. Carlos Montemayor and Antonio Gamoneda admitted to being fans of Humberto’s poetry, and in 2006, he became a Guggenheim fellow.
One cannot overstate the importance, quality, originality, and poetic sensibility of Humberto Ak’abal. Though his work has been previously translated into English, a new translation shines a new light on Humberto’s devastating poems. This June, Milkweed Editions will publishIf Today Were Tomorrow, a book of poems written by Humberto Ak’abal and translated by Michael Bazzett, the author of The Echo Chamber. If Today Were Tomorrow is a beautifully crafted, comprehensive, and faithful approximation and representation of Humberto’s work. I had the opportunity to interview Michael Bazzett on Humberto’s legacy, the experience working between K’iche’, Spanish, and English, and the translation of silence.
José García Escobar (JGE): In 2018, you famously put out your translation of the Maya’s creation myth, The Popol Vuh. Naturally, we find many references and similarities between The Popol Vuh and the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal. Can you describe how translating The Popol Vuh prepared you or A writer’s published diary is a study in contradictions—not entirely fact nor fiction, public nor private. Moreover, it is a topiary art form, the emotional and intellectual life sheared according to the writer’s sensibility. Yet the literary diary, for all its ambiguity and artifice, retains an aura of authenticity. The temptation to read this genre as the final word on a given author is especially precarious when it comes to Franz Kafka. After his death in 1924, Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod trimmed and pruned the diaries to such an extent that he produced what amounted to a different version of both the diaries and of Kafka. Schocken Books published them in English in 1948 and 1949, with translations by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg. Consequently, the Kafka you know is the one that Max Brod helped fashion with the bowdlerized diaries. In his hands, Kafka’s prose became less transgressive and less homoerotic, more polished and more conventional. Kafka’s original, unexpurgated diaries still exist, and translator Ross Benjamin has returned to give us them in their full, uncensored form. As Benjamin puts it, these diaries offer a “glimpse into Kafka’s workshop” and will be invaluable to scholars, artists, and anyone interested in Kafka’s life and work. Coming full circle, Schocken Books will publish Benjamin’s translation in summer of 2022. While the following interview focuses on Benjamin’s translation of Kafka’s diaries, he has also translated numerous works, including Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Archipelago), Clemens Setz’s Indigo (Liveright/Norton), and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (Pantheon), which was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize. Eric Trump (ET): What is your connection to German? How did you become interested in translation? Ross Benjamin (RB): At first I wanted only to be able to read German-language literature and philosophy—which had strongly appealed to me ever since I discovered Kafka and Nietzsche in high We are coming up to halfway through the year, which is a pretty good time to take stock. For various reasons I haven’t read as much as I usually would (partly through getting stricter at abandoning books, partly through taking more time), but let’s have a look anyway. I found this set of questions on Nina Allan’s blog; here are my answers: Best book you’ve read so far in 2022. I would have to say Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur), a story collection which had me from the first page to the last. Chung goes straight on to my list of must-read authors. Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2022. Well, Marseillaise My Way by Darina Al Joundi (tr. Helen Vassallo) is the only actual sequel I’ve read this year. It’s very good, but also kind of a default answer to this question. Perhaps I could add J.O. Morgan’s second novel, Appliance. This is not a sequel to Pupa, but it is definitely a companion piece aesthetically. I will be reviewing Appliance for Strange Horizons, but I can tell you now that it’s excellent. Most anticipated release for the second half of the year. The first book that comes to mind is Life Ceremony, the forthcoming story collection by another of my must-read authors, Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori). I also can’t leave out Malarkoi, Alex Pheby’s sequel to the wonderful Mordew – sure to be a treat. Biggest disappointment. I’m chary of calling books disappointments these days, because I know from personal experience that it can be that you’ve just caught a book at the wrong time. So I will say that I’d been looking forward to reading Damon Galgut for the first time, and I was disappointed that I didn’t click with In a Strange Room. Maybe another book, another time. Biggest surprise. I’m going to say Homelands by Chitra Ramaswamy – not because I didn’t expect to like it (I did), but because it was not on my radar at all until I found it in the publisher’s .