2000 years of mayan literature review
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2000 Years of Mayan Literature
Get print book. Dennis Tedlock. Tedlock is so much more than a translator, placing selected Mayan works in a continuous narrative that skillfully links authors from the third century to the sixteenth century with writers of today.
An extremely important, original, and innovative work. Informed by the latest research on Maya hieroglyphic writing, art, and mythology, this beautifully illustrated and wonderfully readable work by an outstanding scholar should be on the bookshelf of all those interested in this fascinating civilization. A truly unprecedented gathering and translation of written Mayan texts. Tedlock is making visible, for the first time, a Mayan literature in comprehensible, meaningful form.
The Alphabet Arrives in the Lowlands. The Books of Chilam Balam 24 8. Understanding the Language of Suyua. Song of the Birth of the Twenty Days. Conversations with Madness. The Alphabet Arrives in the Highlands. A Way to See the Dawn of Life. The Death of Death. The Human Work the Human Design The Count of Days. Bibliography Illustration Credits Blood Moon Becomes a Trickster. Learning to Read. Man of Rabinal. Notes 4O3.
Reviewed by: Years of Mayan Literature. The selections from inscriptions include an in-depth introduction and analysis of the text. Years of Mayan Literature (review). John F. Schwaller. The Americas, Volume 69, Number 1, July , p. (Review). Published by Cambridge.
Get print book. Dennis Tedlock. Tedlock is so much more than a translator, placing selected Mayan works in a continuous narrative that skillfully links authors from the third century to the sixteenth century with writers of today. An extremely important, original, and innovative work.
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2000 Years of Mayan Literature / Edition 1
Schwaller Years of Mayan Literature. By Dennis Tedlock. Berkeley: University of California Press, Dennis Tedlock is well known in Mayanist circles for his translation of the Popul Vuh. In this collection he presents selections from some of the greatest works of the Maya civilization.
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The hacking of the Mayan script in the twentieth century is an intellectual epic that is in some respects even more dramatic than Champollion's decoding of Egyptian in the century before. The Mayanists had no Rosetta stone.
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Release Date: March 5, In " Years," a beautifully illustrated and highly readable book, Tedlock makes the intellectual world of the ancient Mayans visible and meaningful in distinctive new ways. His most notable accomplishment is that he establishes for the first time that two millennia of Mayan writings produced in various writing systems and media -- from stone glyphs and paper documents produced in the post-Columbian Roman alphabet -- constitute a single literary history and tradition. Tedlock's application of a literary designation to stone-carved Mayan glyphs is undoubtedly his most important and emphatic claim he makes and it is one he supports with scholarship of sweeping scope. He makes the case that hieroglyphic texts represent a visible not oral literature that originated long before Old English was born, and centuries before Europeans came to the Americas. This has not been understood, he says, because while there has been much progress in the glyphs' decipherment, an appreciation of their literary value has lagged behind. Tedlock analyzes this material not just as discrete bits of data, but as a series of narratives, a task, he says, which "requires paying attention to the whole story the writers tell" through a unique literature that employs complex visual art forms to recount complex stories. He describes what Mayans dreamed and the stories they told themselves about astronomy, math, medicine and other sciences to history, mythology, poetry and spiritual practice. Tedlock says part of his inspiration lies with the late Linda Schele, an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography whose role in the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphics he considers invaluable. He calls her "a very generous scholar" who also made literary connections in her analysis and, like Tedlock, linked the older works to living Mayan culture as well, "interpreting inscriptions in the light of what we know about Mayan culture today. He presents the material chronologically, beginning with early "calculiform" hieroglyphic materials and moving on to paper codices considered "works of the devil" by the Spanish, who systematically destroyed most of them. Tedlock also considers literature written in their native languages by Christianized Mayans after the Spanish conquest, and ends with writings composed by contemporary Mayans, whose literature is not only thriving, but experiencing a renaissance. The author drew on his decades of work among the Mayans and the work of major scholars in this field, to assemble the book, and to challenges a number of other commonly held assumptions about this culture. He firmly establishes, for instance, that many Mayan writers not just a few were women, and that Mayan inscriptions on monuments were not just the abstract speculations of priests or stories of royal life, but descriptions of the lives of every day flesh and blood human beings.
Mayan literature is among the oldest in the world, spanning an astonishing two millennia from deep pre-Columbian antiquity to the present day. Here, for the first time, is a fully illustrated survey, from the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions to the works of later writers using the Roman alphabet. Dennis Tedlock—ethnographer, linguist, poet, and award-winning author—draws on decades of living and working among the Maya to assemble this groundbreaking book, which is the first to treat ancient Mayan texts as literature. Tedlock considers the texts chronologically. He establishes that women were among the ancient writers and challenges the idea that Mayan rulers claimed the status of gods. Learning to Read 2. Early Mayan Writing 3. The Skilled Observer from Maxam 4. From the Time of Gods to the Time of Lords 5.
