Humberto Ak'abal (–2019)

A long poem at the end of this collection protests how the white man exploits the native, destroying homes and livelihoods while profiting from their culture, reducing an entire people to a branch of the tourist industry, but I had an uneasy feeling of something similar happening with this book - all these designs of what I guess are traditional Mayan patterns, the use of Mayan numerals to number pages, the occasional untranslated poem which we are invited to approach as pure sound... It feels a bit iffy. The poems are generally short and, at least as translated here, simple, folksy, some of them content to just name objects. Some are translated into English, some into Scots, seemingly in an effort to give an impression of Ak'abal's K'cihe'. I don't know about that (and the introduction's attempt to connect Ak'abal with MacDiarmid is unconvincing), but they seem to me usually livelier than the English ones (perhaps because less familiar - you have to think about the words).… (mehr)