As Dennis Tedlock remarks in his introduction to this work, it's not as if publications on its precise topic have ever been superabundant (though they certainly do exist). And he goes on to suggest reasons why this might have been the case. Among them is the sheer complexity of Maya hieroglyphic script, which only in the last half century or so has yielded protracted readings, thanks not least to recognition of the phonetic element embedded in it. Another is the degree to which the idea of literary intelligence has been displaced by linguistics and the urge to reduce and decipher, most often with little or no regard for larger context or genre. Perhaps most important of all with respect to “this most deeply American of literary traditions,” is the question of European colonization, and the ideology that accompanied the propagation of the Roman alphabet over much of the globe. As Tedlock forcefully puts it, “according to the story of progress, which is always teleological, the problem was not that the alphabet had somehow become flat and one-dimensional but that other writing systems had failed to evolve to a high enough level to rid themselves of nonphonetic signs.” This when the Mayans were writing their history long before any European set foot in America and when English had still to be fully born as a written language.
The study itself falls into two parts, devoted respectively to the two scripts Maya literature is written in, indigenous hieroglyphs and imported Roman letters. Part One begins with some pretty workman-like observations on learning to read, the core of the writing system being the divinatory calendar shared throughout Mesoamerica. At this early stage we are also informed about the workings of syllabic signs and logographs in ways that help explain Maya hieroglyphs as a composite script whose beginnings are traced back to the late preclassic period (400 BC - 240 AD). In the seventeen chapters that make up the rest of Part One we are first taken in turn through texts from major cities of the Classic period (230-925 AD). The first is Maxam, later known as Naranjo, close to Guatemala's border with Belize, and is exemplary in being the source of two beautiful chocolate drinking vessels ingeniously designed by a scribe-painter who signs himself as “the skilled observer.” Next comes a consideration of stone stelas from eastern Copan and Quirigua, on the lowermost Motagua River. The chapters jointly entitled “Cormorant and her Three Sons” (5-7) center on the three temples housing carved stone tablets at the western city of Palenque. There follow Yaxchilan with its famed lintels, and central Calakmul, the source of pottery painted in the style of books. All these cities are located in the rainforest and prior to moving north to Coba and Chichen Itza in more arid Yucatan, Tedlock inserts two less geographically centered chapters (10 and 11), touching respectively on the phenomena of glyphs that read as concrete poems, no less, and graffiti. This paves the way to the concluding remarks, at the end of this first part, on the pages of surviving Maya books, notably the astronomical knowledge (moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars) in the Dresden and other codices.
In dealing with Maya literature written in the Roman alphabet Tedlock respects the phases of the European invasion and moves from the lowlands to the highlands. After the rich hieroglyphic heritage transcribed in part alphabetically in the books of Chilam Balam from an array of Yucatecan towns, chief among them Chumayel, Mani, Tizimin, and Kaua, we learn about the highland treasures of the Quiché, above all their superlative Popol Vuh and the verse drama Rabinal Achi, and the Kaqchikel, whose annals fall into years of 400 days. He also pays close attention to the little-known Kiché Codex which records astronomical phenomena in pre-alphabetic fashion as late as the early decades of the eighteenth century.
The thirty-two chapters of Parts One and Two conclude in a brief epilogue that culminates in the advent of printed Maya texts and what is termed the Maya renaissance of the late-twentieth century. Well chosen and succinct notes accompany each part of the main text, which also includes helpful photographic and other illustrations.
It will be hard not to recognize Tedlock's volume as a landmark contribution to the understanding of a millennial literature too often misconstrued or simply ignored in its own terms. Some may find it hard to adapt to his use of non-Yucatec terms for the twenty signs, his insistence on a spatial rather than a temporal understanding of the world-age creation story, legible elsewhere in Mesoamerican genesis (not least the Popol Vuh translation of his predecessor Munro Edmonson), and the occasional privileging of US over European scholarship, for example with regard to Maya signs for direction. As for the late-twentieth-century rebirth of Maya letters it's chastening to recall that it coincided with wholesale massacres of the Maya themselves, unmentioned here, as Rigoberta Menchú testified as one of their number, while for US collusion in them President Clinton on assuming office offered an unprecedented apology.
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[Review length: 842 words • Review posted on February 27, 2013]