Volume 18, Number 7 · April 20, 1972
A Sight of the Bright Life
By W.S. Merwin
The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala
translated and with an Introduction by Munro S. Edmonson
Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, 291 pp., $10.50 (paper)
Every approach to the indigenous literature of the Americas, and in particular to those works whose forms and main or entire impulse antedate the European conquest, is troubling, and this is so in close proportion to the degree to which the reconstruction evokes the life and excitement of the original. The fact that the reconstructions are indispensable to us common readers—that our knowledge of these words out of the past of the Americas in which we were born and learned to speak depends (entirely, in most cases) on their representations in languages brought from Europe by the same conquest that overran the American natives—is and should be a part of what troubles us, as it is part of the uneasy elusive richness of our cultural lives, and of the bad conscience and sense of inherited deprivation which these works stir in us.
Review, 2805 words
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