Time Commences in Xibalbá Read online

  TIME COMMENCES IN XIBALBÁ

  VOLUME 74

  Sun Tracks

  An American Indian Literary Series

  SERIES EDITOR

  Ofelia Zepeda

  EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

  Larry Evers

  Joy Harjo

  Geary Hobson

  N. Scott Momaday

  Irvin Morris

  Simon J. Ortiz

  Kate Shanley

  Leslie Marmon Silko

  Luci Tapahonso

  Time Commences in Xibalbá

  LUIS DE LIÓN

  TRANSLATED BY NATHAN C. HENNE

  AFTERWORD BY ARTURO ARIAS

  ©2012 the Estate of José Luís de León Díaz/Luís de Lión and Nathan Henne

  (translator)

  All rights reserved

  www.uapress.arizona.edu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lión, Luis de, 1940--1984.

   [Tiempo principia en Xibalbá. English]

   Time commences in Xibalbá / Luis de Lión ; translated by Nathan C. Henne ;

  afterword by Arturo Arias.

     p. cm. --- (Sun tracks: an American Indian literary series ; v. 74)

   Includes bibliographical references.

   ISBN 978-0-8165-2134-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

   I. Henne, Nathan C. II. Title.

   PQ7499.2.L53T513 2012

   863'.64---dc23

                                                 2012017907

  Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent

  endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National

  Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

  Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

  containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free.

  17 16 15 14 13 12 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Image of Luis de Lión on p. 117 courtesy of the National Security Archive

  I wish to express my gratitude to doña María Tula

  for her hospitality, her tireless work, and her many insights.

  This translation is dedicated to the recently passed Ronald Nibbe,

  who helped set the wheels in motion for this project.

  —Nathan Henne

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction: Translation and a Poetics of the Uncertain

  NATHAN C. HENNE

  —First There Was the Wind

  —The Other Half of the Night They Didn’t Sleep

  —And, in Fact, They Were Alive

  —And the Day Came

  Epi . . . taph

  Prologue

  Afterword:

  Racialized Subalternity

  as Emancipatory Decolonial Project:

  Time Commences in Xibalbá by Luis de Lión

  ARTURO ARIAS

  Translator’s Introduction

  Translation and a Poetics

  of the Uncertain

  NATHAN C. HENNE

  I AM HAPPY TO INFORM the readers of this translation of Luis de Lión’s novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá that, rather than being at the traditional “disadvantage” compared to those who read the novel in its original language, my readers might actually understand the novel in some different ways precisely because they are reading in translation. I certainly don’t make that claim because my translation in some way improves on Luis de Lión’s impressive literary language; rather, it is simply that multiple levels of “translation” (broadly conceived) drive the novel’s narrative line and hold together its philosophical foundation; so peering through the lens of actual translation inserts the reader right into the novel. In fact, the complications of cultural translation as I will explore them in this introduction are so prevalent in this novel that it may at first surprise the reader to find out that its author was fluent in only one language. But in a culture like Guatemala’s, translation happens all over the place, not just among its many natural languages. Anyone who grew up in Guatemala in the last century has been inevitably immersed in several different kinds of translation his or her whole life; so de Lión, like all Guatemalans, developed an almost instinctual tendency to think about translation in the broadest terms—often only indirectly related to the more than twenty indigenous languages bouncing off one another in every corner of Guatemala.

  In this introduction I’ll try to put the reader temporarily in the challenging position of translator in the context of this particular novel and its unique Guatemalan village dialect of Spanish. I do this precisely because that challenging position offers the best vantage point from which to understand El tiempo principia en Xibalbá on several different levels. I myself have come to understand this novel in so many different ways directly as a function of translation. I soon became aware that figuring out how to meet the unique challenges of translation that confronted me in this novel in fact illuminated internal aspects of translation underlying the novel’s unconventional narrative line. On the first level, translation proper—that is, from this Guatemalan dialect of Spanish to US English—the difficulties of translation in many ways resemble the struggles any translator faces, and I give examples of these as a springboard. But I intend to show how the resistance to translation in this novel also resonates beautifully on the level of Guatemalan culture and its various mestizo selfhoods. Thus, in some ways translation actually opens up the narrative because it enacts a poetics of the uncertain lying at the heart of the novel.

  Martinican literary critic Edouard Glissant once claimed that the more William Faulkner’s novels are translated, the more they are understood. The difficulty of Faulkner’s work on several levels makes this seem counterintuitive (especially to the poor translator!); but Glissant’s argument makes sense both in Faulkner’s case and in the case of this novel. Glissant explains that Faulkner’s novels are built on what he calls “a poetics of the deferred,” and that this deferral works on several levels at the same time. That is, on the word level (what any individual word “means”); on the level of the sentence (how words work together in the sentence to create meaning); on the level of the plot (how the sequence of declarations work to create the meanings of the story); and even on the level of differing moralities (how different readers decide what certain actions mean about the people who do them). On all of these levels the meaning (singular, totalizing) of any enunciation or action can never completely coalesce; instead, it is endlessly destabilized by never being able to trace its way back to the original enunciation. Therefore, everything—language itself, human meaning—is always already a translation, and the vertigo that results from Faulkner’s poetics is a direct result of this unending deferral. So, when translators take Faulkner’s novels into other languages, they are enacting the poetics of the novels themselves by deferring meaning on one more level. That is, as a translation, the text e
xplicitly acknowledges the fact that each word (in the receiving language) is unmistakably “just standing in” for another word (in the donating language). The transparency of the deferral of translation adds dimension to the same unending deferral Faulkner’s work crafts before a translator even takes it up.1

  Here I intend to show how the springboard of translation can open up the poetics of Time Commences in Xibalbá in a similar way because its logic is built on what I have elsewhere called an indigenous poetics of the uncertain. This poetics of the uncertain describes a way of making meaning in language that always recognizes the resulting meaning as only partial and fleeting, underscoring the fact that language cannot ever precisely define. This poetics of the uncertain also functions on a couple of different levels on the ground in Guatemala. First, it is prevalent in the discourse patterns of Maya languages. But this poetics of the uncertain is also a philosophical approach to immutable truth (outside language) that differs substantially from a Western poetics of scientific certainty, which constantly seeks to narrow down, to define more precisely in language. It is this second level that is most important in the context of this novel, of course, because Luis de Lión himself did not speak more than a few words of any indigenous language.

  However, speakers of Spanish as a first language in Guatemala’s indigenous regions often continue to exhibit many markers of indigenous discourse in their speech in Spanish. It is my intention to show how these markers also provide evidence for the persistence of the poetics of the uncertain across rural areas of Guatemala regardless of whether or not they still use indigenous languages or traditional indigenous dress. This novel exploits some of these markers in order to achieve its distinctive communal village voice (especially in the opening section of each chapter). The novel’s title in Spanish, El tiempo principia en Xibalbá, features such a marker in the otherwise archaic verb principiar.2 I say archaic because—unlike the noun principio—this verb is no longer used in the modern Spanish-speaking world; however, the verb principiar is certainly not archaic in villages of Guatemala, where it is more prevalent than the preferred comenzar of Spanish speakers in the wider world.3 A person using the verb principiar in everyday Spanish in Guatemala City, for example, would be clearly identified as “indigenous” by a city dweller even if the speaker had never uttered a single word of an indigenous language or worn traditional indigenous dress. The word has an alienating effect in urban areas.

  In order to retain that alienating indigenous poetics within a nonindigenous language, I have chosen the somewhat archaic “commences” in English rather than the more comfortable “begins” in the translated title Time Commences in Xibalbá. Right from the front cover, El tiempo principia en Xibalbá purposefully confronts its reader with the persistence of indigenous poetics in the absence of indigenous language. This alienating effect in the title represents—stands in for—the persistence of indigenous poetics on other levels as well.

  While the word principiar is an example of an indigenous residue only (not an example of a poetics of the uncertain proper), the title also offers a more specific “translation” that will serve here as a link between Glissant’s poetics of the deferred and the poetics of the uncertain. The last word of the title, Xibalbá, refers to a prominent setting for the action in two major sections of the Popol Wuj, the most famous Maya literary book, most of which (arguably) was written in the time before contact with the Spanish. Both in the Popol Wuj and in Maya thought in general, Xibalbá is a kind of underworld realm of sickness and other suffering which all people encounter in certain stages of their lives. Xibalbá fiercely resists translation because it does not have the punitive aspects of the Christian hell, nor is it associated only with death at the end of one’s life like the Greek underworld.4 So why does it matter in the context of a poetics of the deferred? The titular word Xibalbá never appears in the novel itself! That is, its precise connection to the narrative line is endlessly deferred. The reader can easily come up with several places in the novel with potential links to the titular Xibalbá, most notably in the collectively voiced first section of each chapter. But it is significant that the place-name is never used in the text itself, especially since time commences there. As a result, it is uncertain where or when—or for that matter, if—time commences at all.

  Paired Couplets

  However, the poetics of the uncertain works on a more discursive level as well, and this discursive feature provides an important departure from Glissant’s poetics of the deferred under which the previous example fits comfortably. Several scholars have shown how Maya languages often employ two-word, compound terms as a strategy to bracket rather than capture meaning.5 Maya languages commonly achieve a sort of dialectical meaning by juxtaposing what appear to be two opposing words, thereby implying that the precise meaning cannot lie in any single word, but only in the space between the two opposing terms. Barbara Tedlock gives an effective example of this in her translation of the K’iche’6 term chuchkajaw, which she translates quite literally as “motherfather.”7 A “chuchkajaw” is a person in a particular town or village, a sort of part counselor/part intermediary with other realms, whose official charge it is to give counsel on one or another area of a person’s life. A chuchkajaw can be either male or female but he or she functions neither as community “mother” nor “father”; but some combination of both that lies ambiguously—and intermittently—between the two terms. The conjoined couplet “motherfather” sets the two edges of the field and implies that the referent lies somewhere in the middle, essentially uncapturable in language. Yet the complementary binary does not yield a new term because K’iche’ foregrounds its own inability to name where exactly in the space between these two this position exists because in fact it does not lie in any one place. So chuchkajaw shows how a poetics of the uncertain functions on the word level in one way in Guatemalan indigenous languages.

  Time Commences in Xibalbá echoes this poetics early on in the introduction of the heroine. The very first mention of Concha takes the form of an impossible pair of terms, terms that in fact appear to negate each other. “The Virgen de Concepción was a whore.” If we remove the linking verb, we are left with the term virginwhore. The poetics of the uncertain imply Concha is both and neither at the same time: She is a whore and not a virgin . . . yet she also is a virgin and not a whore at the same time. But the meaning of the apparent oxymoron can never coalesce, though this seems to be a primary challenge the novel puts before the reader as a driving force behind the narrative. Thus, though we find out early on that this oxymoron is true in some ways (i.e., that she does not have sex for the money, and that she has not conceded her agency as a woman in the act of Catholic marriage), reconciling the opposition is essentially a challenge of translation that both she and the reader must engage for the remainder of the novel.

  What’s more, Concha’s given name also enacts this poetics of the uncertain in a different way that is echoed in other parts of the novel. Concha means “shell” in Spanish.8 A typical shell lying abandoned on the beach has two sides enclosing a space, like a two-term compound word. But when the shell serves as a home to a creature, what is in between these two sides more properly defines the shell itself.9 Of course the poetics in both the name Concha and in the moniker virginwhore plays off the paradoxical Catholic title of the Virgen de Concepción in the village church. The Virgen de Concepción in turn relies on the implied poetics of both the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, as Concha rema
rks in comparing herself to the statue. But the thing that makes Concha the hero of the novel to me is that, unlike the other main characters—in fact, unlike the village itself—she embraces that duality in spite of family, community, and church pressure.

  Emasculation

  By contrast, Juan Caca, Concha’s second husband, does not embrace the multiple sides of his identity. In fact, he does the opposite; he embraces the empty space that is left after denying—or being denied—his conflicting identities. At a crucial point during his own mission of self-discovery (or translation)—a mission that in many ways provides the most structured narrative line in the novel—Concha tells Juan she does not love him because he is a hueco. Now, the Spanish word hueco has a very specific regional meaning in Guatemala that not only complicates its transfer to English but also occludes its meanings in all other Spanish-speaking countries. What’s more, it is especially appropriate as an example of a poetics of the uncertain and as a counter to Concha’s own embracing of her dual self.

  In all other Spanish-speaking countries hueco has a primary meaning of “hollow,” but in Guatemala its primary meaning is “homosexual,” and it does not get used for anything else without eliciting giggles or uncomfortable looks. The novel plays on this double meaning when Concha calls her husband, who has never consummated their marriage, “hueco.” Clearly the first meaning here is “homosexual” as she and others in the village question Juan Caca’s sexuality. But the “hollow” meaning, while more subtle—especially in the Guatemalan context—is perhaps more telling in the context of the poetics of the uncertain I have been constructing to this point. Remember that the Virgen de Concepción (Concha) decides to embrace the contradiction of “virginwhore”; she is a “concha” precisely because she is the two parts that name the space in the middle. Juan, as the hueco, does the opposite. He refuses the two conflicting sides of his identity and is only the empty space.