Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0806155612 ISBN 13 : 9780806155616

Editeur : University of Oklahoma Press, 2017

Synopsis

Mexico's indigenous people speak a number of rich and complex languages today, as they did before the arrival of the Spanish. Yet a common misperception is that Mayas have no languages of their own, only dialectos, and therefore live in silence. In reality, contemporary Mayas are anything but voiceless. Chiapas Maya Awakening, a collection of poems and short stories by indigenous authors from Chiapas, Mexico, is an inspiring testimony to their literary achievements. A unique trilingual edition, it presents the contributors' works in the living Chiapas Mayan languages of Tsotsil and Tseltal, along with English and Spanish translations.

As Sean S. Sell, Marceal Méndez, and Inés Hernández-Ávila explain in their thoughtful introductory pieces, the indigenous authors of this volume were born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, a time of growing cultural awareness among the native communities of Chiapas. Although the authors received a formal education, their language of instruction was Spanish, and they had to pursue independent paths to learn to read and write in their native tongues. In the book's first half, devoted to poetry, the writers consciously speak for their communities. Their verses evoke the quetzal, the moon, and the sea and reflect the identities of those who celebrate them. The short stories that follow address aspects of modern Maya life. In these stories, mistrust and desperation yield violence among a people whose connection to the land is powerful but still precarious.

Chiapas Maya Awakening demonstrates that Mayas are neither a vanished ancient civilization nor a remote, undeveloped people. Instead, through their memorable poems and stories, the indigenous writers of this volume claim a place of their own within the broader fields of national and global literature.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Sean S. Sell is a translator and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California-Davis.

Nicolás Huet Bautista is editor of Ma'yuk sti'ilal xch'inch'unel k'inal: Silencio sin frontera, the Mayan- and Spanish-language edition of this book.

Marceal Méndez is a Tseltal writer and scholar from Petalcingo in Chiapas, Mexico.

Inés Hernández-Ávila is Professor of Native American Studies at UC-Davis and editor of Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Oklahoma Press
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0806155612
• ISBN 13: 9780806155616
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Éditeur: Bautista Nicolás Huet
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Pays-Bas