Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 2008
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[page 64]
Felicia Londré
Curators’ Professor of Theatre, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Book Review
Rabinal Achí: A Fifteenth-Century Maya Dynastic Drama. Ed. by Alain Breton. Trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan and Robert Schneider. Foreword by Robert M. Carmack. Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 2007.
Pp. xviii + 396. $34.95 paper.
Given the textual ambiguities and layered shades of meaning in Rabinal Achí, the earliest surviving text of a Native American drama, a new English translation of it is a welcome contribution to performance and ethnographic studies. Alain Breton’s meticulous rendering of the Pérez manuscript of Rabinal Achí was published in French in 1994, in Spanish in 1999, and now in English, along with his close historical, geographical, and etymological analyses of it. This volume also includes a facsimile of the 64-page handwritten Pérez manuscript and a glossary of significant terms as gleaned from various colonial lexicographies. The heart of the book, the dramatic work itself, is presented with the transliterated Quiché-language text and Robert Schneider’s English version of Breton’s translation on facing pages that also offer voluminous explanatory footnotes. Thus there is a wealth of fascinating material here for anyone intrigued by Rabinal Achí.
Breton’s Introduction reviews the provenance of the two existing transcriptions of Rabinal Achí: the one published by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862, the other--the Pérez manuscript--dated 1913 and discovered by Carroll E. Mace in 1952. Although both manuscripts are tied to Bartolo Sis (the Guatemalan villager who had received the work orally from his father and grandfather), Breton argues on the basis of variations in spelling, punctuation, and page layout that the latter was independently transcribed rather than copied from Brasseur’s text.
To contextualize the action of Rabinal Achí, Breton traces back as early as the tenth century the migration patterns and conflicts between the two Guatemalan highlands groups, the Rabinaleb and the Quiché, represented by the two warriors in the play. [page 65] However, he sees the drama as essentially ahistorical, less concerned with a specific historic episode than with an allegorical pattern, as befitting its ritual significance.
Breton’s analyses of the action, the characters in the drama and those named in the dialogue, and the geographical references are all underpinned by his meticulous examination of word choices, their meanings, and their possible variants. He recounts his own coming to awareness of the work’s importance as an outgrowth of his field research on “the religious life of the Quiché-Achí” (48-49).
Following the texts of Rabinal Achí, Breton indulges in somewhat speculative analysis as a means of grappling with the work’s ritual significance over five centuries. He finds considerable interest in the geographical trajectories of the two warriors despite the difficulty of identifying actual locales for the place-names in the dialogue. A series of maps and charts break down the spatial perspectives in Rabinal Achí, and then Breton overlays this with an analysis of temporal perspectives. Drawing upon both historical and etymological evidence, Breton vividly conveys the urgency of the quest for food in the 1400s as a driving motive behind the jockeying for territorial domain between the Rabinaleb and the Quiché. One of his most startling insights concerns the royal taste for honey containing the bee larvae. Less explicit is the treatment of the Quiché warrior’s sacrifice, which Breton sees more as a punishment than as a ritual honor. Yet he conveys his deep respect for the mystery of this ancient dance-drama, which has hitherto yielded to outsiders only a tiny portion of its secrets.
Breton’s scrupulous scholarship makes for a densely written text with similarly dense footnotes, but he organizes his material so skillfully that the reader is pulled smoothly along, much aided by the lucid translation. Solid as this research is, one must regret the time-lag between its original publication in French and this book. The field of pre-Colombian cultural studies is a fast-growing one, yet this book’s bibliography lists no work later than one of Breton’s own articles in 2001. The glaring omission is Denis Tedlock’s Rabinal Achí: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Whereas Schneider’s translation of the text of Rabinal Achí established by Breton is devoted to precise rendering of literal meaning while retaining inasmuch as possible the rhythms of the original, Tedlock’s translation was intended for and tested in [page 66] performance. Thus Breton/Schneider’s version of the refrain in the Quiché warrior’s opening speech is:
so says my word, facing the sky
So I will not exchange many words with You!
May the sky
and the earth remain with You
--Dignitary
Rabinal Achí. (129)
Tedlock’s treatment of the same passage is:
so say my words
since I haven’t many words
May Sky and Earth be with you, sir
Some of Breton’s literally translated phrases may strike the reader as odd, and thus it is interesting to compare them with Tedlock’s choices. For example, “in the child of my shield” (Breton 131) vs. “under the power of my shield” (Tedlock 30); “as to attract them, the white children” (Breton 143) vs. “as an enticement … for the children, the sons of light” (Tedlock 36); “That’s where I heard, close by, the trumpets announcing the bleeding” (Breton 157) vs. “When I got there I heard, already in progress the sorrowful sound of the bloodletter’s trumpets” (Tedlock 42).
My final comparison comes from the king’s fourth speech, in which he addresses the Quiché warrior. According to Breton:
If it hadn’t been for my anger
to make them return and reappear,
it is certain that, over there, the white children’s roots
Tedlock’s version of that excerpt is:
and if it hadn’t been for my brave
[page 67]Truly, over there
you, sir, were chopping through the root, the trunk
These examples should suggest the complexities of this arcane work. While both Breton and Tedlock establish historical and ethnographic contexts for Rabinal Achí, Breton grounds his work in etymology and Tedlock documents performance traditions. Both leave plenty of latitude for further study of the religious elements in Rabinal Achí.