two poems from Humberto Ak'abal
From time to time
I journey backwards
It is my way of remembering.
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I Journey Backwards
From time to time
I journey backwards
It is my way of remembering.
If I walked forward alone,
I would be able to tell you
What oblivion is like.
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Stones
It is not that stones are mute;
they simply keep silent.
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I Don’t Know
My village
saw me leave in silence.
The city with its racket
didn’t even take notice
of my arrival.
I stopped being a peasant
and I have become a laborer:
I don’t know if I’ve made progress
or regressed.
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And Nobody Sees Us
The flame of our blood burns,
inextinguishable
despite the wind of the centuries.
Quiet,
I sing out of breath,
misery with soul,
sadness cornered.
Oh, I want to cry out!
The lands which they leave us
are the mountainsides,
the slopes:
the rainfalls wash them away little by little
and drag them down to the plains
which don’t belong to us anymore.
Here we are
standing at the road’s edge
with our gaze broken by a tear…
And nobody sees us.
* Translated from Spanish to English by Andres Alfaro
Humberto Ak'abal was born in 1952 in Momostenango, Totonicapán, Guatemala and is a K'iche' Maya poet. His poetry has been published in French, English, Scots, German, and Italian, as well as in the original K'iche' and Spanish. In 2004 he declined to receive the Guatemala National Prize in Literature because it is named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, whom Ak'ab'al accused of encouraging racism. He was the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.