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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9496157" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading Joaquin De la Sierra's new translation of The Maya Book of Creation: The Sacred Text of the Maya, also known as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popol_Vuh" target="_blank">Popol Vuh</a>.A note of acknowledgment is due here, as I picked this book up after reading another poster in this thread (or perhaps last year's thread) mention this title. I'm pretty sure it was [USER=6671663]@Autumnal[/USER], so thanks for that.On a similar note, it's rather odd that I couldn't find the name of the translator of this book at all within the text. He mentions several personal opinions and some anecdotes, and makes a dedication in the front of the book as well, yet never uses his name. If it wasn't for the Amazon page, I wouldn't know who he was. Is that an oversight, or was he being deliberately humble? I'm not sure.What I am sure of is that the author did a very good job of translating the text...mostly. There's a long introduction that highlights and overviews several aspects of Mayan culture, particularly the Ki'che' people (called "Quiche" in the text), helping to ground things. I'll confess to particularly enjoying learning about Mayan numerals and how they counted, which was incredibly easy to remember for how simple it was (there are only three numerals), and yet is able to concisely write out very large numbers.Likewise, the text itself is artificially broken into forty-five sections, with each break having a picture or illustration and a caption that explains some aspect of Mayan culture of mythology, usually in reference to what we're about to read. It made the text very approachable and engaging.My only complaints about the translation are the seemingly-random decisions to translate some names into their English meaning, while others are transliterations of their Mayan pronunciation. For instance, the evil bird near the beginning of the text is called "Seven-Macaw" rather than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vucub_Caquix" target="_blank">Vucub Caquix</a>, but his two sons are called Zipacna and Cabracan, with no listing of what those names mean. It's fairly inconsistent, and I repeatedly found myself wondering why some names had been translated and not others. (My other complaint is that there were a few instances, albeit only a few, where a name was translated differently from one page to the next, e.g. a place called "Chi Ismachi" on one page, and then "Chi Izmachi" on the next.)I was also somewhat surprised at some of themes in the text itself. This might say more about me than anything, but my perception of the pre-Colombian Mayan people (as opposed to, say, the Aztecs) were those of a spiritual, almost "enlightened" society. However, the text here has death being something menacing and awful (the realm of death Xib'alb'a, more commonly known as Xibalba, translates to "Place of Fear" and is full of awful realms and evil gods/demons); has men being dominant figures while women are either temptresses or wives/mothers; has the Ki'che' demanding that other tribes worship their gods in exchange for aid; it has the Ki'che' going to war in order to procure human sacrifices, etc.In other words, the moral aspect of the text is more down-to-earth than I was expecting, insofar as the universal truth about humans not being good people goes.</blockquote>

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