Popol Vuh
Sacred narrative of the K'iche' Maya of the Guatemalan highlands, of anonymous authorship, transmitted orally for centuries before being transcribed in Latin script in the K'iche' language around the mid-sixteenth century by anonymous members of the indigenous nobility, shortly after the Spanish conquest, in an effort to preserve the tradition in the face of the threat of cultural and religious destruction. The original manuscript has been lost, but a copy was transcribed and translated into Spanish in the early eighteenth century by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, thanks to whom we know the text today. The name 'Popol Vuh' roughly means 'Book of the Council' or 'Community Book', and the work combines cosmogonic mythology, heroic epic and dynastic chronicle in a complex structure of extraordinary literary beauty. The first part narrates the creation of the world by the creator gods Tepeu and Gucumatz, including failed attempts to create human beings from mud and wood before succeeding with maize, the material of which true humans are ultimately made. The central and most famous section recounts the adventures of the hero twins Hunahpú and Ixbalanqué, who descend into Xibalba, the underworld ruled by the lords of death, to avenge their father and uncle, overcoming a series of deadly trials through ingenuity until defeating the lords of the underworld and finally ascending to the sky transformed into the Sun and the Moon. The work concludes with the genealogy of the K'iche' royal lineages down to the time of the conquest. Considered the most complete and literarily elaborate surviving synthesis of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican worldview, the Popol Vuh is today a foundational text of Maya and Guatemalan cultural identity, and one of the great classics of American indigenous literature.