If Today Were Tomorrow

Poems

By: Humberto Ak'abal, Michael Bazzett - translator

Narrated by: Michael Bazzett, Magdalena Kaluza

Length: 1 hr and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

“My language was born among trees,

it holds the taste of earth;

my ancestors’ tongue is my home.”

—from “The Old Song of the Blood”

A legacy of land and language courses through this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala.

Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.

Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.

©2024 Humberto Ak'abal and Michael Bazzett (P)2024 Milkweed Editions

Critic reviews

“These poems by a K’iche’ Maya writer—translated from K’iche’ to Spanish by the poet, then to English by Michael Bazzett—are odes to Guatemala’s landscape: a bird who sings for rain, a “humpbacked tree,” moonlight on adobe.” —New York Times Book Review

“These poems are seeds, compact, succinct, stunningly rich, and containing more than meets the eye. They feel timeless in their embrace of the inheritance of the past, the urgency of the present, and a forward leaning gaze of the future. Each poem contains the key components to conveying the subject at hand and allow the full resonance and understanding to take root from the distilled, vital droplet of a poem. Bazzett has made a perennial garden of Ak’abal’s work that will sing through many seasons of readers.”—Claire Jussel, West Trade Review

“Ak’abal, drawing on the animated symbolism of his tradition, mixes a rawness with a passionate precision. The poems have occasion beyond observation.”—Jesse Nathan, Poetry Society of America