UC Santa Cruz

Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel poet Rosa Chávez (San Andrés Itzapa, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, 1980) was a leading voice in the new wave of Latin American Indigenous writing that emerged after the 1960s. In a literary landscape in which few Maya women have published a full-length collection, she has authored five poetry books and a verse play, and her work has been widely anthologized and translated into six languages. Heart of the Stone comprises a translation of her third collection Ri uk’u’x ri ab’aj / El corazón de la piedra (2010), her only book in an entirely dual-language format. The book was originally published in Spanish with allograph translations into her paternal language K’iche’, the most widely spoken Maya language in Guatemala with a documented 1.6 million speakers. This dissertation marks Chávez’s first complete volume to appear in English and presents the 64 poems in a trilingual English-Spanish-K’iche’ edition with an accompanying four-part “Translator’s Introduction.”

Part 1 “The Politics of Contemporary Maya Textualities” situates Rosa Chávez’s work in the context of Maya textual production in Guatemala that begins in the latter half of the twentieth century in direct response to ladino (non-Maya) representations of indigeneity and the state’s systematic targeting of Maya communities. Part 2 “Rosa Chávez’s Life and Writing” delves into the poet’s biography and the questions about identity that motivated her writing and the bilingual presentation of the book. Part 3 “Ways to Read Ri uk’u’x ri ab’aj / El corazón de la piedra” analyzes Chavez’s poetic techniques, which demonstrate a deep engagement with Maya formal structures, cosmovision, and fluid notions of textuality. Part 4 “On the English Translation” turns to the highly collaborative process between the translator and author, and the ethical considerations involved in bringing Mesoamerican Indigenous literatures to Anglophone audiences. This dissertation models a fluid-text translation appropriate to the dynamic, revisionist quality of Chávez’s poetic practice, in which she frequently updates and adapts poems to speak to the current political moment and demands of her community.