The Power & Poetry of the Popol Vuh, the Creation Epic of the Maya

Michael Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and translator. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, his poems have appeared in The Sun, Tin House, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and Image. He’s the author of three collections of poetry, including You Must Remember This, winner of the Linquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. His translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed Editions, 2018) – the first English rendering of the myth in verse – was recently long-listed for the National Translation Award and named “one of 2018’s ten best books of poetry” by the NY Times. He lives in Minneapolis.

This talk will introduce the scope and scale of the creation myth of the Maya, the Popol Vuh, and how it came to us in textual form. It will touch briefly upon the process & challenges of creating a poetic rendering from the K’iche’, then a number of excerpts will be read to give sense of the arc of the greater work.

Co-sponsored by the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication.

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.