Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
I Don't Know . . .
My village
watched me leave in silence.
The bustling city
took no notice
of my arrival.
I stopped working the land
and got a job:
I don’t know if I went forward
or backwards.
Humberto Ak’abal (1952–2019) was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His collection Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named book of the year by Association of Guatemalan Journalists and received their Golden Quetzal award in 1993. In 2004, he declined to receive the Guatemala National Prize in Literature because it is named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, whom Ak’abal accused of encouraging racism. Ak’abal, recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, died on January 28, 2019. A bilingual selected edition of his work, If Today Were Tomorrow (translated by Michael Bazzett), is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in June. (updated 4/2024)
Michael Bazzett is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021). The recipient of awards from The Frost Place and the National Endowment for the Arts, he has placed poems in The American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, The Nation, Granta, and elsewhere. His verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), was longlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry and named one of 2018’s best books of poetry by The New York Times. (updated 4/2024)