Oct
30
1:30am
Ilan Stavans in conversation with Frederick Luis Aldama discusses "Popol Vuh"
By DIESEL, A Bookstore
Join us on Thursday, October 29th at 6:30pm for a virtual event with Ilan Stavans to discuss Popol Vuh: A Retelling. He will be joined in conversation by fellow author Frederick Luis Aldama.
Customers purchasing Popol Vuh: A Retelling from DIESEL will receive a personalized signed copy.
The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popol Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were being threatened with destruction by European conquest and Christianity, it was written down in verse by members of the K’iche’ nobility in what is today Guatemala. In 1701, that text was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar and ethnographer before vanishing mysteriously.
Cosmic in scope and yet intimately human, the Popol Vuh offers invaluable insight into the Maya way of life before being decimated by colonization -- their code of ethics, their views on death and the afterlife, and their devotion to passion, courage, and the natural world. It tells the story of how the world was created in a series of rehearsals that included wooden dummies, demi-gods, and eventually humans. It describes the underworld, Xibalba -- a place as harrowing as Dante’s hell -- and relates the legend of the ultimate king, who, in the face of tragedy, became a spirit that accompanies his people in their struggle for survival.
Popol Vuh: A Retelling is a one-of-a-kind rendition of this sacred text that is as seminal as the Bible and the Qur’an, the Ramayana and the Odyssey. Award-winning scholar of Latin American literature Ilan Stavans brings a fresh creative energy to the Popol Vuh, giving a new generation of readers the opportunity to connect with this timeless story and with the plight of the indigenous people of the Americas.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin America and Latino Culture and the publisher of Restless Books. He has translated Lazarillo de Tormes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Mariano Azuela, and Juan Rulfo into English, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop into Spanish, Yehuda Halevi and Yehuda Amichai from Hebrew, Isaac Bashevis Singer from Yiddish, and Shakespeare, Cervantes, and The Little Prince into Spanglish. His books include On Borrowed Words, Dictionary Days, Quixote, On Self-Translation, and The Wall. He edited the Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, and Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, his work, rendered into twenty languages, has been adapted to film, TV, radio, and theater.
Frederick Luis Aldama is Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of 48 books, including his first children’s book The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie. In 2018, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics won the International Latino Book Award and the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Work. He is editor and coeditor of 9 academic press book series as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. He is creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes in comics and co-founder and director of SÕL-CON: Brown, Black, Indigenous Comix Expo.
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