DeVictoria, Karen
Unveiling Poetic Patterns in El Título de Totonicapán
Faculty Mentor: Allen Christenson, Comparative Arts and Letters

When the Spanish launched a conquest on the Maya empire in the 16th century, the
Maya suffered devastating blows to their livelihood and culture. Perhaps the most
injurious effect of this conquest was the loss of the Maya languages as the Maya were
forced to converse and write only in Spanish and their written works were destroyed. It
has been said, “When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.”1 After the Spanish
conquest, it was only a few generations until the once highly advanced Maya language
was transformed to a mere oral tradition spoken only by the elderly. As a result, the few
rare Maya scripts that survived the conquests were unreadable, and the history of the
Maya people, their world so to speak, was lost behind a great language barrier.
Fortunately, after centuries of research to recover the dying language, modern day
scholars and Maya communities can now read most of the ancient glyphs.2 However,
only in the past fifty years have scholars become interested in, not only what is written
in ancient Maya texts, but also how those ideas are presented. As researchers have
studied the ancient Maya languages in greater depth, they have found that through
centuries of storytelling tradition, Maya culture has adopted an artistically poetic
narrative style, and the poetic forms embedded within a text can add great insight to the
culture of the ancient Maya. For this study, I chose to conduct some research on a
Maya script titled El Título de Totonicapán in order to gain a deeper understanding of
how poetic structures in the text can reveal greater insight on the culture and history of
the Maya people.

El Título de Totonicapán is argued by scholars to be one of the most significant of the
very few Maya texts that remain from the 16th century.3 The document has had a
dramatic past. After being lost for more than one hundred years, the document was
rediscovered by anthropologist Robert Carmack in the year 1973. Since then, efforts
have been made to translate the text from K’iche into Spanish, but apart from these
translation efforts, little research has been conducted on this text. For the purpose of
this study, I focused mainly on what I found to be the most prevalent poetic patterns. As
I found specific examples of poetic structures in the text, I sought to understand why
that structure was being used and how it contributed to the meaning of the text.

The most common poetic patterns within El Título de Totonicapán consist largely of
parallelisms, such as identical parallelism, envelope parallelism, synonymous
parallelism, augmentive parallelism, associative parallelism, and chiasm. The results of
this research on the significance of these poetic structures were very revealing. In each
example of parallel poetics that I found, the structure appeared to be significant in emphasizing and building upon a specific event or idea within the text. In other words,
though the repetitive phrases may sound awkward and unnecessary when translated
into other languages, these repetitions actually form creative, and sometimes very
complex parallel structures that are intended to allow the reader to immerse himself
within the story and understand important events and ideas through different word
structures.

These complex parallel structures speak not only to the nature of Maya storytelling, but
also to the nature of Maya culture itself. Though these structures appear simple on a
surface level, they are actually more complicated than they appear. Maya specialist
Kerry Hull stated, “Producing well-formed parallelisms is not as easy as one might
imagine. Years of careful learning and a high metalinguistic awareness of what
constitutes a proper associative relationship among terms are usually necessary.”4
Poetic parallel structures embedded within Maya texts show us just how important
words are to the history of the Maya people. Storytelling was an art, and scribes were
some of the most valued and honored citizens in ancient Maya culture. The more we
understand the way that the Maya scribes used their words, the more we can
understand the stories and ideas that were so integral to ancient Maya culture.

My research on the poetics in El Título de Totonicapán is not yet finished as I am in the
process of writing an article on the subject, but I have presented my research at the
college wide Humanities Symposium event. I look forward to seeing how my research
and continued research performed by other scholars will contribute to unveiling the
complex nature of Maya culture through the ornate parallel structures found in Maya
literature.

1 Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 2nd ed., Oxford U 1992
2 “Cracking the Maya Code.” NOVA, PBS, Mar. 2008, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/time-nf.html
3 Carmack, Robert M., and James L. Mondloch, translators. El título de Totonicapán: Texto, traducción y comentario. U Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983

4 Hull, Kerry M., and Michael D. Carrasco. Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary,
Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature. U of Colorado, 2012.