Author: Ilan Stevens (ills. Gabriela Larios)

Format: Hardcover

Popul Vuh: A Retelling is a ‘prose retelling’ of the classic K’iche’ Mayan mythical text, as recorded by the priest Francisco Ximenez. As a prose retelling, the goal seems to have been to make the text more accessible to general audiences through the reformulated (and shortened) text as well as interspersed illustrations of key moments in the text. Along with the main story, which clocks in at a relatively short ~150 pages of large text, the book also includes a introductory section that briefly discusses the context of the text itself and its place in the Mayan world (both in the 18th century and contemporaneously).

While the book does in fact recount the story / stories told in the Popul Vuh with pretty pictures, I was overall unfortunately rather disappointed by the text itself. In particular, the text itself just felt very poorly/blandly written. I suppose it was explicitly ‘prose’, but it certainly felt like the story was told through a series of short statements, with no attempt to do justice to any particulars of language in the original poetic form (I would be extremely surprised if the original was anywhere near this dull). This began even towards the end of the introduction, which, as many of these modern retellings / presentations of older folktales do, attempted to provide some sort of guide to many of the thematic threads running through the Popul Vuh. However, in this case, the author(s) seemed to just decide to list off tropes found in the story without any further exploration or even bother to connect thoughts (to the point it felt like a bulleted list of random thoughts). The stilted and shortened nature of the text itself also gave me the impression that I was missing some substantial portions of the original text (though I have no way to verify this, given that I haven’t read the original); this seems like an extremely undesirable quality for any not-explicitly-abridged retelling to have. The book is already extremely short as is; surely some more elaboration throughout the text would help to flesh out the story and make it feel like I’m getting more than Popul Vuh Sparknotes.