About the Multepal Project
Welcome to the worksite of the Multepal Project. We are an international research initiative devoted creating new editions of the Popol Wuj, a Maya narrative that is considered to be the most well-known and influential Indigenous text of the pre-1492 Americas.
Our goal is to create high quality, scholarly, open source and open access editions that respect Indigenous data sovereignty and promote language acquisition, literacy skills, and the preservation of Mayan language and cultural heritage among children and adults.
With teams in Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States, we are making a Yukatek version of the story in video form intended for children and a new K’iche’ version, based on the sole manuscript to survive the colonial era, intended for scholarly use. At UVA, a team of students and scholars are producing digital editions of the original transcribed manuscript along with established editions in Spanish and other languages.
- UVA (Spanish and K’iche’). A TEI-encoded annotated version of the 18th-century manuscript copied by Francisco de Ximénez, using stand-off markup, developed by the UVA team (Rafael Alvarado, Allison Bigelow, and students in SPAN 7559).
- Fidencio Briceño Chel and Rubén Reyes Ramírez (Spanish and Yukatek). A TEI-encoded version of a collaboratively produced translation from K'iche' and Spanish into Yukatek Maya and Spanish, developed by the UVA team (Aldo Barriente, Allison Bigelow, Sofía Marrero, Winnie Pérez Martínez).
- Samuel Colop 1999 (K’iche’). A TEI-encoded version of Colop’s modern poetic edition in Maya K'iche', developed by the UVA team (Aldo Barriente).
- CTS Compliant. A CTS compliant version of the UVA edition of the 18th-century manuscript, developed by the UVA team (Aldo Barriente).
All of these projects are hosted on our GitHub site, which will be updated continuously to showcase our output.
In addition, we are producing a database of annotations and themes as well as an integrated variorum of the texts that have been derived from the source. See "This Site" below for more information.
Finally, part of this digital edition will be a variorum that integrates all of the project’s texts.
Our Teams
Yukatek Team
Miguel Óscar Chan Dzul, Irma Pomol Cahum, Miriam Uitz May, Karen Solís, Carlos Cámara, Cristina Pech, Leydi Couoh, Carmela Alcaraz, Jesús Barrios, and community participants.
K’iche’ Team
Ajpub’ Pablo García Ixmatá, Juana Cecelia Ixch’umiil García Méndez, Saqijix Candelaria Dominga López Ixcoy, María Beatríz Par Sapón, Aj Xol Héctor Rolando.
UVA Team
Rafael Alvarado, Allison Bigelow, Lucie Wall Stylianopoulos, Ann Burns, Miguel Valladares Llata, Aldo Barriente, Winnie Pérez Martínez, Sofía Marrero, Keerthi Medicharla, Mar Sotelo Padrón.
Students are listed in italics. Maya languages represented: K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, Tz’utujil, and Yukatek.
Funding
This project has been generously funded by an NSF grant and a 3Cavaliers grant at UVA.
Backstory
The Multepal project was conceived originally to support a collaborative text-encoding project for a graduate seminar in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. It is now an independent research initiative in digital Mesoamerican Studies, whose current focus concerns the Maya K'iche' narrative, Popol Wuj. We chose to call our project multepal because it reflects the goal of our project to form a collaboratively produced and governed resource that is respectful of data sovereignty. In Yukatekan, the term refers to a precolumbian institution of "joint rule" or "council rulership," a collective model of political organization and governance. In addition, the root metaphor of the word is quite close to "common-weatlth," as mul refers to "cosa hecha o que es de comunidad o de común" (Barrera Vásquez 1995: 538) and tepal refers to "prosperidad, abundancia, gloria y contento y tenerlo" (785). In keeping with the values implied by the word, we recognize that our efforts to produce an edition of the Popol Wuj are equally collective, and we have been honored to collaborate with researchers in Guatemala, Mexico, and the US along the way. We hope to continue to develop the site in the coming years, and to incorporate new ideas and voices into this digital reading and research experience.
This Site
The purpose of the site is to provide participating students and scholars a platform to build out a thematic research collection associated with Mesoamerican society and culture, one of the primary goals of Multepal. This collection consists of an encyclopedia-like topic map, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and annotations of primary sources. We are currently focused on developing a digital critical edition of the K'iche' Mayan book of creation, the Popol Wuj, and so the resources in the collection all pertain to that text.
By entering this site, you recognize the data sovereignty of the K'iche' people and the contributions of Indigenous women and men, present and past, to these kinds of scholarly research projects. Users who enter the site agree to use the wisdom and knowledges contained within these pages in ways that respect the art, history, and culture of the K'iche' people.
About the Popol Wuj
From the colonial period to the present day, the Popol Wuj, sometimes called the K'iche' Maya book of creation, has been translated, edited, paraphrased, and glossed in more than 25 languages. WorldCat suggests that there are over 1,200 known editions of the work, variously published in verse (Colop 2008, Tedlock 1996), poetry (Colop 1999, Christenson 2008), heavily-annotated versions (Christenson 2003, Mondlock and Carmack 2018), and illustrated volumes (Montejo and Garay 2012). Each translation offers a different interpretation of the K’iche’ source text. The opening line of Adrián Recinos’s Spanish-language translation is, “Este es el principio de las antiguas historias de este lugar llamado Quiché” (This is the beginning of the ancient histories of this place called K'iche') while Ermilo Abreu Gómez renders it as, “Entonces no había ni gente, ni animales, ni árboles, ni piedras, ni nada” (And so there were neither people, nor animals, nor trees, nor stones, or anything).
In many ways, this range of editions and editorial choices is inevitable. There is no extant original source for the book that we call the Popol Wuj. Instead, we are left with an early eighteenth-century copy of an edition that was recorded in lettered form in the mid-sixteenth century. The text lists family lines and leaders from the beginning of the K'iche' community through the arrival of Pedro de Alvarado in 1524; in the final pages, we learn that "D. Pedro de robles ahau ꜫalel / Don Po. de Robles. es el q’Reyn agora" (56r). Because Don Pedro de Robles began his rule after 1554, we know that the Popol Wuj was written down around that time. Most scholars believe that the text was written between 1554-1558 (Christenson 2007: 28). When Dominican friar Francisco de Ximénez made a copy of that text, sometime between 1701 and 1703, nearly 150 years had passed. The text that we have today is thus shaped by years of Maya storytelling, histories, and poetics, as well as colonial and early national archival fragmentations, translations, and missionary interventions.
More broadly, such a proliferation of literary forms is both inevitable and welcome. Sacred literatures are deeply personal and of great meaning to their communities; when we think of the long history of Biblical translation, it is perhaps not surprising to find numerous translations of the K'iche' text. But such variations can make it difficult for modern readers to appreciate the larger cosmological and cultural significance of the stories told in the Popol Wuj, and to see how various storytelling traditions, visual cultures (stonework, jade carvings, vases, paintings, textiles), and historical layers converge to create this range of meanings. Readers’ interpretations of the text, and of the K'iche' cultural and spiritual traditions that are conveyed in translation, depend upon the editions they consult.
Rationale for a digital critical edition
For these reasons, we wanted to create a digital edition of the text that would allow readers to appreciate the many meanings and histories embedded in the narrative. This thematic research collection unites key primary sources -- namely, Ximénez's K'iche'- and Spanish-language manuscript (1701-3), as it has been preserved at the Newberry Library and disseminated as pdfs by the Ohio State University Library -- and variant translations, especially Sam Colop (2008), Dennis Tedlock and Andrés Xiloj (1996), and Allen Christenson (2003, 2008). We also make use of secondary work from archaeology, anthropology, art history, history, linguistics, and literary studies, as well as insights from In the future, we hope to add an English-language level using Allen J. Christenson's (2003) literal poetic translation. We also plan to update the site with new research as it becomes available and as our readers share their insights with us.
Maltyox chawe / Muchas gracias / Thank you,
-- Rafael Alvarado, Allison Bigelow, Catherine Addington, Karina Baptista, Aldo Barriente, Nicole Bonino, Summer Shaw Chambers, Miguel Óscar Chan Dzul, María Esparza Rodríguez, Ajpub' Pablo García Ixmatá, Juana Cecelia Ixch’umiil García Méndez, Ray Gardella, Saqijix Candelaria Dominga López Ixcoy, Sofia Alejandra Marrero, Mallory Matsumoto, Michelet McClean Estrada, Will Norton, María Beatríz Par Sapón, Winnie Pérez Martínez, Irma Yolanda Pomol Cahum, Dave Prine, Matthew Richey, Aj Xol Hector Rolando, Benjamín Romero Salado, Miriam Uitz May, Miguel Valladares Llata, José Augusto Yac Noj