Mapping an article
Biography of a word
The article is about a word/concept/understanding from the mayan languages.
The article, an essay, includes poetry, quotes from several books, anecdotes, illustrations,photography, draw on cultural and artistic knowledge, is a result of research
as such should also be met with a flexible reading and a variety in approaches
For who is this written? Where does it come from? Where does it want to go?
What is the role of translation? Mapping as a way of translating
Can a text be translated into a map?
Can using the mayan way of writing , with both logogram (representing words and concept) and syllabograms(representing sounds)
be helpful?
Companion readings? N. Katherine Hayles
Before and after lecture 02.10 2025
Can I make this in to a conversation between all the actors? Is it a choir?
A performative lecture as an aim? Do I need one? Should I?
A number of persons and books and various forms for text appear in the text
Throughout there is a constant conversation. The writer refers to a book and lets the writer of that book appear in discussion with his references.
Various forms for text are woven together throughout the text.
Should it be taken out into the physical space? Can I find a way of weaving this?
Why translate it? the main reason is because I think this is a word/concept lacking in nordic societies. For pedagogical reasons i.e doing it.
transformative to
...........
Are there boundaries in this text?
Abiayala. I learned this as a word from a people in Panama, referring to what is now called the american continent. Later I have mainly come across it
Scientists, spiritual guides, poets, artists,
The Maya script is a logosyllabic system in which some signs called logograms represent words or concepts (like “shield” or “jaguar”), whilst other signs called syllabograms (or phonograms) represent sounds in the form of single syllables (like “pa”, “ma”).
Maya Writing System and Hieroglyphic Script - Maya Archaeologist - Dr Diane Davies
This a work-in-progress translation of a chapter written by Cecila Vicuña in the book
KEMTZIJ
Kemon taq tzij na'oj
Palabras y pensamientos tejidos
Los tejidos mayas
Espejos de una cosmovision
Kab'awil
is a kiche' mayan word with the literal (translated meaning) of "double sight". Seeing manifold, would be my own direct western-ised understanding. The ideogram relating to Kab'awil is a two-headed eagle seeing both ways. Its meaning is to "see all ways". To see backwards, and forwards, to remember the contemporary and relate to history and feel the future. A paradigm, Gloria E. Chacón, calls it.
A way of seeing transversally.
(mayan ideograms, 2d images that represent a 4d version)
Huipil
The Huipil: An everlasting, indigenous cultural emblem — Phalarope.org
Mayan words in text:
ch'ob'onik
cahtzu - cahxucut - cuatro lados -fire hjørner- cuatro lados
retaxik - medir - measure
K'a'am - cuerda- rope-tau
winaqirik - empiesar a ser separado (o diferenciado) ( mayas don't use the word creacion but Winaqarik
kajuljutik lo que brilla what shines
Tejer es dar a luz - Andesfjellene
awex - sembrar - to sow, to plant
saqir - aclarar -- to clarify?
Are - pronombre demonstrativo
U xe' - su origen
Ojer tzij : antiguas historias, palabras
Interview from Fifteen Conversations
Vladimir Tarasov
jazz drummer and visual artist
Page 93
Andrey Georgievich Bitov said it very well. We have held joint performances with him, and when talking baout what I do, what we do, he kept giving a great example that "in the beginning there was a word. A word consists of sounds, and the oricingal sound was perhaps the sound of two stones hitting each other". Here when hyou click with your tongue, you don't just hear it, you see it, you understand that is possible to see indirectly, not necessarily because the eyes register some spectacle.
Books referenced and mentioned
Popol Vuh
Dennis Tedlock
The Spoken Word
Dennis Tedlock
The Spoken Word
Dennis Tedlock
Vocabulario de la lengua Aymara
Padre Ludovico Bertonio
Time and the highland Maya
Barbara Tedlock
Time and the highland Maya
Dennis Tedlock
Breath on the mirror
The Spoken Word and the work of interpretation
Dennis Tedlock
Barbara and Dennis Tedlock
Text and textile
El libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel
Popol Wuj
Historia de la literatura natural
Angel Maria Garibay
recopolisacion de Gary Urton
UB'IXIK DEL DECIR
Cecilia Vicuña
Translating to english/norwegian nynorsk
PAGE 133
Ub'ixik über chic!
1. Ub'ixik is the anuncio del decir, "what the name says!, in ki'che-maya, a mode/way of reading.
2. And to read in mayan is to read the day.
3. But the “day”, q’ij, is not a day, but it is a conglomerate of events and dimensions that are possible to “read” or solve as a riddle, in a mode equally multidimensional.
“ quote”
4. To read ubixiqueando the words and events, looking for the signs that might illuminate the meaning/saying
5. A tree, a road, the way someone crosses the road
“Quote”
6. Reading the body of the reader connecting it too its surrounding.
7. The answer and the question interweaves, gets woven together
“Quote”
8. In english, to read and adivinar (to fortunetell, predict, spå, guess), comes from the same root, the high-german word Ratan
9. To translate the transfiguracions of the concepts as they pass from one tongue/language to another es also ub’ixik, to make them “speak”
10. A way of reading that echoes in the greek legein, in the latin legere: recoger: collect/gather, and in quechua, pallay, to gather the hebras strands of the warp to start weaving
11. In Chile, we play the pallalla 1, catch small stones or whatever object, while the ball is in the air.
12. The object of is tha make a gesture within another gesture, with the same hand.
13. Intervene in the intervall, inhabit it.
“Quote”
PAGE 134
14. To read the day in maya is to combine two calendars, the civilian, or solar
15. and the sacred and oracular. To read is to thread them in a ronda calendiarica, calendar round=? In a cyclic form, or circular, that evokes the pixom q’aq’al, a weave without beginning or end.
“Quote”
The reader of the day(ab kin) descifres the divine calendar that sustains in the memory of two parallel histories/countings: thirteen numemal days and twenty nominal days, that repeats cyclical en combinations that always changes, the two cuentas dont coincide or start in a fixed place.
There is neither a first nor a last day, but variations on beginning on comensing/beginning.
“Quote”
Twenty times thirteen
Thirteen times twenty
Are the names dancing in the days
or are the days dancing in the name?
The day is the riddle and the message to decipher, the language of the divinity of the numbers and names of the days
To read is an art and a composition.
A weave and super-position.
The meaning of a phrase or an event is “meaning” in the body interweaved to its surround, and this double perception, of hte body in time and in history, makes the reader in to a fortune-teller adivinadora
Reader of the interior of the sound.
The the numeric count wordplay and associations are added, to awaken the names of the day and the “talk of the blood”, of the inside of the reader/adivinadora. (quote)
PAGE 134
In the beginning of the 80’s, in middle of the massacre of mayan communities in Guatemala I found a huipil in a ditch in New York. How did it get here?
From the United States came orders of death and murder, and the huipil, rotten and hurt, came to give back to New York.
Julia Montoya sends me an image of a huipil from Tactic, by means of internett. Stars and flowers, deer and foxes, dances over a geometric field. The stars are blooming and the flowers are blinking, some has the head lifted others heads down. Who talks to who in these threads? The stars with the flowers?
The foxes and the deer? The forms with the forms? The magenta roses with the blues and the cerulean?
Who sends the colours to the earth?
Who orders the irregular order of its beauty?
It’s not posible to sa order without alluding to the ordiri of the warp: to start weaving
Nor is it possible to say ordinario without going back the original moment, the arming of the threads to the loom
“Quote”
To talk about speech alwais takes us back to textile process, as if one is playing with the other in a vaiven sway of reflections and sounds,
What came first? A cord, or a word to tie the cord back to the rope.
Is speech is a sound made in to thread? Or is reflecting the sound of the textile?
PAGE 135
Linguistics - grammar -
Diphrastic kennings
Diphrastic Kennings in Mayan Hieroglyphic Literature on JSTOR
Difrasismo