Translating Ch’akatajik: Multilingual Poetics of “Conquest” in Sixteenth-Century Iximulew (Guatemala)

This article considers the “poetics of conquest” as the linguistic and discursive ways that authority and imposition were either exerted or contested in the colonial context of evangelization and alphabetization. It focuses on the role that translation played in the vying for power in the early colonial period in the highlands of Guatemala. Specifically, it analyzes two different sources—the Spanish Relaciones geográficas and two Indigenous-language documents, the Popol Wuj and the Xajil Chronicle—that complicate notions of “conquest” by demonstrating the ways that Indigenous scribes and lords appropriated, catered their responses to, or altogether deemphasized European conquest.