A Comparative Analysis of Ch’orti’ Verbal Art and the Poetic Discourse Structures of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing

Ch’orti’ Poetic Structuring

The most commonly occurring instances of poetic discourse today are in healing ceremonies. While curanderos (traditional healers) are becoming increasingly difficult to find in many hamlets, there are a sufficient number who share a common tradition to provide a substantial amount of poetic texts. Inherent in such healing rituals is the consistent presence of archaic terminology that is not well understood by the even the healers themselves at times. An immediately apparent characteristic of Ch’orti’ curing rites is the generous use of Spanish forms by curanderos. This represents a complicated mix of incorporating the ’language of power’ into their speech for reasons of prestige and, more pragmatically, being an aid in completing couplet halves when a close match may be difficult to find in Ch’orti’, e.g. tu’t e rum, tu’t e tierra, "on the earth, on the land." This has also resulted in the replacement of many ritual terms with Spanish "equivalents," though in reality many the Spanish lexical items are heavily reinterpreted.

John Fought’s important contributions to understanding Ch’orti’ time narratives (1976) and cyclical patterning in Ch’orti’ discourse (1985) stand as the only aspects of Ch’orti’ verbal art that have been studied to-date. In his article "Time Structuring in Chorti (Mayan) Narratives" (1976) Fought argued that the Ch’orti’ order events in narratives based on deixis, relational elements in addition to a combination of semantic components and linguistic devices, and rhetorical means (such as narrative particles and repetition). In another study titled "Cyclical Patterns in Chorti’ (Mayan) Literature" (1985). Fought argued that couplets arise through "the exploitation of the most basic syntactic resources of the Mayan languages" (135). Fought contends that Ch’orti’ couplets are based on two fundamental classes of predication. The first is equational and intransitive which he defines as "two items [that] are juxtaposed, [and] placed on symmetrical and equal footing" (135). The second form is the possessive type of predication in which "the possessed constituent bears a prefix (or occurs with a specialized particle) which subordinates it to the possessor (135). Couplets in Ch’orti’, according to Fought, operate on a large-scale and multiple level organizational cycle (136).

In terms of poetic content, Ch’orti’ follows closely in the tradition of most Mayan languages in employing couplets at the primary poetic structuring mechanism. Thus far in this project my research has focused on documenting poetic speech within prayers from healing ceremonies whose core composition consists of parallel couplets. Of primary importance in Ch’orti’ curing rites is the description of the evil spirits who are responsible for the illness by means of synecdoche in the couplet lines. The most common is to refer to the body of the evil spirit through different combinations of certain elements such as "hand," "foot," "face," "walking," and "running."

In these cases the body of the malevolent spirit that causing the illness is referred to through synecdoche by either mentioning two of its body parts or the actions associated with them. This use of synecdoche in these couplet structures acts as a framing device for the structure of much of the prayer. In the example cited above the synecdoche of "their hands/their faces" stems from the Ch’orti’ belief that evil spirits residing in one of some 500,000 (or so) different levels of the underworld ’play’ (i.e. ’mischievously cause illness’, see Hull 2000) with people in this world by using their whole body. In this last example from a prayer for a woman who has a fever the evil spirits are the ones responsible for infecting her with a form of their ’mal calor’, or ’evil heat.’ (The translation of all terms relating to ’heat’ and ’sweat’ in these curing contexts are approximate renderings since the concepts do not lend themselves to a simple definition). There are many distinct forms of injurious heat that these spirits possess that they can transfer to humans (see description of some of them below).

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