Professor Georges Raynaud of the Sorbonne spent many years studying the Indian manuscripts of the Americas, and in Paris in 1925, he published a new version of the Popol Vuh, under the title of Les dieux, les heros et les hommes de l'ancien Guatémala d'après le Livre du Conseil. A Spanish translation of this work was published in 1927.
Finally there should be mentioned the version of Licenciado J. Antonio Villacorta and Don Flavio Rodas N. contained in a volume entitled Manuscrito de Chichicastenango (Popol Buj). Estudio sobre las antiguas tradiciones del Pueblo Quiché. Texto indígena fonetizado y traducido al Castellano. Notas etimológicas, etc. (Guatemala, 1927). This is the first modern translation to be published in Guatemala. In the preface of the work one reads that the authors undertook the translation because a faithful version of the Manuscript had not yet been made. Señor Rodas, well versed in the modern Quiché language, took the text transcribed by Brasseur de Bourbourg and phoneticized it according to Spanish spelling "In order that the Indians and other people who speak the language could read it." The Quiché text appears in this form accompanied by a Spanish translation. Studies on the Quiché, the Maya, and the Tolteca, the calendar, and the pre-Columbian manuscripts precede the translation, and at the end there are several pages of notes and etymology.
A well-known Austrian Investigator, Rudolph Schuller, left an English translation of the Quiché book, according to Dr. Samuel K. Lothrop's report in his archaeological study on the region of Lake Atitlán (Carnegie Institution of Washington, September, 1933). Lothrop adds that he himself also has prepared a translation of the same document.
In his book An introduction to Mythology, Lewis Spence says:
"There is an abridgment in English by the present writer. An English translation of the whole appeared in an American magazine entitled The Word during 1906 and 1907, from the pen of Dr. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, but whether from the Spanish, or original Kiche, I do not know. It is, moreover, couched in Scriptural language, and such treatment assists the vulgar error that the Popol Vuh is merely a native travesty of portions of the Old Testament."
Dr. Guthrie states that his translation was made independently, "but some felicitous terms have been added" from another translation from the first book of the Popol Vuh by James Pryse, which appeared in Lucifer in 1894-95.
A new German translation by Leonhard Schultze Jena was published in Stuttgart in 1944, together with the original text as transcribed by Ximénez, under the title of Popol Vuh. Das heiliges Buch der Quiché Indianer von Guatemala.
The Ayer Collection in the Newberry Libra of Chicago has an unpublished English translation of the Popol Vuh made by Colonel Beebe. It is a manuscript of 264 pages, apparently based on the French translation of Brasseur de Bourbourg.
The legends of the Popol Vuh have been used by some modern writers in the composition of stories and narratives for children, as one can see in the collection of Krickeberg and in the Tales from Silver Lands by Charles Finger. Isolated passages of the Popol Vuh have been dramatized many times. And the German writer, Oswald Claassen, using the same episodes, composed a long poem, entitled Die Ahnen des Mondes, and Das Gefass des Schicksals, inspired by the translation of Pohorilles.
In this way modern authors have justified the opinion, somewhat ironical, that Ximénez expressed when he wrote, "I well know that all these histories are children's stories," although this opinion certainly did not deter the austere friar from dedicating much of the time which his ecclesiastical duties left free, to transcribing and translating them Into Spanish and commenting upon them.
In his study on the Indian authors and their works (Aboriginal American Authors and Their Productions), Brinton comments on the narrative of the mythology and traditional history of the Quiché, and the translations of Ximénez and Brasseur de Bourbourg, and declares that neither of these translations is satisfactory. According to Brinton, Ximénez wrote with all the prejudices of a Spanish monk, and Brasseur de Bourbourg was an euhemerist of the most advanced type, who
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