Canek is foremost a story, a latter-day telling of the life and thinking of Jacinto Canek, the real but also fabled hero of the 1761 Maya Indian revolt in the Yucatan. It is fiction, woven with history, folktale, and a lucid evocation of the temper of day-to-day existence on the great plantations of colonial Mexico. Its many thousand of readers have surrendered to the book’s own special reality, its separateness from the traditional categories of literature, ethnography, or biography. Instead of borrowing myths and legends from an oral tradition and shaping them toward a standard literary form, Ermilo Abreu Gómez presents us with fragments, with photographically sharp renderings of moments, with knowledge and bits of prophetic insight very much like the ones found in the few arcane texts that remain from the pre-Conquest Maya. The resulting tapestry is surely the most vivid and involving of introductions to the folk culture of the Yucatán. Canek has proven wonderfully durable. Since first publication in 1940, over thirty-four editions or new printings have appeared in Spanish, and translations in whole or in part of a variety of languages from Russian to Urdu. The present translation has been made by an anthropologist and a novelist, both of whom have spent considerable time living in rural Mexican society. An introduction and glossary are provided. Más »
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