Bøger af Dennis Tedlock

Mayan literature is among the oldest in the world, spanning an astonishing two millennia from deep pre-Columbian antiquity to the present day. Here, for the first time, is a fully illustrated survey, from the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions to the works of later writers using the Roman alphabet. Dennis Tedlock-ethnographer, linguist, poet, and award-winning author-draws on decades of living and working among the Maya to assemble this groundbreaking book, which is the first to treat ancient Mayan texts as literature. Tedlock considers the texts chronologically. He establishes that women were among the ancient writers and challenges the idea that Mayan rulers claimed the status of gods. 2000 Years of Mayan Literature expands our understanding and appreciation not only of Mayan literature but of indigenous American literature in its entirety.

This exploration of the influence of Mayan hieroglyphics on the great American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) is an important document in the history of New World verse. In The Olson Codex, Dennis Tedlock describes and examines Olson's efforts to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, giving Olson's work in Mexico the place it deserves within twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

"A much needed book. It not only provides the proper orientation to its material, but its humanistic approach is more perceptive and illuminating than technical scholarship." -Theodore H. Gaster, Columbia University

Dennis Tedlock presents startling new methods for transcribing, translating, and interpreting oral performance that carry wide implications for all areas of the spoken arts. Moreover, he reveals how the categories and concepts of poetics and hermeneutics based in Western literary traditions cannot be carried over in their entirety to the spoken arts of other cultures but require extensive reevaluation.