Dennis Tedlock

After receiving his P.h.D. from Tulane University in 1968, Tedlock dedicated his life to studying the Mayan peoples of Central America. With his wife, Barbara Tedlock, he conducted many trips to Guatemala and wrote extensively about his findings, much of which concerned translating hieroglyphic Mayan texts into English. His translation of the Popol Vuh earned the PEN Translation Prize in 1986, and he and Barbara jointly received the American Anthropological Association President's Award in 1997. Tedlock taught English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the 1980s he was a leading proponent of dialogical anthropology, which sought to give the native peoples in question (in this case, the Mayans) a more prominent voice in Western anthropological writings about them. To this end, Tedlock's translation of the Popol Vuh is notable because it uses interpretation and commentary from a modern Quiché daykeeper, Andrés Xiloj. Though Tedlock's translation of the Popol Vuh is the most common version today, he didn't write it: the Popol Vuh existed as an oral story and as a story recorded in hieroglyphs prior to being recorded in phonetic Quiché around 1550. It survived the Spanish conquest of Central America thanks to the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, who translated the text into a two-column version beginning around 1701. One column featured phonetic Quiché; the other recorded the story in Spanish. Ximénez's text now resides in the Newberry Library in Chicago.