Abstract

ABSTRACT


Ruptura y continuidad en la poesía indígena contemporánea escrita en castellano de México y Guatemala

Augusto Gutiérrez

In Mexico and Guatemala the dominant culture continues to dismiss the existence of an indigenous literature, and so their work is persistently excluded from all official artistic and literary circles. This study aims to demonstrate, from a theoretical and literary perspective, that contemporary indigenous poetry from Mexico and Guatemala constitutes a literary phenomenon in which the oral and written traditions interact within a highly complex and conflictive cultural space. I will examine how this relatively new poetic movement aims to resume a line of continuity between the past and the present, and to establish itself as a literary alternative to the dominant culture. For this purpose, I have focused on two central issues: first, the tension between orality and literacy, which constitutes an essential element in the creative process of a bilingual text belonging to two different cultures in conflict. Secondly, the act of translation plays a pertinent role allowing the contemporary indigenous poet from Mexico and Guatemala to underscore the inter-semiotic and inter-linguistic tensions that arise from translating his/her literature, and how this conflictive interaction operates in the present to form the aesthetic and ideological framework for the construction of a differentiated literature.