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K’ay

K’ay means song. The colonial songbook writes it kay (Edmonson, 1982, p. 205). This page is about the couplet, the pair of matching lines at the heart of Maya poetry, from the glyphs to the songs of colonial Yucatán.

The couplet

A Maya poet says a thing twice. Two lines run side by side, and the second echoes or turns the first. Scholars count the couplet among the major poetic features of Maya verbal art. Munro Edmonson set the Popol Vuh in couplets in 1971, and his work made the couplet a starting point for later studies. Dennis Tedlock showed that other parallel forms, such as the triplet, have a place in Maya verse (Carrasco and Hull, 2012, p. 2). A single couplet set in prose asks the reader to pause over it (p. 4).

Three related forms come up again and again. In a chiasm, the first part of a passage matches the last, the second matches the next to last, and so on. A chiasm can run a few lines or a whole chapter (Christenson, 2012, p. 311). A diphrastic kenning pairs two distinct things to make a third, more abstract idea (Hull, 2012, p. 73). A hyperbaton changes the usual order of words in a phrase for poetic effect (Lacadena, 2012, p. 45).

Maya poems were sung, danced, and spoken, so the word k’ay fits them better than the English word poetry.

In the glyphs

The habit is old. Kerry Hull traces fourteen paired kennings from the hieroglyphic texts into colonial documents and Mayan languages spoken today. He argues that they show a poetic tradition reaching back at least to the Early Classic period and running on to the present (Hull, 2012, p. 73). Alfonso Lacadena traces hyperbaton in the inscriptions (Lacadena, 2012, pp. 45 to 71), and Michael Carrasco studies three narratives at Palenque (Carrasco, 2012, pp. 123 to 160).

In the glyphs, k’ay is the verb to sing and the noun song, and a singer is k’ayom, the “song-er” (Kettunen and Helmke, 2025, pp. 101, 118).

The Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh is the K’iche’ Maya book of creation. Allen Christenson’s literal translation sets it line by line in K’iche’ and English, so each couplet can be seen (Christenson, 2007). The gods come in pairs, such as Tz’aqol and B’itol, Framer and Shaper. When a goddess and a god are paired in a couplet, the goddess comes first. In one passage four parallel lines name the four corners and four sides of earth and sky, and Christenson reads the fourfold form as a mirror of the fourfold world (Christenson, 2007, notes to the opening lines).

Couplets had long been recognized in early K’iche’ texts, but chiasmus had not been well documented. Christenson tests early colonial K’iche’ writings for it (Christenson, 2012, p. 311). The words tzuqul and q’o’l, provider and nurturer, come from a Popol Vuh couplet.

The Songs of Dzitbalché

In 1942 a small manuscript of Maya songs came to light in Yucatán. Its first editor, Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, judged that it was copied in its present form after 1742. One song gives the date 1440, and Edmonson accepted it. The scribe names himself by lineage and by his town, Dzitbalché (Edmonson, 1982, pp. 173, 202). Without these songs, Edmonson wrote, Maya lyric poetry would be hard to document (p. 173).

Every song is in couplets, from 22 to 43 of them. Many fall into stanzas of three, five, or six, and each song opens with a title of one to three couplets (Edmonson, 1982, pp. 174 to 175). In one, a singer at dawn asks a small bird to sing in the branches of a ceiba tree (p. 176). The word kay, song, opens the title of the dance of the archer (p. 205).

Popol Vuh, literal translation (PDF) Edmonson on the Dzitbalché songs (PDF) Parallel Worlds

Sources

The chapters from Parallel Worlds were read in the UMGC library copy, ProQuest Ebook Central.