The conquest, colonization, independence, the liberal reforms, the regimes, revolution, and dictatorships, the insurrections and ongoing peace dialogues all are combined in a narrative projecting the most important forces in Guatemalan history from the Mayan period to our own times. Using excerpts from poems, novels, stories, essays, and interviews by writers ranging from Cardoza y Aragón and Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias to the indigenous and testimonial voices of Rigoberta Menchú and Mario Payeras, this full sampling of a country’s literature is, in truth, a documentary of realism and magic. Voices from the Silence bears witness to a nation’s long journey toward some ideal community for which so many have fought and died. Texts translated by Marc Zimmerman with the collaboration of Robert Scott Curry, Linda Thelma Campos, Preston Browning, Brad Stull, and Anne Woerhle.

Marc Zimmerman is an associate professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published widely on Latin American subjects, and is the author of the companion to this volume, Literature and Resistance in Guatemala (Ohio, 1995).

Raúl Rojas is a Guatemalan writer and doctor currently doing his residency in Houston, Texas.