No pre-conquest Kiche book survives. What survives is alphabetic: at some point around the middle of the sixteenth century, within a generation or two of the Spanish conquest of the highlands, Kiche authors who left their names off the work wrote their tradition down in the Kiche language using the Latin alphabet the missionaries had brought. That manuscript is lost.
Between roughly 1701 and 1703 a Dominican, Francisco Ximenez, parish priest at Chichicastenango, obtained it or was shown it, and copied it out in parallel columns, Kiche on the left and his own Spanish translation on the right. His copy passed to the university library in Guatemala City, was carried to Europe in the nineteenth century, and eventually reached the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it sits in the Ayer collection. Every edition and translation in existence descends from those two columns in Ximenez's hand.
That transmission raises an obvious question and scholars have pressed it. The prologue speaks of an older book now hidden and of writing under Christian law; some turns of phrase read as biblical; a sequence of failed creations followed by a flood invites comparison with Genesis. Some readings treat the surviving text as substantially shaped by its colonial setting, and a small minority have gone further and doubted its independence altogether. The dominant position is narrower: the framing and a handful of phrases are demonstrably colonial, the narrative content is not, and the Kiche authors adapted presentation rather than importing story. Dennis Tedlock's English translation of 1985, made in consultation with a working Kiche daykeeper, and Allen Christenson's literal and literary versions published in the 2000s are the standard modern texts.
Sources Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Lifetranslated by Dennis Tedlock with Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the MayaAllen J. Christenson