5. I see my song unfolding in a thousand directions, like a string of
precious stones."
From the specimens presented in this volume and from the above
extracts, I would assign the following peculiarities to the poetic
dialect of the Nahuatl:--
I. Extreme frequency and richness of metaphor. Birds, flowers,
precious stones and brilliant objects are constantly introduced in a
figurative sense, often to the point of obscuring the meaning of the
sentence.
II. Words are compounded to a much greater extent than in ordinary
prose writing.
III. Both words and grammatical forms unknown to the tongue of daily
life occur. These may be archaic, or manufactured capriciously by the
poet.
IV. Vowels are inordinately lengthened and syllables reduplicated,
either for the purpose of emphasis or of meter.
V. Meaningless interjections are inserted for metrical effect, while
others are thrown in and repeated in order to express emotion.
VI. The rhetorical figure known as aposiopesis, where a sentence is
left unfinished and in an interjectional condition, in consequence of
some emotion of the mind, is not rare and adds to the obscurity of
the wording.
§ 8. _THE PRESERVATION OF THE ANCIENT SONGS._
In a passage already quoted,[42] Sahagun imparts the interesting
information that the more important songs were written down by the
Nahuas in their books, and from these taught to the youth in the
schools. A certain branch of the Mexican hieroglyphic writing was
largely phonetic, constructed on that method to which I have applied
the adjective _ikonomatic_, and by which it was quite possible to
preserve the sound as well as the sense of sentences and verses.[43]
Such attention could have been bestowed only on the sacred, royal, or
legendary chants, while the compositions of ordinary poets would only
be disseminated by oral teaching.
By one or both of these methods there was a large body of poetic
chants the property of the Nahuatl-speaking tribes, when they were
subjugated by the Europeans. Among the intelligent missionaries who
devoted their lives to mastering the language and translating into it
the doctrines of Christianity, there were a few who felt sufficient
interest in these chants to write some of them down in the original
tongue. Conspicuous among these was the laborious Bernardino de
Sahagun, whose works are our most valued sources of information on
all that concerns the life of the ancient Nahuas. He collected a
number of their sacred hymns, translated them into Spanish, and
inserted them into the Appendix to the Second Book of his _History of
New Spain_; but this portion of his work was destroyed by order of
the Inquisition, as a note in the original MS. expressly states.[44]
A certain number, however, were preserved in the original tongue,
and, as already noted, we find the able grammarian Horatio Carochi,
who published his Grammar of the Nahuatl in 1645, quoting lines from
some as furnishing examples of the genuine ancient forms of
word-building. He could not, therefore, have doubted their antiquity
and authenticity.
A number of these must have come to the knowledge and were probably
in the possession of the eminent mathematician and antiquary Don
Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, who lived in the latter half of the
same century (died 1700). It was avowedly upon the information which
he thought he gleaned from these ancient chants that he constructed
his historical theory of the missionary labors of St. Thomas in
Mexico in the first century of our era. The title of the work he
wrote upon this notion was as follows:--
_Fenix del Occidente San Thomas Apóstol, hallado con el nombre de
Quetzalcoatl entre las cenizas de antiguas tradiciones, conservadas
en piedras, en Teoamoxtles Tultecas, y en cantares Teochichimecas y
Mexicanos."_
For many years this curious work, which was never printed, was
supposed to be lost; but the original MS. is extant, in the
possession of the distinguished antiquary Don Alfredo Chavero, of the
City of Mexico.[45] Unfortunately, however, the author did not insert
in his work any song in the native language nor a literal translation
of any, as I am informed by Señor Chavero, who has kindly examined
the work carefully at my request, with this inquiry in view.
Half a century later, when Boturini was collecting his material, he
found but very few of the old poems. In the catalogue of his MSS. he
mentions (XIX, 1) some fragments of ancient songs, badly written, on
European paper, but he does not say whether in the original or
translated. The same doubt might rest on the two songs of
Nezahualcoyotl named in his Catalogue (V, 2). He does not
specifically state that they are in the original. The song of
Moquihuix, King of Tlatilulco, in which he celebrated his victory
over the Cuextla, which Boturini states in his text (p. 91) as in his
possession, is not mentioned at all in his Catalogue, and it is
uncertain whether his copy was in Nahuatl.
His literary friend, however, Don Mariano Echevarria y Veitia,
removes the uncertainty about the two songs of Nezahualcoyotl, as he
informs us that they were in the original tongue, and adds that he
had inserted them in his History without translation.[46] I have
examined the manuscript of his work, now in the Lenox Library, New
York City, but it does not contain these texts, and evidently the
copy used by Bustamente did not.[47]
Boturini included the translations of the two odes of Nezahualcoyotl
in a work on the Virgin of Guadelupe, only a fragment of which has
been preserved. One of the chapters in this Latin Essay is entitled
_De Indorum Poetarum Canticis sive Prosodiis_, in which he introduces
Ixtlilxochitl's translation and also a song in the original Nahuatl,
but the latter is doubtless of late date and unimportant as a really
native production.[48]
The fragments of Boturini's library collected by M. Aubin, of Paris,
contain a number of the original ancient songs of the highest
importance, which make us regret the more that this collection has
been up to the present inaccessible to students. In his description
of these relics published in 1851, M. Aubin refers to the _Historical
Annals of the Mexican Nation_ (§ VIII, 10, of Boturini's Catalogue)
as containing "historical songs in a dialect so difficult that I have
not been able to translate them entirely," and adds that similar
songs are preserved in others of the ancient annals in his hands.[49]
§ 9. _THE LX SONGS OF THE KING NEZAHUALCOYOTL._
The most distinguished figure among the Nahuatl poets was
Nezahualcoyotl, ruler of Tezcuco. His death took place in 1472, at
the age of eighty years. His father, Ixtlilxochitl, had been deprived
of his possessions and put to death by Tezozomoc, King of the
Tepanecas, and until the death of the latter at an advanced age in
1427, Nezahualcoyotl could make but vain efforts to restore the power
of his family. Much of the time he was in extreme want, and for this
reason, and for his savage persistence in the struggle, he acquired
the name "the fasting or hungry wolf"-- _nezahualcoyotl_. Another of
his names was _Acolmiztli_, usually translated "arm of the lion,"
from _aculli_, shoulder, and _miztli_, lion.
A third was _Yoyontzin_, which is equivalent to _cevetor nobilis_,
from _yoyoma_ (_cevere_, i.e., _femora movere in re venered_); it is
to be understood figuratively as indicating the height of the
masculine forces.
When his power became assured, he proved himself a liberal and
enlightened patron of the arts and industries. The poetry and music
of his native land attracted him the more as he felt within himself
the moving god, firing his imagination with poetic vision, the _Deus
in nobis, calescimus, agitant'illo_. Not only did he diligently seek
out and royally entertain skilled bards, but he himself had the
credit of composing sixty chants, and it appears that after the
Conquest there were that many written down in Roman characters and
attributed to him. We need not inquire too closely whether they were
strictly his own composition. Perhaps they were framed on themes
which he furnished, or were selected by him from those sung at his
court by various bards. The history of the works by royal authors
everywhere must not be too minutely scanned if we wish to leave them
their reputation for originality.
He was of a philosophic as well as a poetic temperament, and
reflected deeply on the problems of life and nature. Following the
inherent tendency of the enlightened intellect to seek unity in
diversity, the One in the Many, he reached the conclusion to which so
many thinkers in all ages and of all races have been driven, that
underlying all phenomena is one primal and adequate Cause, the
Essence of all Existence. This conclusion he expressed in a
philosophic apothegm which was preserved by his disciples, in these
words:--
_Ipan in chicunauitlamanpan meztica in tloque nahuaque palne nohuani
teyocoyani icel teotl oquiyocox in ixquex quexquex in ittoni ihuan
amo ittoni._
"In the ninth series is the Cause of All, of us and of all created
things, the one only God who created all things both visible and
invisible."[50]
To perpetuate the memory of this philosophic deduction he caused to
be constructed at Tezcuco a stone tower nine stories in height, the
ruins of which were visible long after the Spanish occupation. To
this tower he gave the name Chililitli, a term of uncertain meaning,
but which we find was applied in Tenochtitlan to a building sacred to
the Nine Winds.[51] To explain the introduction of this number, I
should add that a certain school of Nahuatl priests taught that the
heaven above and the earth below were each divided into nine
concentric arcs, each leading farther and farther away from the
conditions of the present life. Hence, there were nine heavens,
abodes of the gods, and nine lower regions, abodes of the souls of
the dead. Another school taught that there were not nine but thirteen
of these stages.
The sixty poems by Nezahualcoyotl are mentioned by various writers as
in existence after the Conquest, reduced to writing in the original
tongue, and of several of them we have translations or abstracts.[52]
Of four the translations claim to be complete, and were published
entire for the first time in the original Spanish by Lord
Kingsborough in the ninth volume of his great work on the
_Antiquities of Mexico_. Since then they have received various
renderings in prose and verse into different languages at the hands
of modern writers.
I shall give a literal prose translation from the Spanish, numbering
the poems and their verses, for convenience of reference, in the
order in which they appear in the pages of Lord Kingsborough.
* * * * *
The first is one referred to, and partly translated by Ixtlilxochitl,
in his _Historia Chichimeca_ (cap. 47). He calls it a _xopancuicatl_
(see ante, p. 15), and states that it was composed and sung on the
occasion of the banquet when the king laid the foundations of his
great palace. He gives the first words in the original as follows:--
_Tlaxoconcaguican ani Nezahualcoyotzin;_