§ 7 The Poetic Dialect
All the old writers who were familiar with the native songs speak of their extreme obscurity, and the difficulty of translating them. No one will question the intimate acquaintance with the Nahuatl language possessed by Father Sahagun; yet no one has expressed more strongly than he the vagueness of the Nahuatl poetic dialect. “Our enemy on earth,” he writes, “has prepared a thick woods and a dangerous ground full of pitfalls, wherein to devise his evil deeds and to hide himself from attack, as do wild beasts and venomous serpents. This woods and these pitfalls are the songs which he has inspired to be used in his service, as praises to his honor, in the temples and elsewhere; because they are composed with such a trick that they proclaim only what the devil commands, and are understood only by those to whom they are addressed. It is well known that the cavern, woods or depths in which the devil hides himself were these chants or psalms which he himself has composed, and which cannot be understood in their true significance except by those who are accustomed to the peculiar style of their language.”35
Not less positive are the expressions of Father Diego Duran, contemporary of Sahagun, and himself well versed in the native tongue. “All their songs,” he observes, “were composed in such obscure metaphors that scarcely any one can understand them unless he give especial attention to their construction.”36 The worthy Boturini was puzzled by those which he had collected, and writes, “the songs are difficult to explain, because they mystify historical facts with constant allegorizing,”37 and Boturini’s literary executor, Don Mariano Echevarria y Veitia, who paid especial attention to the poetic fragments he had received, says frankly: “The fact is, that as to the songs I have not found a person who can fully translate them, because there are many words in them whose signification is absolutely unknown to-day, and moreover which do not appear in the vocabularies of Molina or others.”38
The Abbé Clavigero speaks in somewhat more definite terms of the poetic forms and licenses of the language. He notes that in the fragments of the ancient verses which had been preserved until his day there were inserted between the significant words certain interjections and meaningless syllables, apparently to fill out the metre. Nevertheless, he considered the language of the chants, “pure, pleasant, brilliant, figurative and replete with allusions to the more pleasing objects in nature, as flowers, trees, brooks, etc.”39 It is quite evident from the above extracts that in the translation of the ancient songs in the present volume we must be prepared for serious difficulties, the more so as the Nahuatl language, in the opinion of some who are the best acquainted with it, lends itself with peculiar facility to ambiguities of expression and obscure figures of speech.40 Students of American ethnology are familiar with the fact that in nearly all tribes the language of the sacred songs differs materially from that in daily life.
Of the older grammarians, Father Carochi alone has left us actual specimens of the ancient poetic dialect, and his observations are regretably brief. They occur in his chapter on the composition of nouns and read as follows:41—
“The ancient Indians were chary in forming compounds of more than two words, while those of to-day exceed this number, especially if they speak of sacred things; although in their poetic dialect the ancients were also extravagant in this respect, as the following examples show:—
1. Tlāuhquéchōllaztalēhualtò tōnatoc.
1. It is gleaming red like the tlauhquechol bird.
2. Ayauhcoçamālōtōnamēyòtimani.
2. And it glows like the rainbow.
3. Xiuhcóyólizítzîlica in teōcuitlahuēhuētl.
3. The silver drum sounds like bells of turquoise.
4. Xiuhtlapallàcuilōlāmoxtli manca.
4. There was a book of annals written and painted in colors.
5. Nic chālchiuhcozcameca quenmach tòtóma in nocuic.
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.