§ 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