Cantares mexicanos = Songs of the Aztecs
John Bierhorst (Translator, Writer of introduction)
Bierhorst has accom plished a job that has been left undone for four centuries. This is the first com plete translation of ninety-one Nahuatl songs inscribed late in the sixteenth century and preserved under the title Cantares Mexicanos in a volume of miscellaneous Nahuatl and Spanish manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City. Bierhorst represents the song texts in Nahuatl and English on facing pages, and frames them with an extensive and unusually useful editorial appa ratus. A section of commentary follows the song texts and includes, in most cases, a synopsis, historical background, interpretive remark, and a stanza-bystanza paraphrase, for each song. The general introduction with which the book begins presents a lucid discussion, in thirteen chapters and some 125 pages, of such topics as the manuscript'shistory, the vocabulary, poetics, meta physics, and possible performance settings for the songs, as well as their geo graphical, cultural, and political contexts. And, as if this is not enough, Bierhorst has, "for the convenience of linguists," published a companion volume, A Nahuatl-English Dictionary and Concordance to the 'Cantares Mexicanos.'-- Provided by Project Muse
Print Book, English, 1985
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1985