Nezahualcóyotl's Lamentaciones and Their Nahuatl Origins. The Westernization of Ephemerality (Gordon Brotherston)
Nezahualcóyotl's Lamentaciones and Their Nahuatl Origins. The Westernization of Ephemerality (Gordon Brotherston)
Nezahualcóyotl's Lamentaciones and Their Nahuatl Origins. The Westernization of Ephemerality (Gordon Brotherston)
1 Historia de la literatura náhuatl, México, 1I, 1954, p. 381; for his initial
exploration see 1, 1953, p. 253-6.
2 Paris, 1891, 1I, p. 412, 413, & 448.
:3 Madrid, 1746; see also his Historia general de la América septentrional,
ed. M. Ballesteros Gaibrois, Madrid, 1948 (Documentos inéditos para la his-
toria de España, VI), p. 226, and for possible earlier ownership, E. J. Burnes,
'Clavijero and the lost Sigüenza y Góngora manuscripts', Estudios de cultura
náhuatl, 1, p. 59-90.
394 CORDON BROTHERSTON
and:
4 Tezcoco en los últimos tiempos de sus antiguos reyes, o sea relaci6n to-
mada de los manuscritos inéditos de Boturini, redactados por el Lic. D. Ma-
riano Veytia, México, p. 254; from a (late) copy in the 'Antigua Secretada
del Virreinato'.
5 Poetas Novohispanos, México, 1, 1942, p. 142 ss; the pieces in question
begin 'Un rato cantar quiero' and 'Tiene el florido Verano'.
S Quotations are based on Kingsborough s printing (see note 12) and the
spelling has been modernized.
NEZAHUALCÓYOTL'S LAMENTACIONES 395
not, from the tense opposition between present delight and surround-
ing desolation, between precious tactile splendour and emptiness, the
mode growing out of emphasis with this tension. This is as true of
the passage Lehmann calIed 'Ein ToIteken-Klagegesang' 23 (CM, f.
26-7), with its vivid images of the magnificence of Tula, as of Neza-
hualcóyotl's famous lines beginning 'tiyazque yehuaya ... ' (CM, f.
17rQ ) . To the degree that the Second Version shifts from the xopan-
cuicatl, and from the icnocuicatl, to a 'lamentación', or a less acute
kind of 'elegy' or 'lament', it loses a force essential to both the Na-
huatl modes: the brief phrase 'estos breves gustos', appended almost
as an afterthought, is not enough to restore the tension. Tactile
beauty and the cutting sense of ephemerality vanish into the 'timeless
melancoly' of the folIowing:
His power gone, his 'imperio', his 'casa y corte', are left 'marchito y
seco', as in Tula itself: 'quen ya mamaniz mochan moquiapan' (CM,
f. 27r9). Against such desolation the only solace is here in present
company, where. garlands pass from hand to hand in gestures of
unity, 'puesto que la abundancia de las ricas y variadas recreaciones
son como ramilletes de flores que pasan de mano en mano'. In Ne-
zahualcóyotl's speech:
And the exhortation comes to live that beauty which 1S here and
now, poignant and ephemeral as this experience is:
tions. It is in this last Version, too, that the grammatical violence done
by Spanish to Nahuatl surface brilliance is most apparent. Shifting
noun-verb sheens and interchangeable facets are replaced by struc-
tured sequences in which Latinate grammatical categories not only re-
cover but exuIt in their identity. For:
comes this:
All the Versions suffer from this kind of structuring to sorne extent,
it is true, for that was a problem their authors faced. The valencies
of words in lyrical Nahuatl, especially focal terms like 'xochitl', are
so different from those available in Indo-European grammatical pat-
terns as to rnake translation a hatchet affair still now. Given this
huge linguistic disjunction, and having no recourse to the standard
props of metre and rhyme, these early translators all had to find
something to hold their Spanish together with. And working at the
time they did, they found a certain kind of Latinate atavism carne
most easily to hand. But while Granados's copyist over-compensated
grotesquely, the First Version responded to foreing shape, the un-
decided syntax of sorne of the manuscript copies being a mark of
guarantee. Admittedly, sorne Nahuatl delicacies are still swallowed by
Golden Age idiom: both the extended willow-king 'metaphor' as
such, and the Calderonian descants on the world being aH 'burlas y
engaño' (echoed in the Second Version and a rough equivalent to
Nahuatl thoughts on insubstantiality) are cases in point. But still the
First Version retains many of the virtues of the Cantares; and up to
the end of the 19th century it was certainly unsurpassed as a West-
ern insight into pre-Conquest Nahuatl lyricism, and unequaHed as
a translated xopancuicatl.
As for Ixtlilx6chitl, he is insidious as his own 'copyst' because his
diction is also apparently so Httle Westernized, and because it was
his particular distorsion (with sorne help from Granados) which
wrought so powerful an effect on subsequent generations of 'trans-
NEZAHUALCÓYOTL'S LAMENTACIONES 405
But here his wondering is mainly about his own present: he asks
what will become of us here and now, of our nobility in this place,
of our Brotherhood before the unknown. And aboye aH there are no
signs in the Cantares of the prophecies Ixtlilxóchitl makes so much
of. Ixtlilxóchitl's prophetic forefather derives in fact far less from any
Nahuatl source than from his own persistent desire to make of him
an Old Testament hero, and someone the Spaniards would recog-
nize and accept. Of course this desire was complicated at moments
by vestigial loyalty (analogous to El Inca Garcilaso's) to a golden
Indian past glimpsed when he shifted his eyes from Cortés. But most
of the time he did his best to make Nezahualcóyotl the Psalm King,
the Mexican David complete with U riah and Bethsheba and a good
singing voice, whose very laments for the vanity of earthly things,
whose predictions of Mexican catastrophe and whose intuitions of
the one (as yet) Unknown God, become a surreptitious invitation
to the Spaniards to come to America and bring their bible with them.
This is very much the Nezahualcóyotl that Prescott inherited from
the Historia chichimeca, though the 'songs of much solemnity and
pathos' intoned by the loser in the Conquest 01 Mexico slip that
much further from Nahuatl origins. The most authentic parts of the
Versions are bundled together in paraphrase or ignored, while Gra-
nados's piece is given pride of place in almost full English trans-
lation; and here a palpably proto-Christian twist is administered to
the obscure last stanza, as the king 'turn for consolation to the world
beyond the grave'. In addition, a certain Ossianic influence helped
to make Nezahualcóyotl appear as the forlorn hero of a vanished
race; from being the prophet of his own downfaH he further becomes
the 'natural' victim of historical advance. This, eminently nineteenth-
century figure became the subject of many other 'translations' and
imitations of the periodo To list them aH would be too much, would
lead too far into the definitive graveyards of literary history. But it
should perhaps be said that several writers were helped to focus at
aH on Nezahualcóyotl by that literary Moloch Chauteubriand. Under
his spell Nezahualcóyotl's words became that much more unspoilt
and 'simple' in their sadness. Roa Bárcena talks of the king's good
heart,27 and in Villalón's xopancuicatl (the Third Version put into
jingling rhyme) he appears almost ingenuous.28 More remarkable
29 México, 1854.
80 But see Menéndez y Pelayo's Historio. de la poesía hispanoamericana
(Madrid, 1948),1, p. 139, for a note on his disowning Pesado's 'translations'.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña records that Roa Bárcena (also Pesado's biographer)
celebrated the emperor's arrival by evoking the shades of Indian kings as
his protectors (Literary Currents in Hispanic America, ch. v).
81 México, 1875. CI. Concha Meléndez, La novela indianista en Hispano-
américa, Puerto Rico, 1961, p. 147-155.
408 GORDON BROTHERSTON
32 This still finds· sorne resonance however: el. S. Clissold, Latín Ameriea.
A Cultural Outline, London, 1965, p. 26-7, and Frances Gillmor, Flute 01
the Smoking Mirror (A Portrait 01 Nezahualeóyotl) , New Mexico, 1949
p. 147 (an intelligent abbreviation; see also, p. 168). The Version (in Brin-
ton' s English, also comes as the finale to A. Grove Day's The 8k" Clears
(New York, 1952) and provokes Yvor Winters to cornment in Forms 01
Diseouer" (Denver, 1967), p. 355.