Part 2

The _omichicahuaz_, "strong bone," was constructed somewhat on the principle of a _teponaztli_. A large and long bone was selected, as the femur of a man or deer, and it was channeled by deep longitudinal incisions. The projections left between the fissures were rasped with another bone or a shell, and thus a harsh but varied sound could be produced.[33]

The _tetzilacatl_, the "vibrator" or "resounder," was a sheet of copper suspended by a cord, which was struck with sticks or with the hand. It appears to have been principally confined to the sacred music in the temples.

The _ayacachtli_ was a rattle formed of a jar of earthenware or a dried gourd containing pebbles which was fastened to a handle, and served to mark time in the songs and dances. An extension of this simple instrument was the _ayacachicahualiztli_, "the arrangement of rattles," which was a thin board about six feet long and a span wide, to which were attached bells, rattles and cylindrical pieces of hard wood. Shaking this produced a jingle-jangle, agreeable to the native ear. The Aztec bells of copper, _tzilinilli_, are really metallic rattles, like our sleigh bells. They are often seen in collections of Mexican antiquities. Other names for them were _coyolliyoyotli_. and

Various forms of flutes and fifes, made of reeds, of bone or of pottery, were called by names derived from the word _pitzaua_, to blow (e.g., _tlapitzalli_, _uilacapitzli_), and sometimes, as being punctured with holes, _zozoloctli_, from _zotl_, the awl or instrument used in perforating skins, etc. Many of those made of earthenware have been preserved, and they appear to have been a highly-esteemed instrument, as Sahagun mentions that the leader of the choir of singers in the temple bore the title _tlapitzcatzin_, "the noble flute player."

Large conches were obtained on the seashore and framed into wind instruments called _quiquiztli_ and _tecciztli_, whose hoarse notes could be heard for long distances, and whistles of wood, bone and earthenware added their shrill notes to the noise of the chanting of the singers. The shell of the tortoise, _ayotl_, dried and suspended, was beaten in unison with such instruments.

Recent researches by competent musical experts conducted upon authentic specimens of the ancient Mexican instruments have tended to elevate our opinion of their skill in this art. Mr. H.T. Cresson, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, has critically examined the various Aztec clay flutes, whistles, etc., which are there preserved, and has reached the following conclusions:--

"I. That upon the four-holed clay flageolets the chromatic and diatonic scales can be produced with a full octave.

"II. That the clay whistles or pitch pipes, which may be manipulated in quartette, will produce an octave and a fourth.

"III. From the facts above shown, the Aztecs must have possessed a knowledge of the scales as known to us, which has been fully tested by comparison with the flute and organ."[34]

This result indicates for the instrumental accompaniment a much higher position in musical notation than has hitherto been accepted.

§ 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. Tl[=a]uhquéch[=o]llaztal[=e]hualtò t[=o]natoc.

1. It is gleaming red like the tlauhquechol bird.

2. Ayauhcoçam[=a]l[=o]t[=o]nam[=e]yòtimani.

2. And it glows like the rainbow.

3. Xiuhcóyólizítzîlica in te[=o]cuitlahu[=e]hu[=e]tl.

3. The silver drum sounds like bells of turquoise.

4. Xiuhtlapallàcuil[=o]l[=a]moxtli manca.

4. There was a book of annals written and painted in colors.

5. Nic ch[=a]lchiuhcozcameca 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.

§ 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;_

And the translation:--

"Hear that which says the King Nezahualcoyotl."

Restoring the much mutilated original to what I should think was its proper form, the translation should read:--

"Listen attentively to what I, the singer, the noble Nezahualcoyotl, say:"--

I.

1. Listen with attention to the lamentations which I, the King Nezahualcoyotl, make upon my power, speaking with myself, and offering an example to others.

2. O restless and striving king, when the time of thy death shall come, thy subjects shall be destroyed and driven forth; they shall sink into dark oblivion. Then in thy hand shall no longer be the power and the rule, but with the Creator, the All-powerful.

3. He who saw the palaces and court of the old King Tezozomoc, how flourishing and powerful was his sway, may see them now dry and withered; it seemed as if they should last forever, but all that the world offers is illusion and deception, as everything must end and die.

4. Sad and strange it is to see and reflect on the prosperity and power of the old and dying King Tezozomoc; watered with ambition and avarice, he grew like a willow tree rising above the grass and flowers of spring, rejoicing for a long time, until at length, withered and decayed, the storm wind of death tore him from his roots, and dashed him in fragments to the ground. The same fate befell the ancient King Colzatzli, so that no memory was left of him, nor of his lineage.

5. In these lamentations and in this sad song, I now call to memory and offer as an example that which takes place in the spring, and the end which overtook King Tezozomoc; and who, seeing this, can refrain from tears and wailing, that these various flowers and rich delights are bouquets that pass from hand to hand and all wither and end even in the present life!

6. Ye sons of kings and mighty lords, ponder well and think upon that which I tell you in these my lamentations, of what takes place in spring and of the end which overtook King Tezozomoc; and who, seeing this, can refrain from tears and wailing that these various flowers and rich delights are bouquets that pass from hand to hand and all wither and end even in the present life!

7. Let the birds now enjoy, with melodious voices, the abundance of the house of the flowery spring, and the butterflies sip the nectar of its flowers.

* * * * *

The second song is preserved in a Spanish metrical translation only, but which from internal evidence I should judge to be quite literal. The words of the poem do not represent it as a composition by the royal poet, but one which was sung before him, and addressed to him. It admonishes him to rejoice in the present moment, as the uncertainties of life and fate must at some time, perhaps very soon, deprive him of their enjoyment.

II.

1. I wish to sing for a moment, since time and occasion are propitious; I hope to be permitted, as my intention merits it, and I begin my song, though it were better called a lamentation.

2. And thou, beloved companion, enjoy the beauty of these flowers, rejoice with me, cast out fears, for if pleasure ends with life, so also does pain.

3. I, singing, will touch the sonorous instrument, and thou, rejoicing in the flowers, dance and give pleasure to God the powerful. Let us be happy in the present, for life is transitory.

4. Thou hast placed thy noble court in Acolhuacan, thine are its lintels, thou hast decked them, and one may well believe that with such grandeur thy state shall increase and grow.

5. O prudent Yoyontzin, famous king and peerless monarch, rejoice in the present, be happy in the springtime, for a day shall come in which thou shall vainly seek these joys.

6. Then thy destiny shall snatch the sceptre from thy hand, thy moon shall wane, no longer wilt thou be strong and proud, then thy servants shall be destitute of all things.

7. In this sad event, the nobles of thy line, the provinces of might, children of noble parents, lacking thee as their lord, shall taste the bitterness of poverty.

8. They shall call to mind how great was thy pomp, thy triumphs and victories, and bewailing the glory and majesty of the past, their tears will flow like seas.

9. These thy descendants who serve thy plume and crown, when thou art gone, will forsake Culhuacan, and as exiles will increase their woes.

10. Little will fame have to tell of this wondrous majesty, worthy of a thousand heralds; the nations will only remember how wisely governed the three chieftains who held the power,

11. At Mexico, Montezuma the famous and valorous, at Culhuacan the fortunate Nezahualcoyotl, and at the stronghold of Acatlapan, Totoquilhuatli.

12. I fear no oblivion for thy just deeds, standing as thou dost in thy place appointed by the Supreme Lord of All, who governs all things.

13. Therefore, O Nezahualcoyotl, rejoice in what the present offers, crown thyself with flowers from thy gardens, hear my song and music which aim to please thee.

14. The pleasures and riches of this life are but loaned, their substance is vain, their appearance illusory; and so true is this that I ask thee for an answer to these questions:

15. What has become of Cihuapan? Of the brave Quantzintecomatzin? Of Conahuatzin? What of all these people? Perhaps these very words have already passed into another life.

16. Would that we who are now united by the ties of love and friendship could foresee the sharp edge of death, for nothing is certain, and the future ever brings changes.

* * * * *