Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

16. Translating an Esoteric Idiom: The Case of Aztec Poetry

370 Translating an Esoteric Idiom The Case of Aztec Poetry John Bierhorst A typical Cherokee “sacred formula”—better, i:gawé:sdi ‘to say, one’— begins with the words: Ha! White Sparrow Hawk! You live Above. You have just come to scream: “Your soul has just been separated!” Ha! Blue Mourning Dove!1 Similarly, out of the cryptic literature of the Yucatec Maya, the compilation known as Ritual of the Bacabs gathers up incantations put together with such blind phrases as: Who is its mother? O glyphs in the skies, O glyphs in the clouds, for you are always in skies, for you are always in clouds. Throw it down!2 Mystifying in much the same way, the collection of Aztec conjuros recorded by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón in the early 1600s preserves, among dozens of comparable examples, one that starts: Come quickly! Come, Red Chichimec! Here stands the priest, its sign is 1 Water.3 Translating an Esoteric Idiom 371 Whatever the meaning concealed in these various yet similar phrases— from three widely separated cultures—here evidently is the language of control, expressed in imperious declaratives (“You have just come to scream”), demanding interrogatives (“Who is its mother?”), and outright imperatives (“Come!”). In short, all three repertories—Cherokee, Maya, and Aztec—may be classed as incantatory. Further, all three are bristling with enigmatic figures of speech—to an extent rare in Native American literature, even for incantations (by comparison, the equally insistent petitions of the Navajo chantway singer or the Kwakiutl prayermaker are transparent, both in the original idiom and in translation).4 As the latterday investigators Anna Gritts Kilpatrick and Jack Kilpatrick have said of the Cherokee texts, these “abound in terms that merely skirt their true meanings,” in “ritualisms,” and in “tricky wording.”5 Similarly, Ruiz de Alarcón, complained that the evidently magical conjuros were “nothing but a string of metaphors, not only in the verbs but also in the nouns and adjectives.”6 Why the veiled diction? What can be its purpose? Forthrightly, the Cherokee scholar Alan Kilpatrick offers the answer: “to baffle and confuse the uninitiated.”7 Essentially the same, if subtler, is the explanation given by Ruiz de Alarcón, who observes that the very obscurity of the utterance enhances its prestige; or, as he writes, “the Devil, its inventor, influences their [i.e., the native practitioners’] veneration and esteem through the difficulty of the language.” A comparable, native answer that may serve for all is contained in the Ritual of the Bacabs itself, indicating that the practitioner is using an idiom of authority, the so-called suyua in thanab ‘language of Suyua’ (referring to a legendary place of ancestral origin). This, the suyua in thanab, is the parlance of riddle-like metaphors that Maya chiefs, in theory at least, had to learn before assuming office. Thus the Bacabs practitioner can mention whomever he wishes to control, saying , “He falls into Suyua, my house of command!”8 A fourth repertory that may be considered in this select company is the vast corpus of cantares ‘poems (accompanied by music),’ recorded in the Aztec language in Mexico City or its environs during the second half of the 1500s. Two manuscripts have survived, the Cantares Mexicanos, collected between 1550 and 1590, and the Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España ‘ballads of the lords of New Spain,’ dated 1582 (some sixty years after the Spanish Conquest of 1521). Unlike the conjuros ‘incantations ,’ the cantares remained untranslated in their own time and so were wrapped in mystery from the moment they became written texts. Judging by the largely spurious glosses contained in the manuscripts, it is clear that even the native scribes, though fluent in Nahuatl, were baffled by the material they had taken in dictation from the adept singers. The linguist undoubtedly most competent to interpret the songs and very possibly the overseer of at least one of the two compilations, the missionary-ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún, seemingly ruled against translation, stating, “For the most part they sing of idolatrous things in a style so obscure that there is no one who really understands them, except themselves alone.”9 The cantares were not to be taken up again until the 1600s, when a new generation of antiquaries begin to sift through the mass of texts. Now with a new agenda, not of missionization but of nation building, they combed through...