Broken Spears or Broken Bones: Evolution of the Most Famous Line in Nahuatl

Arguably the line “Broken Spears” is the most famous in Nahuatl. Any undergraduate student who has taken a course in Latin American history, literature, or anthropology has in all likelihood come across the line. It, of course, comes from the title of Miguel León-Portilla’s book of the same name. The line appears in a description of Tlatelolco following the destruction of the city by the Spanish in the conquest of Mexico:

Broken spears lie in the roads We have torn our hair in our grief The houses are roofless now, and their walls Are red with blood.

This evocative image has dominated much of the imagination of two generations of college students.

Recently, I was asked by the Library of Congress to serve as an external consultant on a new exhibit, the first permanent exhibit in the history of the Library. The exhibit, entitled “Exploring the Early Americas,” focuses on materials collected by a Florida entrepreneur, Jay I. Kislak.¹ The works on exhibit range from Maya vases, to Aztec statues, to early maps and books written in native languages. There are two highlights of the exhibit. One is the famous Waldseemüller map of the world. Printed in 1507 it is the first map to both clearly depict the Americas and also to label it as “America.” The second highlight of the exhibit is a series of paintings depicting the conquest of Mexico by Cortés and his followers. These paintings, by an unknown artist, date from the latter half of the seventeenth century and show the major events of the conquest of Mexico. In order to compliment these and other items in the collection, the curators opted to have audio narration. One small part was to be a narration of the conquest of Mexico, from the point of view of the natives. Needless to say, the curators were drawn to the evocative lines from León-Portilla’s work.

The curators began consultations regarding the acquisition of copyright permission in order to use the material from León-Portilla. Since I was a consultant on the project, they also contacted me to see if there were other passages they might include. I supported using the León-Portilla material because of its now iconic status, but cautioned them because I also had real reservations concerning the work. The problem with León-Portilla’s book Broken Spears, is that the English edition is a translation of the Spanish edition, originally published as La visión de los vencidos.²

In originally compiling the book, León-Portilla used translations from the Nahuatl that had been done by his own mentor and teacher, Angel María Garibay.³ Unlike many books published today where both the original text and the translation are made available, the first edition of La visión de los vencidos consists of only the translations, with supplemental material written by León-Portilla, along with drawings taken from the codices by Alberto Beltrán. Consequently, there was no way to evaluate the translations unless one were willing to go back to the original material.

To further complicate matters, the book was then translated into English just three years later, in 1962. When Lysander Kemp did the translation, he merely translated everything from Spanish into English. In 1962 very few scholars in the United States knew Nahuatl or would have been capable of making an original translation from the Nahuatl into English. Consequently, the texts that Garibay had translated from Nahuatl to Spanish were then simply translated from Spanish into English. Thus, I was rather concerned that the Library of Congress would be perpetuating this double translation in their new exhibit. I offered to look at the original Nahuatl texts and make a new translation of some of the material they wished to use in the exhibit.

The particular passage from which the phrase “broken spears” was taken comes from a manuscript held in the Bibliothèque National of Paris known as the Anales de Tlatelolco, also known as Manuscript 22bis. There are...