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To FACILITATE COMPARISON of the two dramas, I have paired the fiveline stanzas of the Spanish text with the corresponding segments of the Nahuatl script, numbering them accordingly. Each segment of the Nahuatl play includes all the text that is modeled on the corresponding Spanish stanza plus any additional content without a basis in the Spanish, up to where text based on the following Spanish stanza begins. Since the stanza boundaries in the Spanish nearly always coincide with discursive breaks in the Nahuatl, the pairing of the texts in this manner presents fewproblems; it is clear that the Nahua author, despite his many changes and digressions, was keeping a close eye on the structure of the Spanish text as he composed his own. In the manuscript, seven of these boundaries are marked visibly by extending the last letter of the last word into a short horizontal line (this is also done, where space permitted, at the end of each turn at speech), by skipping to the next line on the page, or both. The scribewho recorded the Nahuatl drama placed it on the page in a format that resembles prose literature, with the characters' speeches written in paragraphs. As noted in Chapter Two, the Nahua playwright composed his text in the oral-poetic style of Nahuatl oratory. This non-linear, indirect, formal, and repetitive style lends itself poorly to prose translation . I havetherefore chosen to translate the playin the form of lines rather than continuous prose. In this I am following the conventions for "ethnopoetic " translations of Native American oral literature that have been developed over the past two decades by Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, and others.1 The advantages of translating in lines are well stated by Bright: First, it represents an effort to present the elements of phonological, grammatical , and semanticparallelism that exist in the originals and that are basic to their effectiveness. Second, it represents a typographic attempt to focus the attention of readers: to encourage the type of close reading that we might not accord to apage of run-on, wall-to-wall prose. (1993:xiv; emphasisin original) Arrangement in lines revealsthe poetic devices employed in Native American —including Nahua—verbal art, which are often obscured when texts are forced into prose. Prologue to the Translations One drawback of this method is that the line divisions I impose on the text are inevitably somewhat arbitrary.The sixteenth-century Nahuas seemingly did not possess a concept of "a line of poetry" as such, in respect to either spoken oratory or songs.2 However, phrasal units ofvarying length can be identified in Nahuatl oratory based on syntactic, semantic, and occasionally orthographic criteria. Representing such units of phrasing spatially as lines on the printed page has been done to good effect by translators such as Sullivan (1965, 1966,1980), Leon-Portilla (Sahagiin 1986), and Klor de Alva (1980). In setting line divisions, I have been guided by the use of particles (a-uh, ca, ma, tla, and others) in the Nahuatl, by semantic parallelism (couplets , triplets), by forms of vocative address, and in some cases by the scribe's use of capital letters, colons, and periods. I have also considered the coherence and aesthetic appeal of the English translation. Lines that turned out too short and choppy in English would not convey the elevated formality of the Nahuatl. In short, the line structure is very much my own interpretation of the text and is based on many arbitrary decisions. Text that I place in a single line could sometimes be divided into two or more; conversely, I place divisions between phrases that another translator might join in the same line. The language employed in the Nahuatl text is canonical Classical Nahuatl of the variety typical of Church literature. Though composed by a native speaker, the text should have been comprehensible to those friars who had a good mastery of the language and I presume it was intended to be so. In some cases where the Nahuatl text seemed ambiguous, I chose the translation that more closely corresponded to the Spanish text. Clear digressions from that text are translated as such. The reverential or honorific system of Classical Nahuatl is used throughout the play. Mary never addresses Christ without using reverential inflections, nor do Christ, the angel, or the Holy Fathers ever address her except in tones of respect. To speak reverentially, Nahuas added the honorific suffix -tzin to any nouns referring to the revered person ("his book" becoming "his...

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