Cantares Mexicanos

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The Cantares Mexicanos is the name given to a manuscript collection of Nahuatl songs or poems recorded in the 16th century. The 91 songs of the Cantares form the largest Nahuatl song collection, containg over half of all known traditional Nahuatl songs. It currently located in the National Library of Mexico in Mexico City.

A complete transcription and English translation of the Cantares was published in 1985 by John Bierhorst as Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs,[1] as well as a dictionary and concordance.[2] This was the first time the whole of the Cantares had been translated into a modern language. Although Bierhorst's transcription was appreciated by scholars for its accuracy and faithfulness to the original manuscript, his translations were criticized as misleading and colored by his view that the Cantares are "ghost songs", part of a colonial revitalization movement parallel to the ghost dances of the Plains Indians.[3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ ISBN 0-8047-1182-8.
  2. ^ ISBN 0-8047-1183-6
  3. ^ Dakin (1986): pp. 1014–1016; Karttunen (1987): pp. 442–443; León-Portilla (1992): pp. 41–44; Lockhart (1991): pp. 141–157.

[edit] References

  • Bierhorst, John (1985). Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1182-8. 
  • Bierhorst, John (1985). A Nahuatl-English Dictionary and Concordance to the Cantares Mexicanos: With an Analytical Transcriptions and Grammatical Notes. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1183-6. 
  • Dakin, Karen (1986). "Review of Cantares mexicanos and A Nahuatl-English dictionary and concordance to the Cantares mexicanos". American Anthropologist 88 (4): pp. 1014–1016. 
  • Karttunen, Frances (1987). "Review of Cantares mexicanos and A Nahuatl-English dictionary and concordance to the Cantares mexicanos". Language 63 (2): pp. 442–443. 
  • León-Portilla, Miguel (1992). Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 
  • Lockhart, James (1991). "Care, Ingenuity, and Irresponsibility: The Bierhorst Edition of the Cantares Mexicanos", Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 141–157. ISBN 0-8047-1954-3. 

[edit] See also