Cantares Mexicanos

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 is currently located in the National Library of Mexico in Mexico City.

A Spanish edition and translation of the manuscript was given by the great Mexican scholar, Ángel María Garibay Kintana, in the second and third volumes of his Poesía náhuatl (1965, 1968). Later, 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] 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]

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.

References

See also