Translation, Mobility, and Mediation: The Case of the Codex Mendoza, (original) (raw)
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2019
The "Codex Mendoza" is one of the earliest, most detailed, and most important postconquest accounts of pre-Hispanic Aztec life. Nahuas and Spaniards manufactured the codex through a complex process that involved translations across media, languages, and cultural framings. Translations made Aztec culture legible and acceptable to nonnative viewers and readers by recasting indigenous practices, knowledge, ontology, and epistemology. Following a stratigraphic approach that examines the process through which natives and Spaniards created a transcultural manuscript, the article examines the multiple interpretations and negotiations involved in producing images, books, and information about the indigenous world in early colonial Mexico.
Fuentes MesoAmericanas, Vol. 7, Verlag Anton Saurwein, 2020
Order at: https://mexicon.de/product/fuentes-mesoamericanas-7-2020/ The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is one of the most beautiful Aztec manuscripts from the early colonial period of Mexico. The first half of this codex relates to the Aztecan calendar system, whereas the second one is a detailed account of Aztec history, spanning a time from the beginning of the mythical migration of the Mexica in the eleventh century to the early colonial period in the mid-sixteenth century, including such far-reaching events as the foundation of Tenochtitlan, the war against Tlatelolco, and the conquest of Tenochtitlan led by Hernán Cortés in the years 1519–1521. This eventful history was recorded in a native writing system that can be described as a sophisticated composition of iconography, calendar notation, and such signs that are linked to the language of the Aztecs: Nahuatl. Even though the original Nahuatl text is accompanied by Spanish annotations written in Latin letters, many of the Nahuatl writing signs hitherto remained undeciphered. The first part of the present volume addresses the principles of this exceptional writing system. The second part is a meticulous study of the historical section, presenting numerous new decipherment proposals for yet uninterpreted or misinterpreted signs. The study is topped off with three catalogs, each printed in color: a catalog of the Nahuatl writing signs appearing in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis including their proposed reading, and two catalogs of the deciphered place signsa and the name signs of the depicted historical figures, respectively.
2016
Author(s): Lopez, Felicia Rhapsody | Advisor(s): Aldana, Gerardo | Abstract: ABSTRACTMayahuel and Tlahuizcalpanteuctli in the Nahua Codices: Indigenous Readings of Nahuatl Pictorial and Alphabetic Texts byFelicia Rhapsody LopezPrior to colonization, diverse Indigenous populations across the area now known as Mesoamerica developed complex writing systems. In this dissertation, I examine Postclassic Mesoamerica as a time and place with shared knowledge that spanned across regions inhabited by diverse linguistic groups. During this time, the Nahuatl language served as a spoken lingua franca, and the Mixteca-Puebla writing style (used by Nahuatl speaking people) served as a written lingua franca. As such, my approach makes these glyphic texts (such as the Codex Borgia and other Borgia Group codices) and alphabetic Nahuatl texts (such as the Florentine Codex and the Codex Chimalpopoca) central to the understanding of indigenous culture. Using this approach, I begin by reexamining the way...
A catalogue of pre-1840 Nahuatl works held by the Lilly Library
1973
T H E EARLIEST BOOK known to have been printed in the New World was in Nahuatl. Nahuatl is the name of the Aztec language, spoken throughout central Mexico before the Spanish conquest; and this first book known to have been printed was the Breve y mas compendiosa doctrina cristiana en lengua m exicana y castellana published in 1539. 1 There are other books which have a claim to having been the first book printed in the Americas, since much of the history of early printing in Mexico remains unclear. Nevertheless, the amount of evidence in favor of the Doctrina cristiana makes its publication, if not its primacy, a certainty, although no copies exist today. One of the main reasons for the establishment of a printing press in Mexico centered around the need for materials to aid in the "spiritual conquest" of the area, the conversion of the conquered Aztec empire to Christianity. Thus it should come as no surprise that one of the first , if not the first, book printed in Mexico would be in Nahuatl. Throughout the next three centuries, the Nahuatl language continued to occupy a position of importance in the output of Mexican presses. Yet even through three centuries publications in Nahuatl did not lose their didactic nature, serving in the Christian education of the Indians. The Mendel Collection of the Lilly Library at Indiana University reflects the significance of Nahuatl in the history of Mexican printing. While the collection does not contain [ 69 J
The path from Aztlan to Mexico, on visual narration in Mesoamerican codices
Navarrete Linares, Federico, “The path from Aztlan to Mexico, on visual narration in Mesoamerican codices”, in Res. Aesthetics and Anthropology, 2000, vol. 37, pp. 31-48.
The aim of this article is to examine certain graphic conventions used to represent time and space in sixteenth-century Mesoamerican pictographic codices dealing with the history of the Mexica migration.1 This will, in turn, lead to an analysis of such documents as visual narratives. The most remarkable of these conventions is a set of lines or blocks marking distance and duration that unites the towns of Aztlan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the beginning and the end of the Mexica migration, and that appears in different guises in all the codices dealing with that historical event. Perhaps the best known codex dealing with the Mexica migration is the Codex Boturini (also called Tira de la Peregrinaci?n, Codex Boturini 1975). In this beautiful sixteenth-century pictorial history, the distance between Aztlan and Mexico is marked by two different lines (fig. 1).2 The first is a row of footprints representing the path followed by the Mexica in their migration; the second is a continuous line that unites the rectangular year signs that represent the time elapsed during the migration. These two lines are carefully intertwined throughout the codex: the footprints always begin near a year sign, clearly establishing the date of the departure of the Mexica from each place, and they lead to a place sign, the next stopping point in their migration. Each place sign, in turn, is followed by a meandering block of year frames that represents the length of the sojourn of the Mexica in that place. In this way, time and space are
Ritualized Discourse in the Mesoamerican Codices: An Inquiry into Epigraphic Practice
2016
Master's Thesis, University of Leiden Supervisor: Dr. Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen Despite the fact that the PostClassic Mesoamerican codices display a striking amount of similarity, academic studies of the discipline typically separate the Central Mexican and Mixtec manuscripts from those of the Maya, with the Maya receiving an epigraphic approach and the Mexican and Mixtec receiving an art historical approach. Many of these studies implicitly privilege phonetic writing systems, taking an evolutionary view of writing which devalues the pictographic. This privileging of the phonetic speaks to the more extensive devaluation of indigenous beliefs and practices on a wider scale. This thesis seeks to bridge the gap between the art historical and epigraphic by understanding the codices as products of the communities in which they were created, and thus fulfilling culturally-specific needs. Ritualized Discourse in the Mesoamerican Codices: An Inquiry into Epigraphic Practice accomplishes this through two case studies, one of which is based on the representation of the same subject matter, bloodletting, and one of which is based on the representation of the same linguistic practice, difrasismo. The results of the analysis indicate that while on a visual level the codices appear very different, on a phonological level there are many similarities in how they represent linguistic and phonetic elements. The Central Mexican and Maya codices in particular display a high degree of overlap, speaking to their shared scribal traditions. Approaching the codices as inventions designed to fulfill a purpose, interpretations of iconographic and phonetic elements are reached which speak to a pan-Mesoamerican experience of writing and highlight the benefits of alternative traditions of knowledge.
Ethnolinguistic manuscripts from Middle and South America in the collection of the Hispanic Society of America, New York. A preliminary catalogue 2020 , 2021
A preliminary catalogue 2020 Our catalogue has to be considered as preliminary and we encourage any scholar working in the field to send us corrections or sharing their recent research relating to these manuscripts with us. The Making of an Outstanding Collection. The outstanding collection of the Hispanic Society [HS] is a kind of of a hidden treasure. We hereby present the collection of ethnolinguistic manuscripts which is only a small part of the whole collection, but consists of items which will enrich future ethnolinguistic research for years to come.
Indigenous Writing and Literacy in Colonial Mexico
Ucla Historical Journal, 1992
Ma quimatican Yn quexquichtin quitasque yhuan quipohuasque Ynin esCritura de Benta ticchihua Yn tehuantin... Let those know who should see and read this instrument of sale made by us... cin ualic u >ibtabal in testamento tu tanil in yum Batab y_ Justicias... I state my will for it to be written down before the batab and magistrates... yodzanacahui tutu yaha dzaha nudzahui... Let this document in the "Mixtec" language be read...Πntroduction to Indigenous Writing Soon after the arrival of Europeans in the land that they called New Spain, Franciscan and Dominican friars taught the art of alphabetic writing to members of the indigenous elite. As a result, indigenous peoples during the colonial Mexican period produced (mostly legal) documentation in their own languages using the Roman alphabet. The first group to do this were the Nahuas (sometimes called "Aztecs") of central Mexico; material in Nahuatl has survived in greater quantities than sources from other Indigenous Writing and Literacy 9 language-groups and has been studied far more by scholars. dditional work has also been published on Yucatec Maya and Cakchiquel sources and, more recently, on Mixtec documentation. There are also sources, known of but unstudied by scholars, in Zapotec, Chocho, Quiche, Otomi, Tarascan and no doubt other Mesoamerican languages.-^Smaller bodies of documents that have not surfaced or survived may have been written in lesser-spoken languages (see Figure 1: Map of Mesoamerican Languages). This chapter makes general remarks about indigenous-language documentation of colonial Mexico, but our specific comments refer only to the sources with which we are familiar-those in Nahuatl, Mixtec and (Yucatec) Maya. Our concern is to draw attention to the existence of these sources, to the ethnohistorical work in which they have been utilized, and to the potential this material holds for future study. In discussing the characteristics of indigenous sources in three different languages, we are hereby contributing a comparative framework that has yet to receive adequate attention, as well as working towards the disintegration of the term "Indian"~found by ethnohistorians to be increasingly inaccurate and unhelpful, save in its reflection of the Spaniards' racial per