Question for February 2011

I wouldn’t speak of “the” Spanish, or “the” Aztecs. Conrad Russell, who was a great historian and a clear thinker, said that no English word was more abused than “the.” We should always think carefully before using it. In early colonial times, most Spaniards weren’t interested in learning native languages or reading what native people wrote, but those who were – mostly priests, who needed to be able to talk to their congregations, and court officials who wanted to understand native testimony – often mastered the materials thoroughly. For most purposes, professional interpreters dealt with problems of communication between speakers of different languages, as they did and do in every state with more than one linguistic community.

Pic 1: Moctezuma visits Cortés: painting from the Enconchado series, c.1680-1700, depicting the Conquest of Mexico. Museo del Prado, Madrid

As far as we know from surviving evidence, before contact with Spaniards, they used symbolic notation only for information that was hard to remember, such as the calendar and the dates of important past events, or subject to dispute, such as different communities’ mutual political obligations, or unworthy of memory, such as taxes and prices and bureaucratic data. Symbolic notation also served as an aid to memory, especially in the use of what we might call “prompt cards” to enable priests to recite prayers and divine stories, and to help courtiers recall royal genealogies and achievements. All these practices involving what we might call writing were confined to a few members of the elite. The number of texts, before contact with Spaniards, was very small.

Pic 3: The Tizoc Stone records 15 scenes of Aztec military victory over key provinces

For small numbers, they used appropriate combinations of dots, each signifying “one,” and bars, each signifying “five.” Arbitrary, commonly agreed symbols represented large numbers. Texts written with these symbols or “glyphs” as we call them are relatively easy to read once you understand the system. When Spanish priests or administrators wanted to refer a glyphic text to fellow-Spaniards who could not read them, they usually added a translation. In the 1540s, for instance, when the Viceroy of New Spain sent copies of documents from the archives of the old Aztec state to Spain, an interpreter added a reading in Spanish of every glyph, line by line. Modern editions of the manuscript, known as Codex Mendoza are easy to come by.

Pic 5: Spanish gloss (explanation) on folio 58 of the Codex Mendoza

When Europeans arrived, Aztecs largely abandoned glyphic writing. The alphabetic system that Spaniards brought with them – the Roman alphabet – immediately appealed to writers as a good way of getting a lot of data down quickly. Almost all surviving texts in Nahuatl date from after the Spanish invasion. With a few exceptions (for the enumeration of tribute on what we would now call tax returns, and for recording place-names on maps) writers used the Roman alphabet and matched the sounds of Nahuatl as nearly as possible to the combinations of letters a reader of Spanish would interpret as standing for particular sounds.

Pic 7: Detail showing gold tribute exacted by the Spanish during the Colony, from the Codex Tepetlaoztoc, British Museum

The question from Brent School raises, however, a deeper problem. In every culture, words convey more than plain, literal meaning: there are nuances, suggestions, implications and associations that are hard to grasp for anyone who has not grown up in the culture to which the words belong. So translation is always inadequate, and something important always gets “lost.” If we go back to the original question from Brent, “How did Spaniards translate what Aztecs wrote?” the best answer is probably, “Always easily, but perhaps never perfectly.”

Pic 9: ‘Conquistadores’: illustration by Felipe Dávalos