On We People Here

I’m so pleased to have re-discovered this. I first read this version of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex (given as a print-out) as an undergrad for a methodology course, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Here it is!!

So, the bulk of this book is the Florentine Codex. It’s produced with four columns: the first is the original Nahuatl as written by Bernardino de Sahagún’s Mexica(n) aides, the second is Lockhart’s translation of the originally Nahuatl, the third is Sahagún’s translation of the Nahuatl of the Spanish, and the fourth column is Sahagún’s Spanish translated into English by Lockhart’s. I love Lockhart’s thinking on this—it allows us to see how the 16th-century translation differs from the original text. That’s not to say that even the original text is untainted by the Spanish, however. Lockhart mentions in the introduction that he believes that Sahagún directed his aides to produce more descriptive accounts than they otherwise would because he was in the process of producing a Nahuatl dictionary, and he was looking to fill it in with as many words as he could. I had no idea about this, and it re-frames the way I see the text (I wrote a paper on it when I first read it, and I made the argument that the detailed descriptions and emphasis on flowers as gifts given to the Spanish by Moctezuma described in the Nahuatl but not the Spanish was evidence that showed the way the Mexica valued flower arrangements—silly, I know).

Also included are a few selections and fragments from other texts produced in Nahuatl as well as an overview of each text by Lockhart. These only have the Nahuatl and the English translation, without any Spanish. The included texts are:

• Extract from the Annals of Tlatelolco
• Extract from the Codex Aubin
• Fragments from the Annals of Quauhtitlan
• Extract from the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca
• The Letter from Huejotzingo, 1560

Finally, the book ends with some commentaries. I thought that they would be an in-depth breakdown of Lockhart’s interpretation of the meaning that these texts hold, but they’re more footnotes that shed more light on the language used, choices in translation, and things like that.

All said, this is a good collection of primary sources about Cortez’s conquest of Tenochtitlan from a Mexica perspective.