Bloodlines of sacrifice and identity.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Books

A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs, Ed., Timothy J. Knab; Trans., Thelma D. Sullivan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003.

As the Spaniards approached the capital city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec world began to disintegrate. Vast amounts of Nahuatl poetry and mythology were lost. Although certain Spanish clerics such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagun recognized the excellence of Aztec literature, the conquistadors destroyed the native Mexicans' art and culture as well as their political supremacy. Until the twentieth century, scholars knew little about Aztec literature, and translations were almost nonexistent. A Scattering of Jades represents a significant step toward the recovery of Aztec culture and its interpretation for Anglophone readers.

Knab's introduction presents an informative overview of Aztec history and society. The editor discusses the origins of the Mesoamerican peoples, Aztec religion, the emergence of Tenochtitlan as the Aztec capital, the warrior mentality, the role of women among the Aztecs, and the Spanish conquest. He addresses honestly and openly the difficulties Westerners face when confronting Aztec culture. Notions such as human sacrifice are nearly impossible for most modern readers to grasp, acknowledges Knab. "[The Aztecs] were a people who spoke of their children as 'precious jades, precious feathers,' their most valued objects, yet continually sacrificed crying newborns to Tlaloc," he writes. Yet, we must deal with these questions if we are to understand Aztec culture and its literary expression.

Summarizing Sullivan's research on the subject, Knab concludes: "By feeding the gods sacrificial victims from an expanding empire, Aztec rulers were attempting to stave off the chaos caused by capricious spirits and rulers. War, drought, famine, and disease, the chaotic events that disrupt the fabric of everyday life, were perceived as caused by the whimsy of both rulers and deities." Thus, the sacrifices represent efforts to satisfy the gods, and thereby to maintain stability and harmony in the universe.

Thelma Sullivan, one of the towering scholars of the twentieth century and the first major woman translator of Nahuatl literature, labored for decades on the material in this anthology. For the most part, she worked directly from Sahagun's encyclopedia of Aztec culture. She strove to make her translations not only accurate, but also clear and readable. This was no easy task, given the fact that Nahuatl is an agglutinative language--that is, one that coins new terms by stringing words together. Since Nahuatl offers endless lexical possibilities, it is difficult to find English equivalents for Aztec words. Sullivan died in 1981, two years after she had drafted an outline for A Scattering of Jade with Knab, who compiled the material and copyrighted it in 1994; it becomes available to a wide, English-speaking audience only now.

Of particular interest is Sullivan's...