Sahagún's Sources for Book II

Resumen

One of the questions which was raised when the translation of the Nahuatl of Sahagún's Florentine Codex was becoming a possibility was: What information can we find in the Nahuatl which the informants were deliberately withholding from the Spaniards? If the question should be of interest now, we have indeed found that in general the Nahuatl is more informative than the Spanish text, but not in a way to suggest that the informants used the Nahuatl to hide information from the authorities. If the informants were not always good Christians, the young men helping Sahagún were, and Sahagún or any competent translator could have detected a trick. The only passages in which there may well have been a decision not to inform are the well-known sacred songs which form one of the Appendices in Book II. In the first place, Sahagún did not transIate them (though there are glosses of uneven value in the Real Palacio MS version): Sahagún thought them works of the devil. It is quite likely, therefore, that his ammanuenses likewise so considered them, and thought it improper to study them carefully enough to help translate them. For, if we can accept the results of Seler's and Garibay's studies and translations —as most scholars do— they could not have been impossible for them to translate. Besides, some of the difficulties to surmount are due to poor copying —if that is what accounts for the presence of absurd sequences of vowels and consonants, in both the Real Palacio MS and Florentine Codex versions. It is a reproduction so corrupt that it looks as if it must have been deliberate, with the purpose, maybe, of shaming the devil since it was the devil's work.