Chimalpahin’s Original Relations were written in the city of Mexico during the first half of the seventeenth century. Their author, an upper-class Indian from the province of Chaleo, collected and reworked existing local annals and added to them notices of events to his own time. His writings are among the most valuable of central Mexican sources for data on preconquest and colonial events, toponyms, native titles, and many other subjects.
Of the eight known Relations of Chimalpahin, five are here fully published in Spanish translation from the original Nahuatl. The first, the eighth, and the “Memorial breve” of the second are omitted. The third includes a lengthy historical compendium from 1063 to 1519 with detailed information on local towns and their rulers in the fifteenth century. The fourth and fifth furnish additional material on the towns of Chalco and on Aztec prehistory. The sixth moves briefly into the colonial period terminating in 1613, while the seventh, the longest and most informative, reorganizes earlier sections in a consistent annalistic style, adds new facts, and provides the most satisfactory consecutive narrative for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Chimalpahin appears easier and more assured in the seventh than in other Relations, and he seems to have devoted most attention and care to this one. The sixth and seventh Relations are also the ones that are best known in modern times, having been published by Remi Siméon with a French translation in 1889.
In the Preface, Ángel María Garibay K. calls attention to an article by the translator, Silvia Rendón, in La palabra y el hombre, analyzing the problems of translation from Nahuatl into Spanish. The problems are of considerable technical intricacy, but they are not commented upon specifically in the present edition, which is an expert product, not a scholarly analysis, of the translator’s art. It offers students a reliable Spanish version of large parts of Chimalpahin’s writings, together with the relevant index, bibliography, and glossary; some chronological tables relating to the rulers of the Chalco towns; and an introduction on the life and writings of the author. Some ten folios of the second and the entire text of the third Relation appear here in Spanish for the first time.
These are of course very useful contributions. But it should be pointed out that some basic problems of Chimalpahin interpretation remain, and that the new edition, for all its utility, is not the definitive one. Its translations of Relations II to V depend on photographs from the Paso y Troncoso collection in Mexico, and the omissions of the entire first Relation and of a portion of the second seem to be due to nothing more than the absence of the equivalent photographs in Mexico City. The sections could have been supplied from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris or from the Nahuatl facsimile published in the Corpus Codicum Americanorum. The omission of the eighth Relation, though it cannot be explained in this way, reflects the continuing piecemeal character of Chimalpahin bibliography and research.
Ralph Roys, one of the leaders of modern Maya research, published The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel in the Carnegie Institution of Washington series in 1933. The first scholarly edition of any of the Chilam Balam works, it was immediately recognized as a publication of immense erudition and value. The edition included the Maya text, a translation into English, copious notes, illustrations, maps, appendices, and bibliography (a facsimile had already been published in 1913). It appeared at a time when the Carnegie Institution was sparing no expense in Maya research and publication, and the combination of skilled editor and interested publisher resulted in a model of documentary presentation. The second of the two works under review is a reproduction of this 1933 edition by the Oklahoma University Press, introduced with a tribute to Roys by J. Erie S. Thompson.
Students seeking an entry into the labyrinth of Chilam Balam texts or wishing to sample the literary history of the Maya with an important and representative document could do no better than to consult this work. The Chilam Balam books were written in the colonial period (Chumayel is dated 1782), but they contain tales, sayings, history, and lore dating from pre-Spanish times, sometimes with a bare minimum of European admixture. Written in Maya, each book covers a variety of topics, and there is much duplication and interdependence between one and another. The books are named for the prophet (chilam) whose name was Balam, the foremost of the ancient Maya prophets. The contents are far less orderly than the controlled annalistic data of Chimalpahin, but the Chilam Balam books are original documents of a kind that no annal can be, and they carry a sense of historical immediacy that Chimalpahin’s text necessarily lacks.