1 - Histomesoamericana

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INTRODUCTION XÜi
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SPANISH /
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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
European Dates in Hundreds of Years
'one katun' to 'ten katuns']. And, where the Tizimin has conolbil (line
5304), the Chumayel has conbil, a syntactic variation (implying something
like 'marketing places' rather than 'marketplaces'). Obviously a
close comparative study of these texts would be most rewarding, but such
a study has not been undertaken here.
The Translation
With minor exceptions, the orthography of the Mayan text is that of the
original manuscript. To facilitate typesetting I have changed eft to ch', o
to tz', and y. to y etel. With the exception of some marginal notes (see
chapter 24) apparently added in the mid nineteenth century, the Tizimin
appears to have been recopied in a single hand, probably between 1824
and 1837 and probably in or near Tizimin itself. Word divisions are not
standardized in the manuscript and I have made my own, but in no case
have I altered the original order of the letters.
Some of the late texts (chapters 24, 25, 39, 40, and 41) are written in a
relatively straightforward style. But all of them are in the poetic form of
couplet parallelism that is customary in formal Mayan discourse (Edmonson
1971). They have been so transcribed and translated. Except in the
chapters just cited, there is an additional poetic element: the extensive
use of kennings or difracismos (Garibay 1953). Each particular couplet
has both an obvious and a synthetic or esoteric meaning, which sometimes
applies to many couplets at a time, Examples are listed in the index
under "kennings." Hence I have found it necessary to prepare an interpretative
prose translation, which is presented first and which is keyed to
the corresponding numbered lines of the literal translation and the Mayan
text and to the notes that follow. My surmises as to the meanings of the