2025.01.14 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Sebastian Purcell, Discourses of the Elders. The Aztec Huehuetlatolli. A First English Translation, Norton, 2023, 224pp., $25.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781324076162.
Reviewed by Andrew Laird, Brown University
What are the texts presented in this book? Sebastian Purcell says he “set out to translate these Huehuetlatolli or Discourses of the Elders, which Friar Andrés de Olmos compiled beginning around 1535” (xi). He explains that the huehuetlatolli was a genre which belonged to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of pre-Hispanic central Mexico, consisting of discourses (tlatolli) pronounced by elders (huehuetque) and the brief responses given by the younger listeners who heard them. Purcell later notes (xl) that Olmos, a Franciscan missionary in Mexico, included examples of eloquent speech at the end of the grammar of Nahuatl he completed in 1547. The surviving manuscripts of Olmos’ grammar do indeed contain such examples in short quotations, usually of one or two sentences, which in total take up only…
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