New World Poetics: Translating Indigenous Traditions in Colonial Latin America

The articles gathered here display the poetic richness of colonial Latin America, exploring how Indigenous oral and lyric traditions were transformed through the processes of transcription, translation, and evangelization in the early modern period. While situating the works under study in their distinct colonial contexts, contributors simultaneously highlight the native worldviews and performance practices that gave rise to these New World creations. Although certainly not exhaustive, these studies cut across several regions of the Iberian Americas and explore some of the ways in which Amerindian and European traditions converged.Throughout this volume, the authors advance diverse understandings of poetry and poetics. Some articles focus on Indigenous lyric works that were subject to colonial transcription and translation (Egan, Gillespie, Velloso-Lyons), while others examine how colonial missionaries, typically working in collaboration with Indigenous intellectuals, used native images and myths in order to create devotional songs (Andrango-Walker, Vega). A third group of essays inquires more broadly into the way Indigenous oral practices were incorporated into the colonial archive (Carvajal Regidor, Serna Jeri), and the subsequent rearticulation of that archive centuries later (Villas Bôas). Highlighting the linguistic diversity of the Americas, one cluster of studies engages with the Nahuatl, Maya K’iche’, and Kaqchikel languages of Mesoamerica (Carvajal Regidor, Egan, Gillespie, Vega), a second explores the Quechua of the Southern Andes (Andrango-Walker, Serna Jeri, Velloso-Lyons), and a final contribution deals with Tupi (Villas Bôas). Taken together, these studies illuminate common dynamics across regions as well as the distinct itineraries charted by Indigenous poetic creation, performance, and preservation in the colonial world.A familiar narrative of the transatlantic encounter suggests that Indigenous communities receded after European arrival, their worldviews eclipsed by those of the newcomers. The contributions gathered here show, on the contrary, that Indigenous perspectives continued to animate poetic production across the early modern Atlantic. For instance, focusing on the role of translation and its entanglement with power in the early colonial highlands of Guatemala, Ignacio Carvajal Regidor examines what he terms the “poetics of conquest,” the discursive mechanisms through which authority and imposition were exerted or contested. His article reveals multiple understandings of “conquest,” demonstrating how Indigenous scribes and lords appropriated alphabetic writing to craft responses to European authority—or, at times, to diminish its significance altogether. A similar dynamic emerges in studies centered on the Cantares mexicanos, which show how intercultural poetics developed in the early colonial world. Two articles in this dossier reveal how the sixteenth-century Cantares preserve pre-Hispanic expressive systems even when framed within, or overlaid by, Christian and colonial contexts. Jeanne Gillespie analyzes the cuicatl (song) “Nican pehua tlamelauhqui teuccuicatl” (Here begins, unfolds a lordly song) with a focus on its performative and sensory elements, revealing the persistence of non-European modes of meaning-making beneath the surface of alphabetization and Christianity. Similarly, Caroline Egan argues that the “Michcuicatl” (Fish Song) and “Atequilizcuicatl” (Water-pouring Song) from the Cantares encode Indigenous perspectives on the upheavals following the invasion of Tenochtitlan in both theme and form.The creation of religious poetry in Indigenous languages for the purpose of indoctrination is explored in two contributions that move from Mesoamerica to the Southern Andes. First, Martín Vega examines the 1583 Psalmodia christiana, focusing on Bernardino de Sahagún’s rendering in Nahuatl of the biblical New Jerusalem. By reimagining this idealized Christian city for a Nahua audience, Sahagún produces a transcultural vision that draws on native urban imagery, aligning the architectural splendor of Tenochtitlan with the sacred topography of New Jerusalem. Catalina Andrango-Walker’s article, in turn, focuses on the promotion of the Virgin Mary in the Andes. Examining Marian poetry by Juan Pérez Bocanegra and Luis Jerónimo de Oré, Andrango-Walker reveals how these authors drew on Western Marian rhetoric and iconography while navigating the complexities of translating foreign religious concepts into Quechua. This involved the strategic incorporation of Andean origin myths and religious practices into devotional poetry, appropriations that ultimately engaged with—and at times challenged—the political and cultural foundations of Andean beliefs.While the lyric works studied by Vega and Andrango-Walker were composed in the colonial period for the purpose of evangelization, the cases studied by Angelica Serna Jeri and Leonardo Velloso-Lyons constitute reconstructions of precolonial oral and poetic practices. Serna Jeri offers a decolonized reading of interactions between Andean inhabitants and their sentient landscape as expressed in the treatment of the term huaca in the Huarochirí Manuscript. Framing this relationship as a “poetics of exchange,” she foregrounds the sentient landscape as a key epistemic positionality, both illuminating the ways it has been historically erased and working to rearticulate its centrality within Andean practices and discourses. Leonardo Velloso-Lyons then examines two Quechua poems included in the first part of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609). Velloso-Lyons argues that these poems represent forms of philosophical abstraction that, for Garcilaso, serve to highlight the superiority of Incan language and culture in relation to that of non-Incan Andeans.Finally, as Luciana Villas Bôas demonstrates in the closing article, the transformations of Indigenous poetry engendered by the conquest extend far beyond the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her study explores composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s problematic engagement with Brazilian indigeneity, a case that crystallizes the long historical arc of “New World poetics.” Villa-Lobos drew on numerous early modern and modern sources in order to create what became known as “Musique cannibal,” a style that catered to European audiences’ exoticist expectations. In her article, Villas Bôas reconstructs these sources, highlighting in particular the significance of Hans Staden, a German mercenary whose account of captivity among the Tupinambá was published in 1557. Taken together, the articles in this issue advance the mission of Calíope by bringing its focus on early modern Hispanic poetic production into dialogue with Indigenous forms that were refashioned in the colonial world.Acknowledgments: These essays stem from dialogues that have taken place both in person and virtually since 2019 across panels and roundtable, including sessions sponsored by the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry (SRBHP) at the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Juan in 2023. As guest co-editors of this special issue, we would like to express our gratitude to our colleague Nicole Legnani for her collaboration in the early stages of this project, as well as Fernando Rodríguez Mansilla for his indefatigable editorial work in bringing this collection into its final form. We are also immensely grateful to Felipe Valencia for inviting us to advance this project through sessions sponsored by the SRBHP. Finally, our sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of the articles collected here for their invaluable insights.