A Translation

Poema de la Conquista

Con suerte lamentosa nos vimos angustiados.
En los caminos yacen dardos rotos:
los cabellos están esparcidos.
Destechadas están las casas,
enrojecidos tienen sus muros.
Gusanos pululan por calles y plazas,
y están las paredes manchadas de sesos.
Rojas están las aguas, cual si las hubieran teñido,
y si las bebíamos, eran agua de salitre.
Golpeábamos los muros de adobe en nuestra ansiedad
y nos quedaba por herencia una red de agujeros.
En los escudos estuvo nuestro resguardo,
pero los escudos no detienen la desolación.
Hemos comido panes de colorín
hemos masticado grama salitrosa,
pedazos de adobe, lagartijas, ratones
y tierra hecha polvo y aun los gusanos...

Poem of the Conquest

With sad luck we saw ourselves tormented.

Broken arrows lie in the streets,
the hair is scattered.

The houses are unroofed,
their walls are reddened.

Worms writhe in the streets and plazas,
the walls are painted with brains.

The waters are dyed red and if we drank them,
they were waters of niter.

We punched the adobe walls in our anxiety,
we left a network of holes as an inheritance.

We defended ourselves with shields,
but the shields couldn't stop our desolation.

We have eaten brightly colored breads,
we have chewed salty grass,

pieces of adobe,
little lizards, mice,
dirt turned into dust, worms...

---

This is a translation of a translation. And this seems to be a common theme in ethnopoetics. The original version was translated from a 1528 Nahuatl manuscript by Ángel María Garibay Kintana. Ethnopoetics is all about finding connections and taking from other cultures to broaden our own perspective. And so that is what I tried to do here. I brought this obscure record of indigenous art into our culture and have made it accessible to you. I tried to preserve the meaning more completely by altering the language where it was necessary into modern terms that would be more comprehensible. I broke up the lines to highlight meaning and changed language to maintain the parallelism that I can tell through the translation was a feature of the original. I hope that my translation is enlightening to you, that it communicates the brutality of the Spanish conquests as told by the people who experienced them.

BTW I can't really be sure of the credibility of the website I took this Spanish version from.

Source: http://www.toltecayotl.org/tolteca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=604:poesia-nahuatl-angel-maria-garibay-kintana&catid=26:general&Itemid=74