Note 332 — Chapter VI · [263]

“El horror del sepulcro es lisongera cuna para él, y las funestas sombras, brillantes luces para los astros.”—The original text and a Spanish translation of this poem first appeared, I believe, in a work of Grenados y Galvez. (Tardes Americanas (México, 1778), p. 90, et seq.) The original is in the Otomi tongue, and both, together with a French version, have been inserted by M. Ternaux-Compans in the Appendix to his translation of Ixtlilxochitl’s Hist. des Chichimèques (tom. i. pp. 359-367). Bustamante, who has, also, published the Spanish version in his Galería de antiguos Príncipes Mejicanos (Puebla, 1821, pp. 16, 17), calls it the “Ode of the Flower,” which was recited at a banquet of the great Tezcucan nobles. If this last, however, be the same mentioned by Torquemada (Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 45), it must have been written in the Tezcucan tongue; and, indeed, it is not probable that the Otomi, an Indian dialect, so distinct from the languages of Anahuac, however well understood by the royal poet, could have been comprehended by a miscellaneous audience of his countrymen.