Abstract

Ekphrasis, understood as a metaphor for encounter, serves as a literal vessel for an encounter between Nahua and Spanish worldviews in the illustrated bilingual Spanish and Nahuatl encyclopedia Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (mostly written 1547–78), overseen by Bernardino de Sahagún in collaboration with Nahua scholars. Crucially, the function of ekphrasis—intensified verbal description of visual artifice—differed between Spanish and Nahua users of the encyclopedia, both in general and in this context. The twin missions of the text, to diagnose Nahua deviance from Christianity, and to record the Nahua world and its practices, directly conflict. This essay examines the differences between the side-by-side Spanish and Nahuatl accounts of a major Mexica ceremony, Toxcatl, with a special focus on rhetorical discrepancies between the two. It also argues that the unusually explicitly gruesome illustrations of this section may have functioned differently for the two audiences: as iconographic aids to identification of idolatrous ritual for the Spanish, but for a Nahua audience as ongoing ekphrasis-prompts, extending the ritual.

摘要

Ekphrasis 被理解为相遇的隐喻，在插图双语西班牙语和纳瓦特尔语百科全书Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España中充当纳瓦语和西班牙世界观之间相遇的文字容器（主要写于 1547-78 年），由 Bernardino de Sahagún 与 Nahua 学者合作监督。至关重要的是，ekphrasis 的功能——对视觉技巧的强化口头描述——在百科全书的西班牙语和纳瓦语用户之间存在差异，无论是在一般情况下还是在这种情况下。文本的双重使命，诊断纳华背离基督教，记录纳华世界及其实践，直接冲突。本文探讨了在墨西哥的一个主要仪式 Toxcatl 中并排的西班牙语和纳瓦特尔语之间的差异，并特别关注两者之间的修辞差异。它还争辩说，这部分异常明确的可怕插图可能对这两种观众起到了不同的作用：作为西班牙人识别偶像崇拜仪式的图像辅助工具，