Cantares Mexicanos

A description is found in the census of prose manuscripts in the native tradition in the Handbook of Middle American Indians.

[1] The ninety-one songs are made up of short stanzas averaging about thirty words each, presented in the manuscript as hanging paragraphs (of which there are about 1,700).

A Spanish edition and translation of much of the manuscript was given by the great Mexican scholar, Ángel María Garibay Kintana, in the second and third volumes of his Poesía náhuatl (1965, 1968).

[4] Although Bierhorst's transcription was appreciated by scholars for its accuracy and faithfulness to the original manuscript, his translations were criticized as misleading and colored by his view that the Cantares are "ghost songs", part of a colonial revitalization movement parallel to the ghost dances of the Plains Indians.

[5] David Bowles, in his translations of selected poems from the Cantares and other Mesoamerican codices, agrees with León-Portilla and Garibay that the songs are part of a long aesthetic and philosophical tradition predating the Conquest.