Our translators Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, in their prefatory 'Note On The Translation' to The True History of The Conquest of New Spain of Bernal Díaz first, briefly lay out their sources and their scholarly apparatus. This includes mention of the massive and 'definitive critical edition' with the thousand page commentaries by José Antonio Barbón Rodríguez. Next they explain how Díaz himself confessed to not having any rhetorical training or even grammar or vocabulary skills to compare with someone like Francisco López de Gómara, the secretary and biographer to Hernan Córtes. They reassert that 'Díaz presents himself as a simple man' before then launching into the numerous difficulties in the work of translating him.
"His vocabulary derives more from his extraordinary life experience than from reading the great authors.... One finds that he uses a limited vocabulary, that certain phrases occur repeatedly and almost ritualistically, and that he tends to write strung-out, if not run-on sentences that nonetheless cohere." [p. xxxiii]Here, a footnote is added to explain how they made decisions about punctuation in some of these lengthy sections. Sections that sound very much like verbal clusters once set down as dictation.
"One often finds paragraph-long sentences in which Bernal Díaz recounts a sequence of events or a series of conversational elements, stringing them together with commas or semicolons. In many, if not most instances, we have preserved his sequences by using either commas or semicolons, depending on the length and relative independence of the phrase or clause. We have been particularly careful to do so when we apprehended clear continuity and coherence internal to these sentences. In other words, we have allowed the context, content, and singleness of idea to determine our choices in these instances." [p. xxxiii]
They don't feel it's a good idea to change his text so much as make it clear. But adding any qualifiers or stating what the text seems to imply, is not what they want either They even describe that sort of choice as 'a slippery slope' once one has 'taken the plunge' in accepting 'some' provisional additions or subtractions, then where does one stop? So they just don't want to do that, even if they are 'context-sensitive renderings' that might help with 'specificity and concreteness'. So that's bueno even, as they seem to hint, their translation might be a tad more bland than others. Instead, they are striving toward the goal of capturing his story as Díaz perceived things. Again, from that footnote:
"Another feature of these long sentences is that they sometimes conclude with a short, often not fully relevant coda, and we have generally chosen to leave these as part of the sentence because they seem to us so much a part of Bernal Díaz's thought pattern and style of expression." [p. xxxiii]
A great example comes at the beginning of Díaz's chapter lxxxiv. The massacre at Cholula as described in the previous chapter had occurred. Conversations with all the relevant parties had concluded. Díaz took the time to defend himself from the version told - in the era of his own writings - by friar de Las Casas, and then, at the head of a new chapter (84), almost like bullet points, Díaz rolls out his next run-on sentence. It sounds like an argument, if one hears it as something born of passion rather than style. I do the translator's text the disservice of posting this run-on point by point in such a bullet-point style to make my point. The ellipses and the bullets are inserted to the text of the translators.
- "As fourteen days had passed since we had come to Cholula,
- ... and we had nothing more to do there,...
- ... and we saw that they city was full of people and they were holding markets,
- ... and we had established friendship between the Cholulans and the Tlaxcalans,
- ... and we had erected a cross and admonished them regarding our holy faith,
- ... and we saw that the great Montezuma was sending spies secretly to our camp to find out and inquire what our intention was and whether we were going to go to his city --
- ... because he managed to know everything very fully from his two ambassadors who were in our company --
- ... our captain determined to consult with certain captains and some soldiers he knew were well disposed toward him,
- ... because, besides being very brave, they gave good advice,
- ...and he never did anything without first getting our opinion." [p. 177]
The Cortes faction after more discussions, decided they could press on to Mexico City. A number of small outlying towns were encountered, but within two short weeks, the troop had left Cholula, entered Tenochtitlan and captured the great Motecuhzoma.
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quotes and pagination from Bernal Díaz de Castillo: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain translated with an introduction and notes by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc. 2012
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