Finally, Ñudzavui verse can use sections of prose, or irregular passages that do not have strong poetic features. In the Cuilapan origin narrative, the coupleted naming of Lord and Lady 1 Deer was introduced with the irregular

:horiz:

The following excerpt from the Prayer to Copal is a mix of prose and of the list:

:horiz:

A visual equivalent of prose may be found in the use of a single place glyph to introduce where a scene is taking place.²⁶ The scene in Figure 17 (which begins at the river at the bottom of the page) may have been introduced by the Ñudzavui poet with the phrase

:horiz:

To conclude by integrating the poetic transcriptions covered so far, the following extended poetic narrative can be produced from page 25 of the Codex Vienna (Figure 18):

For more detailed investigations of the relations between verbal art and painted image among the Ñudzavui, see John Monaghan’s 1990 “Poetics and the Structure of the Mixtec Codices.” Although the Cuilapan origin narrative survives as the only alphabetic text composed from a Ñudzavui pictorial source, we are fortunate in that at least two alphabetic documents based on Central Mexican pictorial sources have survived. They are the Leyenda de los Soles and the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas.²⁷ Further discussion of Central Mexican literary aethetics can be found in the Poetics: Flowers and Song Nahua tutorial. Finally, Dennis Tedlock’s 1987 “Hearing a Voice in an Ancient Text” discusses the process of recovering the verbal art of the Quiché Maya from a sixteenth century alphabetic document.

Text by Byron Hamann
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²⁵ Monaghan 1990, 137.

²⁶ The use of single phrases to introduce the place at which the story takes place is used in contemporary Quiché Maya storytelling; see Tedlock 1987, 154-155.

²⁷ See León-Portilla 1992 and Markman and Markman 1992.