When I was a brand-new Indiana University grad student in linguistics,
Joe Campbell was a brand-new assistant professor. I took a course in
the history of linguistics from Joe, but we didn't do any Nahuatl then.
Since those days, we have become firm friends and colleagues and had
our share of adventures in Mexico.
In 1967-68, while I was an NSF pre-doc fellow in computational
linguistics at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, I met Jim
Lockhart, who also lived in Santa Monica.
From there I moved on to the University of Texas, Austin, where I held
a series of research positions in linguistics. Shortly after that Jim
relocated from UCLA to UT-Austin for a brief time before returning to
UCLA. While in Austin he approached me with a problem: The archives
of Mexico are stuffed with indigenous-language documents, probably
vital to any colonial Latin-American historian like Jim, but there were
no organized courses teaching these languages.
The language of the largest number of these colonial documents is
Nahuatl. Jim asked me as a linguist about how one approaches such a
language.
As it turned out, it was Jim who did the intensive leading over the
next several years. I went to Finland on a Fulbright research
fellowship and then on to MIT for a year. In the meantime Jim went
back to UCLA. From there on, we carried on most of our collaboration
by xerox machine and the USPS. Jim flooded me with transcriptions and
provisional translations and sent me photo-copies of many significant
works such as the facsimile of Carochi 1645. I would never have gotten
anywhere without his immense generosity.
After I got back to UT-Austin, I made a trip to Mexico City while Jim
was there on sabbatical carrying on archival research. He introduced
me to the Mexico City nahuatlahtos such as Miguel León Portilla and his
wife Chonita, Fernando Horcasitas, Thelma Sullivan, Nigel Davies, and
others. I also met Fritz Schwaller on my first visit to Mexico. Later
I met Fred Nagel and even more nahuatlahtos in Mexico.
In the States Jim provided me with a letter of introduction to Arthur
Anderson, which was a huge privilege.
Together Jim and I combed Mexico City book stores for more books. And
one day, when I was visiting the National Archives and had some waiting
to do while Jim worked on something or other, he ordered up a Nahuatl
manscript to occupy me.
It turned out that without ever having taken a paleography course, I
had a knack for transcribing colonial Nahuatl. I even cracked a hard
nut that Thelma had been chewing on for a long time.
During that brief time Jim and I produced Nahuatl in the Middle Years,
connecting the Classical Nahuatl of Olmos, Molina, Carochi, et al.,
with the modern studies of spoken Nahuatl via material drawn from the
colonial documents.
Also, Joe Campbell had by this time moved to UT-San Antonio, and
Elizabeth Hill (later Boone) and I were burning up IH-35 visiting Joe
at least once a week to work with him and his computerized Nahuatl
teaching material. Like Jim Lockhart, Joe was unstinting in his
generosity with Nahuatl material. I carted home wheelbarrows full of
computer print-out from his fieldwork. Later Joe let me build on the
basis of his computerized Nahuatl lessons to produce the notebook
Foundation Course in Nahuatl Grammar, copies of which Fritz Schwaller
has so faithfully distributed over these many years.
In the mid 1970s I went to Tepoztlan to live with a local family and
maintained my connections in Tepoztlan for many years. I also had the
privilege of going out on interviewing trips with Joe, and once I made
a trip up to the Huasteca with Karen Dakin, who has been a good friend
and fellow linguist. Jim and I once made a trip deep into the
hinterland of Guererro to visit Una Canger, who was living and working
there.
It became clear from the grammar of J. Richard Andrews plus our
by-now-well-worn copies of Carochi that a modern dictionary of Nahuatl
showing distinctive vowel length and segmental glottal stop was greatly
needed, and that my abilities in computational data processing and
linguistic analysis would make me the logical person to do it.
I got a series of NSF grants to do An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl
and an NEH grant to do a book about the Bancroft huehuehtlahtolli
co-authored with Jim Lockhart. I went back to Finland during this
time, so much of the Nahuatl dictionary was compiled in a lake-side
cottage in the Finnish countryside.
Joe left UTSA, but by this time my own Nahuatl work--some co-authored
with Jim, some co-authored with Joe, and the rest done on my
own--continued unchecked. Part of the impetus for the work came from
the unfailing support of Fermando Horasitas (whose death left us
bereft), Thelma Sullivan, Yolanda Lastra, and Miguel Leon-Portilla and
Ascension H. de L-P (Chonita).
One of the fascinating people in Nahuatl studies is doña Luz Jiménez,
who worked with Fernando Horcasitas. I did not have the good fortune
to meet doña Luz in life, but through her Nahuatl compositions, I felt
as though she was an intellectual mother. Joe and I interviewed
members of her family, and I wrote her career biography as part of my
book Between Worlds. Since then we have enjoyed an especially warm and
close relationship with Jesús Villanueva, the grandson of doña Luz, who
has recently produced a CD about her life and work.
At UT-Austin I directed two NEH Summer Institutes at while Joe and I
and Alberto Zepeda taught Nahuatl. Alberto was a brilliant teacher and
a dear friend, and we were devastated when he died of leukemia.
Among the many wonderful participants in those NEH institutes was John
Charlot, whose father--the painter Jean Charlot--had been particularly
close to doña Luz in the 1920s and maintained a close connection
through letters after he moved to New York and eventually to Hawaii.
Because of the letters from Luz to Charlot that are archived at the U.
of Hawaii-Manoa, I spent an academic year in Hawaii, and my connections
through that year and with the Charlot family have been very fruitful.
When my husband retired from UT-Austin, I took early retirement, and we
left Texas. Shortly thereafter, completely out of the blue, I was
contacted by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, who was seeking help
with creating a libretto for an opera about the Conquest of Mexico that
had been commissioned for the Prague National Opera. His concept was
for the Spaniards to sing in 16th-century Spanish, the Aztecs to sing
in Classical Nahuatl, and the character of doña Marina, the Nahua
interpreter for Cortés, to interpret to the opera's audience what was
going on. After I worked for Lorenzo as a consultant for a while, he
generously suggested we share credit as co-librettists. The opera had
its premiere in Prague in March 2005, and we hope it will find many
other venues in the near future.
Most recently I recorded a podcast about doña Marina ("la Malinche")
for NuestraFamiliaUnida.
Frances Karttunen
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