Francisco Ximénez, Las historias del origen de los indios de esta provincia de Guatemala (written c. 1701–1722; first printed 1857)
A Dominican parish priest in the K'iche' town of Chichicastenango copied out, word for word, the book his parishioners kept, and put a Spanish translation beside it. He did it to expose their errors, and says so in his prologue. The manuscript sat unread in Guatemala for 130 years; a passing Austrian naturalist found it in the university library in June 1854 and printed the Spanish text in London in 1857. It is the only reason the text survives at all.
Why this wins its question: English accounts of how the K'iche' creation history reached print move in one step from "a friar copied it down" to nineteenth-century editions, and almost never quote the friar. His prologue is quoted here from the 1857 sheets: he states that he transcribed the whole of it "á la letra", that he translated it and annotated it, and — in the same paragraphs — that the point of the exercise was to publicise the errors of his parishioners' heathenism and to undeceive Spaniards who had begun to find the book compatible with the faith. Two pages later he calls its contents a thousand lies with Satan for their tutor. The achievement and the intention are inseparable on the page, which is exactly why neither can be reported without the other. The editorial half of the story is documented from the same volume: convents turned into barracks in 1829 and manuscripts pulped for cartridges, a manuscript nobody outside Guatemala knew existed, a naturalist who found it in June 1854 and printed only the parts he judged useful to science.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page states what the book is and how it was made: "LAS HISTORIAS DEL ORIGEN DE LOS INDIOS DE ESTA PROVINCIA DE GUATEMALA, traducidas de la lengua quiché al castellano para mas comodidad de los ministros del S. Evangelio. POR EL R. P. F. FRANCISCO XIMENEZ, cura doctrinero por el real patronato del pueblo de S. Thomas Chuila." The printing follows "exactamente segun el texto español del manuscrito original que se halla en la biblioteca de la Universidad de Guatemala, publicado por la primera vez, y aumentado con una introduccion y anotaciones por el Dr. C. Scherzer", London, Trübner & Co., 1857, "á expensas de la Imperial Academia de las Ciencias".
Ximénez states his method in his own prologue, and it is a transcription before it is a translation: "quise trasladar todas las historias á la letra de estos indios, y tambien traducirla en la lengua castellana, y ponerle los escolios que al fin van puestos, que son como anotaciones de la historia que se van declarando las cosas de los indios." He expects the work to be judged "la mas sutil y vana" of everything he has done, and holds the opposite — that it is the most useful and necessary.
The motive is on the same page and it is not preservation. "Se reduce esta mi obra, á dar luz y noticia de los errores que tuvieron en su gentilidad, y que todavia conservan entre sí" — to bring to light the errors they held in their heathenism and still keep among themselves. The practical purpose follows: with the text in Spanish, ministers who do not know the language "tendrán facilidád en poderlo saber".
He also wrote to settle an argument among Spaniards. Some, he says, "ó ya sea por no saber la lengua, ó por que lo han oido en relacion adulterada de boca de otros", judge these histories "ser cosa muy conforme á razon, y á nuestra Santa fé" — among them a grave religious whose authority would have persuaded Ximénez himself had he not already seen and read the text. He promised that man he would take the matter in hand "para desengaño de muchos que se hallan engañados".
His verdict on the book he had just copied out is severe and is printed immediately after his description of it. From its beginning, where it treats of God, it says things "tan conformes á la Santa Escritura y fé catolica"; but these are "envueltas en mil mentiras y cuentos que no le debe dar mas crédito, que el que tiene el Padre de mentiras, Satanás, quien fué su tutor, sin duda para engañar y perder á estos miserables" — the same source, he adds, that spoke through Arius, Luther, Calvin and Muhammad. The man who preserved the text believed it was dictated by the devil.
The text he preserved opens with a cosmogony and with a statement about its own transmission: "antiguamente habia libro original que se escribió antiguamente; sino que está escondido al que lo mira, y al que lo piensa." It describes the finishing of sky and earth, "su ser cuadrado, su ser repartido en cuatro partes, su ser señalado, su ser amojonado con estacas, su ser medido á mecates ó cuerdas", and carries the rubric "Este es su Ser dicho cuando estaba suspenso en calma, en silencio, sin moverse, sin cosa sino vacio el cielo", before which there were no men, animals, birds, fish, crab, wood, stone, hollow, ravine, straw or forest.
The Historias were the sixth and last treatise bound into one volume of Ximénez's papers. The other five are an Arte de las tres lenguas Cacchiquel, Quiché y Yutuhil; a "tratado segundo de todo lo que debe saber un ministro para la buena administracion de estos naturales"; a reply dated Guatemala, 25 February 1581, from the provincial Alonzo de Noveña to questions sent on 1 September 1570 by Fray Diego Ferrano, vicar in Tecutzitlan, about doubts in confessing Indians; a confesionario in the same three languages; and a catecismo de indios. The sixth is the one Scherzer printed, and he states it was published for the first time in 1857.
Its survival was accidental and its editor thought its near-destruction deliberate. Scherzer reports that Ximénez's works were long presumed lost, and that it was presumed the Spanish chiefs, offended by the severe tone in which he wrote about "las violencias sangrientas de los diferentes gobernadores de las colonias" and about "la imposibilidad de convertir los indigenas con la bayoneta y el hierro", had suppressed and destroyed his writings on purpose. The wording is a presumption reported by the editor, not a documented act, and is stated here as such.
What did happen to the archives is on the record without inference. Since the separation from the metropolis in 1823 a great number of documents were lost or taken out of the country, and in 1829, after general Morazán suppressed all the convents, many of those houses became barracks and prisons and "montones de libros y manuscritos fueron sacados de sus depósitos para fabricar cartuchos" — heaps of books and manuscripts taken out of their repositories to make cartridges. Ximénez's papers escaped in an obscure corner of the Dominican convent and passed at the suppression to the library of the University of San Carlos, where Scherzer found them in June 1854.
Before that the text was invisible to scholarship. Outside Guatemala Ximénez's works were known only through extracts published by Ramón de Ordóñez y Aguilar; and Brasseur de Bourbourg, writing from Mexico to the Duke of Valmy on 15 October 1850, described the ancient history Ximénez composed of those countries as "demeurée manuscrite et entièrement inconnue" — remaining in manuscript and entirely unknown.
The recovery was partial and the editor selected. Of Ximénez's works Scherzer could find only three volumes; the second and fourth tomes of the collection were missing and his searches in the convents and private libraries of the capital failed to find them. He had exact copies made only of what bore on the ancient history of the country, judging a complete copy beyond his resources and, in his own words, of no particular value for science.
What this printing is not: the title page says it follows the Spanish text of the manuscript, so the K'iche' that Ximénez transcribed "á la letra" is not what was set in type here. An edition of the Spanish column is evidence of the friar's translation and of his apparatus; it is not evidence of the K'iche' wording, and any argument about the original language has to go back to the manuscript.
Scherzer states his own claim carefully, and it bears on how much weight the introduction can carry: he does not pretend to have discovered the manuscripts, but believes he can claim the merit of having been the first to direct the attention of the learned world to Ximénez's manuscripts in the Guatemala library, and of having in part occasioned their publication. The introduction is therefore the account of an interested finder.