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The Spanish ballad tradition is one of the largest and most colourful in Europe, as reflected in the present collection of 71 of the best examples.
Compiled in 1582, Ballads of the Lords of New Spain is one of the two principal sources of Nahuatl song, as well as a poetical window into the mindset of the Aztec people some sixty years after the conquest of Mexico. Presented as a cancionero, or anthology, in the mode of New Spain, the ballads show a reordering—but not an abandonment—of classic Aztec values. In the careful reading of John Bierhorst, the ballads reveal in no uncertain terms the pre-conquest Aztec belief in the warrior's paradise and in the virtue of sacrifice. This volume contains an exact transcription of the thirty-six Nahuatl song texts, accompanied by authoritative English translations. Bierhorst includes all the nu...
In New York City during the winter of 1922 and the spring of 1923, Mair Jose Benardete recorded the texts of the thirty-nine traditional ballads published in this volume. His collection, the beginning of Judeo-Spanish ballad research in America, was assembled when the oral tradition was still rich and vigorous among immigrants to New York from the Sephardic settlements of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Among the ballads are a number of rare text types, some never again recorded in the Sephardic communities of the United States, In addition, many of the texts provide new insights into the origins of the thematic traditions they represent. Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverm...
The Judeo-Spanish folk literature of the Sephardic Jews of Bosnia, and with it their uncommonly rich balladry, has remained largely unknown to Western scholars. Since their move to Sarajevo in the sixteenth century, Serob-Croatian has displaced their original Spanish, and the entire culture is rapidly approaching extinction. This book preserved for posterity three fundamentally important groups of these rare ballads: Kalmi Baruch's Spanski romanse; ballads collected from the readers of the Sarajevo newspaper Jevrejski Glas; and five previously unedited eighteenth-century Bosnian ballads from a manuscript in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Notes, abstracts in English, reproductions of the music itself, and other scholarly aids serve to make this colorful and strangely modern literature fully accessible to Hispanists, folklorists, and all students of comparative literature and Judaic culture.