Thomas A. (Thomas Allibone) Janvier - Legends of the City of Mexico

EL PVENTE DEL CVERVO
[See .

TO
C. A. J.
WITHOUT WHOSE HELP THIS BOOK
COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE

These legends of the City of Mexico are of my finding, not of my making. They are genuine folk-stories. Each one of them is a true folk-growth from some obscure curious or tragical ancient matter that, taking hold upon the popular imagination, has had built up from it among the people a story satisfying to the popular heart.

Many of them simply are historical traditions gone wrong: being rooted in substantial facts which have been disguised by the fanciful additions, or distorted by the sheer perversions, of successive generations of narrators through the passing centuries. Others of them have for their kernel some unaccounted-for strange happening that, appealing to the popular mind for an explanation, has been explained variously by various imaginative people of varying degrees of perception and of intelligence: whose diverse elucidations of the same mystery eventually have been patched together into a single storythat betrays its composite origin by the inconsistencies and the discrepancies in which it abounds. A few of themstarting out boldly by exalting some commonplace occurrence into a marvelpractically are cut from the whole cloth. All of themand most obviously the most incredible of themhave the quality that gives to folk-stories in general their serious value: they reflect accurately the tone of thought, and exhibit more or less clearly the customs and the conditions, of the time to which they belong. Among the older people of the City of Mexico, alike the lettered and the unlettered, they still are cherished with a warm affection and are told with a lively relishto which is added, among the common people, a lively faith. The too-sophisticated younger generation, unhappily, is neglectful and even scornful of them. Soon, as oral tradition, they will be lost.

Most fortunately, the permanent preservation in print of these legendsand of many more of the same sortlong since was assured. Because of the serious meaning that is in them, as side-lights on history and on sociology, they have been collected seriously by learned antiquariansnotably by Don Luis Gonzlez Obregn and by Don Manuel Rivera Cambaswho have searched and sifted them; and who have set forth, so far as it could be discovered, their underlying germs of truth. By the poetsto whom, naturally, they have made a strong appealthey have been preserved in a way more in keeping with their fanciful essence: as may be seenagain to cite two authors of recognized eminencein the delightful metrical renderings of many of them by Don Vicente Riva Palacio, and in the round threescore of them that Don Juan de Dios Peza has recast into charming verse. By other writers of distinction, not antiquarians nor poets, various collections of them have been madeof which the best is the sympathetic work of Don Angel R. de Arellanoin a purely popular form. By the playwrights have been made from the more romantic of themas the legend of Don Juan Manuelperennially popular plays. By minor writers, in prose and in verse, their tellings and retellings are without end.

While the oral transmission of the legends among the common peopleby heightening always the note of the marvelloushas tended to improve them, the bandying about in print to which they have been subjected has worked a change in them that distinctly is for the worse. In their written form they have acquired an artificiality that directly is at odds with their natural simplicity; while the sleeking of their essential roughnesses, and the abatement of their equally essential inconsistencies and contradictions, has weakened precisely the qualities which give to them their especial character and their peculiar charm.

The best versions of them, therefore, are those which are current among the common people: who were the makers of them in the beginning; whopassing them from heart to lip and from lip to heart again through the centurieshave retained in them the subtle pith that clearly distinguishes a built-up folk-story from a story made by one mind at a single melting; whose artless telling of themabrupt, inconsequent, full of repetitions and of contradictionspreserves the full flavor of their patchwork origin; and, most important of all, whose simple-souled faith in their verity is of the selfsame spirit in which they were made. These are the versions which I have tried here to reproduce in feeling and in phrase.