Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/14

vi to win royal approval for his lawless courses, for from it sprang the inspiration which prompted him to pen his descriptions of the Aztec civilisation at the zenith of its splendour and to report in detail to his sovereign the progress of his conquest.

Although historians have from the beginning recognised the superlative value of these letters and several editions of them are accessible to students familiar with the Spanish language, it has been left to my modest labours to provide an English translation of the complete series of Relaciones, The translation of sixteenth century Spanish into readable, modern English is not devoid of difficulty, though greater demands are made on the translator's patience and ingenuity than on his erudition.

Cortes wrote with soldier-like terseness, but his powers of observation were acute and accurate; hence his descriptions are both lucid and striking. His vocabulary was very limited, and as he was unfamiliar with the classical and scholastic styles of composition then in vogue amongst men of letters, his plain tale is ungarnished with the digressions into philosophy and theology and the lengthy citations from scripture and the classics, which abound in the more polished writings of his times. I suspect, moreover, that he had in mind to capture the fancy of the royal youth to whom he wrote, and, in days when novels were not, and court life must have weighed on a monarch of seventeen, still too young to be engrossed either in the delusive pleasures of private dissipation or in the absorbing intrigues of public ambition, many of his pages may have furnished the youthful sovereign with diverting reading in his leisure hours

I have aimed rather to preserve accuracy and the characteristics of Cortes 's original style than to produce a more finished piece of English literature, by excessive rearrangement and the employment of a richer vocabulary than he commanded.