I queried the HiveMind; I wrote my question

August 22, 2012 7:20 PM

Can anyone tell me what this Aztec literary/oratorical technique is called?

I say literary/oratorical because these are spoken rituals and stories captured post-Conquest in written form.

Anyway, the technique is a kind of literal reduplication of the idea being presented (that sometimes gets lost in translation). For instance, Hassig has (translated from Sahagun) a "baptism" speech with the passage:

Our lords, priests, welcome [lit. Here you come bringing yourselves. You have brought your feet]. We hope your coming here has not inconvenienced you [lit. Perhaps somewhere you have stumbled against sticks or straw; perhaps somewhere you have twisted a foot or hit it on something].

Other examples from Sahagun with a different translator:

Speaking of women dressed up for a feast:

They were indeed adorned; they were indeed carefully dressed.

Or on cutting firewood:

He makes a log, a cylinder of wood.

Or on replacing a runaway war captive:

A man was purchased; they delegated another, they placed one in his stead.

Or on the travails of long-distance merchants:

Their foreheads burnt; the sun's heat held them, they went exposed to its rays.

Or on the Moon as something dead(ish):

Now he is no longer warm; nor does his heat radiate.

Is there a term for this sort of reduplicative/repetitive device?

posted by Panjandrum to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

Pleonasm?
posted by thumpasor at 7:35 PM on August 22, 2012

This is a pretty good rundown on the rhetorical figures of repetition. "Exergasia" was the term I most often encountered in reference to similar structures in Greek and Roman literature.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:13 PM on August 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The same technique is found in much of the Old Testament, where it's called parallelism.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 8:21 PM on August 22, 2012 [4 favorites]

Tautology.
posted by Iridic at 12:21 PM on August 23, 2012

Response by poster: Parallelism, perfect. Mesoamerica apparently even has it's own particular style.
posted by Panjandrum at 10:02 AM on August 24, 2012