62 Western American Literature Song of the Meadowlark: The Story of an American Indian and the Nez Perce War. By John A. Sanford. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986. 297 pages, $16.95.) John A. Sanfordâs Song of the Meadowlark is an ambitious historical novel based on the Nez Perce War of 1877. Sanford is a capable writer, and when he writes about the war itself or about Indian myths and customs, he does quite well. But Song of the Meadowlark tries to be more than an historical novel. Teeto Hoonod, the Nez Perce warrior who is the novelâs narrator, is also a mystic who has undertaken a âVision Quest,â a search for mystical illumina tion which ends with his sudden awareness âthat all things, though many, yet are one. . . . â After his brother is killed in battle, however, Teeto Hoonod tries to get revenge and in the process forfeits his ability to understand the spiritual nature of things. The Nez Perce War which gradually destroys the tribe is parallel to the anger that erodes his spiritual insight. He regains that insight only when he abandons his search for revenge and, having deserted his tribe, makes a âseparate peace.â Song of the Meadowlark has affinities with works of the highest stature in American literatureâworks in which the hero is able to preserve his spiri tual integrity only by withdrawing from the world. Thoreau, Melville, Twain, and Hemingway have been here already. But as good a writer as Sanford is when dealing with historical materials, he iscertainly not their matchâat least in this novel. Teeto Hoonod and the other major figures in the book are not very well characterized; there is nothing especially subtle here, nothing com plex. They seem echoes of characters we have seen somewhere else. And when Sanford deals with his heroâs spiritual experience, the prose has a tendency to become suddenly labored, annoyingly sentimental and âpoetic.â If Sanford had written strictly an historical novel, Song of the Meadow lark might have been a very good book. When he tries to turn the novel into something more ambitious, he fails. EDWARD HALSEY FOSTER Stevens Institute of Technology Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Translated from the Nahuatl, with an Introduction and Commentary, by John Bierhorst. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. 559 pages, $48.50.) For more than fifteen years John Bierhorst has labored to bring the American Indian verbal arts to the attention of a wide American readership, and, in such collections as In the Trail of the Wind (1971), Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature (1974), and The Red Swan (1976), he has set increasingly high standards for the herd of anthologists who have lumbered after him. In this book he demonstrates that he is superlative not Reviews 63 only as an editor, but as a translator and scholar as well. Bierhorst has accom plished a job that has been left undone for four centuries. This is the first com plete translation of ninety-one Nahuatl songs inscribed late in the sixteenth century and preserved under the title Cantares Mexicanos in a volume of miscellaneous Nahuatl and Spanish manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City. Bierhorst represents the song texts in Nahuatl and English on facing pages, and frames them with an extensive and unusually useful editorial appa ratus. A section of commentary follows the song texts and includes, in most cases, a synopsis, historical background, interpretive remark, and a stanza-bystanza paraphrase, for each song. The general introduction with which the book begins presents a lucid discussion, in thirteen chapters and some 125 pages, of such topics as the manuscriptâshistory, the vocabulary, poetics, meta physics, and possible performance settings for the songs, as well as their geo graphical, cultural, and political contexts. And, as if this is not enough, Bierhorst has, âfor the convenience of linguists,â published a companion volume, A Nahuatl-English Dictionary and Concordance to the âCantares Mexicanos.â This is a model translation; and it is a pleasure to note that the work was carried out with the support of a grant from the Translations Pro gram of the National Endowment for the Humanities. May they fund more New World...