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Translation as Conquest: Sahagún and Universal History of the Things of New Spain

«Parecos de nosotros los españoles son los de la Nueva España, que viven en Síbola y por aquellas partes» dice Francisco López de Gómara, porque «no moramos en contraria como antípodas», sino en el mismo hemisferio. «Austral» es el término que adoptaron los habitantes de los virreinatos del Perú para publicarse. Bajo esas dos nomenclaturas con las que las gentes de indias son llamadas en la época, la colección de «Ensayos de cultura de la colonia» acogerá ediciones cuidadas de textos coloniales que deben recuperarse, así como estudios que, desde una intención interdisciplinar, desde perspectivas abiertas, desde un diálogo intergenérico e intercultural traen de la América descubierta y de su proyección en los virreinatos.

Translation as Conquest: Sahagún and Universal History of the Things of New Spain

Translation as conquest : Sahagún and Universal history of the things of New Spain / Victoria Ríos Castaño.

ISBN 978-1-936353-16-3 (Iberoamericana Publ. Corp) -- ISBN 978-8484896593 (Iberoamericana) -- ISBN 978-3-86527-640-7 (Vervuert)

1. Sahagún, Bernardino de, -1590. 2. Sahagún, Bernardino de, -1590. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España. 3. Franciscans--Mexico--History--16th century. 4. Nahuatl language--Early works to 1800. 5. Indians of Mexico--History--16th century. 6. Mexico--History--Spanish colony, 1540-1810. I. Title.

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Cover illustration: “Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, Paynal y Tláloc”. Libro primero, fol. 1v, p. 10, Vol. I). Códice florentino. Gentileza de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706 Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico sin cloro

Sahagún’s Intellectual Origins: From Early Education to the University of Salamanca

The Inquisition in Spain and New Spain during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century

Olmos and Sahagún’s Application of the Inquisitorial Techniques to the Collection of Indigenous Data

The Composition of Historia universal: Sahagún, the Respondents, and the Assistants

On a warm spring afternoon in a cafe close to the Potsdamer Platz, I was enjoying the company of Romy Köhler, an early Sahaguntine scholar and expert on the Tonalamatl. We had just met in the library of the Ibero-American Institute, upon the happy coincidence that the two of us wanted to consult Paso y Troncoso’s facsimile of the Códices matritenses. Having finished the preliminaries of our getting-acquainted conversation, Romy asked me what I had “discovered” about Sahagún and I fired away: Sahagún was not a pioneering ethnographer but a cultural translator who had used confessional and inquisitorial techniques in order to collect data for the creation of an encyclopaedic reference manual in Nahuatl that would mirror those works he consulted himself as a preacher and confessor. Romy looked at me and said that I had drawn those conclusions in isolation. I could only agree and disagree. True as it is that my lack of direct interaction with colonial Latin American and Sahaguntine scholars—some of whom defend or repeat the idea that he is the father of anthropology in the New World—emboldened me at times to “speak against the master,” with the passing of the years, the reading of their studies has turned them into imaginary friends and colleagues with whom I have taken issue and nodded with delight whilst sharing the same common goal of continuing an understanding of Sahagún’s work. The list of scholars to thank is long but I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble —whose translation of the Florentine Codex allowed me the possibility of conducting research on Sahagún in the first place—, Louise M. Burkhart, Jesús Bustamante García, James Lockhart, and Alfredo López Austin. There is nothing in this study that they have not already said or suggested.

I would also like to express my gratitude, in chronological order, to other people who have been involved, this time face-to-face, in my research; to Ovidi Carbonell i Cortés, for introducing me to the concept of cultural translation as an undergraduate at Salamanca; to Elke Ruhnau, for helping me with the Nahuatl language and inspiring in me so much fascination for the Nahuas; to Jeremy Lawrance and Adam Sharman for supervisory support as a postgraduate at Nottingham; to Tyler Fisher for showing me the art of proofreading; to my extraordinary colleagues and friends Jenny Mullen, and Carolina Miranda, Miguel Arnedo Gómez, and Nancy Márquez, from Victoria University of Wellington, for reading drafts, assisting me in the final stages, and being, overall, so good sport; and to Máiréad Nic Craith, from Heriot-Watt, for her professional and emotional support. I could not forget, although I must apologize for not recognizing them in name, the librarians of the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid and the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, who were always helpful and friendly.

Last but not least; a big thanks to my very much beloved parents, brother, friends, and husband. We did it.

The physician cannot advisedly administer medicines to the patient without first knowing of which humour or from which source the ailment derives. Wherefore it is desirable that the good physician be expert in the knowledge of medicines and ailments to adequately administer the cure for each ailment. The preachers and confessors are physicians of the souls for the curing of spiritual ailments. It is good that they have practical knowledge of the medicines and the spiritual ailments.

This is the opening paragraph of the first prologue to Universal History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1577-1579), a twelve-book encyclopaedic work on the Nahuas.¹ Fray Bernardino de Sahagún begins with a simile on preachers and confessors as physicians of the soul in order to argue that, in the same manner that physicians cure by detecting a disease and applying appropriate medicines, churchmen must be able to identify and heal spiritual illnesses; the harmful, “idolatrous” beliefs that sickened the Nahuas. Sahagún’s fellow missionary, Fray Andrés de Olmos, reiterates this simile and argument in his prologue to Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios (1553), urging the “spiritual physicians” to employ the admonitions of this work as “medicines to better cure or discuss” indigenous superstition.² The medicines that both Franciscans were dispensing was the Christian faith, inculcated through sermons and the administering of the sacrament of penance, two crucial proselytizing activities that required not only a sound knowledge of Nahuatl, but also of the Nahuas’ world in order to address them in a persuasive manner from the pulpit, and ask and understand their answers during confession. The physician-churchman comparison, established by the Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo in Book I of De doctrina christiana (ca. 426), concerning the Christian orator’s role for the conveyance of the evangelical message, was used by Pope Gregory the Great in his seminal treatise on the clergy’s duties Cura pastoralis (591). The simile was repeated throughout the centuries by other influential figures, like the French theologians Alain de Lille in his predication manual De arte praedicatoria (ca. 1199), and Jean Gerson in his predication and confessional Opus tripartitum (ca. 1408), and the Spaniard Martín de Azpilcueta in his confessional Manual de confessores y penitentes (1549).³ Sahagún and Olmos’s use of the comparison reveals their connection to an evangelization tradition that they were continuing in New Spain. Historia universal and Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios are products of a collaborative effort to compose works that best suited their mission, and which ranged from grammars, vocabularies, and dictionaries that codified the indigenous languages, to translations of doctrinal and liturgical texts and the creation of new ones. In this regard, Sahagún explains that a grammar with an appended vocabulary, a “history” (Historia universal), a collection of chants, and another of sermons were the resulting works of the 1558 commission he received from his Franciscan Order to write “in the Mexican language that which seemed to me useful for the indoctrination, the propagation and perpetuation of the Christianization of these natives of this New Spain,” emphasizing again that all these works were conceived as “a help to the workers and ministers who indoctrinate them.”⁴

Of the corpus of texts for the “physician of the soul” that came about from Sahagún’s 1558 appointment, Historia universal has been the centre of attention of a massive bibliography from the twentieth century onwards. At times both this work and Sahagún have been decontextualized and another simile has been created, that of Sahagún as a pioneering anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. The evolution of his status from sixteenth-century missionary to first anthropologist of New Spain and, by extension, father of modern anthropology in the New World, started with Alfonso Toro’s 1922 conference paper on the linguistic and ethnographic value of Sahagún’s work and with Wigberto Jiménez Moreno’s 1938 edition of Historia universal.⁵ Jiménez Moreno observes that Sahagún applied to his collection of data “the most demanding method an ethnographer could use,” conducting research as a “conscientious ethnographer.”⁶ Ángel María Garibay Kintana followed suit in Historia de la literatura náhuatl, dedicating a chapter to “missionary-ethnographers” that includes Olmos, Sahagún, Fray Toribio de Benavente-Motolinía, and Fray Diego Durán.⁷ Garibay Kintana praised Sahagún in particular for his monumental “Encyclopaedia on the culture of the Nahuas of Tenochtitlan,” describing him as a “brilliant forerunner of scientific anthropology and ethnography both for the general conception and for the execution.”⁸ In subsequent decades an accumulation of works has continued to echo Jiménez Moreno and Garibay Kintana’s statements in biographies of Sahagún, and edited volumes and articles on Sahagún and Historia universal.⁹ What is more, the attribution of the title of anthropologist is not restricted to scholarly studies; it has been disseminated among the general public through commemorations and institutional awards. In Mexico, the academic prize Premio Fray Bernardino de Sahagún is annually awarded by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia to the best work in ethnology and social anthropology, and in Spain, since 1966, a memorial plaque in one of the oldest buildings of the University of Salamanca—where Sahagún studied—, and a statue in his hometown, have these words engraved respectively: “To the memory of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún […], distinguished researcher of the language and culture of the ancient Mexicans, and father of anthropology in the New World;” “missionary and educator of peoples, father of anthropology in the New World.”¹⁰

Three main recurrent reasons can be put forward to understand why Sahagún has been perceived as a pioneering anthropologist, or for that matter, as an ethnographer and ethnologist, since there is no consensus to situate him in one or another category. The first reason rests on the fact that, on some occasions, Sahagún expresses a sincere and profound admiration for the Nahuas’ rhetorical and physical skills, education, medical knowledge, and solemnity of their religious cult, even to the point of regarding some of their lost policies as superior and regretting the destruction to which the Spaniards subjected them.¹¹ Sahagún’s recognition of the Nahuas’ value and level of perfection, in his own words “quilate” (carat), has been compared to an anthropologist’s fascination with the cultural Other.¹² His motive for being in New Spain and committing to the composition of Historia universal seems to be put side by side with an attitude proper of indigenismo that celebrates the cultural Other on its own.¹³ The second reason that has positioned Sahagún as a pioneering anthropologist has to do with the contents of Historia universal. Undeniably, its twelve books compile a variegated range of material—on gods, ceremonies, mythology, astrology, rhetoric and moral philosophy, fauna and flora, and the description of the life and duties of kings, lords, and merchants—, all of which is reminiscent of the subject matters studied by social anthropologists, namely; other peoples’ “ecologies, their economics, their legal and political institutions, their family and kinship organizations, their religions, their technologies, their arts, etc.”¹⁴ Many scholars from France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the United States have drawn on this encyclopaedia on the world of the Nahuas for their anthropological studies, which reinforces the notion that, if modern anthropology is concerned with the same themes as Sahagún was, Historia universal is a testament of pioneering interest in anthropological research and Sahagún, as his compiler, one of its precursors.¹⁵ Moreover, the nature of Historia universal makes it an unparalleled source; contrary to other so-called “missionary-ethnographers” like Motolinía or Durán, Sahagún wanted to leave a written record of how the Nahuas spoke and did not tamper with the Nahuatl text as openly as his contemporaries, who eventually composed their “ethnographic” works in Spanish.¹⁶ In this vein, León-Portilla argues that Sahagún organized material into an encyclopaedia “without altering or distorting in any way his texts.”¹⁷ His work is “purer,” so much so given the method that he applied to his collection of data in the Nahuatl language, whereby he enquired Nahua elders, whose answers were transcribed by several Nahua assistants or “colegiales”—former students at the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco—working under his direction.

This method of data collection has raised two controversial arguments. The first bestows upon the Nahuas—elder respondents and assistants—the authorship of the early Nahuatl manuscripts of Historia universal; the Códices matritenses.¹⁸ Garibay Kintana championed this assertion in his introductory study to the 1956 edition of Historia universal. He maintains that while the translation into Spanish of the Florentine Codex is Sahagún’s, the early texts, and it can be presumed those that were copied in the Nahuatl column of the codex, are “undeniable testimony of what the indigenous people said and wrote; [these texts] are more their work than Sahagún’s.”¹⁹ Informed by this contention, Garibay Kintana and León-Portilla initiated the series “Fuentes indígenas de la cultura náhuatl: Textos de los informantes de Sahagún” (“Indigenous sources of the Nahuatl culture: Texts of Sahagún’s informants.”)²⁰ Garibay Kintana edited his translation into Spanish of the religious songs of chapter I of the Primeros memoriales as Veinte himnos sacros de los nahuas (1958), and León-Portilla several paragraphs of the same chapter, on gods, ceremonies, and attires, as Ritos, sacerdotes y atavíos de los dioses (1958).²¹ In his appendix to this edition León-Portilla highlights the purity of these early texts because it is in them that readers can appreciate “the mentality and the words of the natives”— who were given an opportunity to speak up—, in opposition to Sahagún’s translation into Spanish, which shows his.²²

The second controversial assertion on Sahagún’s method of data collection is that it represents, as suggested by Toro and Jiménez Moreno, “the most demanding an ethnographer could use.” This idea has since been voiced by several scholars throughout the decades and constitutes the third and most widespread reason to support the simile of Sahagún as a pioneering anthropologist. In no attempt to mislead readers, these scholars firmly admit that Sahagún’s proselytizing purpose was quite distinct from that of the modern anthropologist.²³ Hence, “the aptness of this label,” as Henry Nicholson states, “derives from his use of a technique for obtaining information about the native culture that remarkably anticipated what is currently recognized as one of the most effective methods of recording accurate ethnographic data.”²⁴

Nicholson’s contemporary reading of Sahagún’s method calls for a revision of the manner in which Sahagún describes his modus operandi in the second prologue to Historia universal. Overall, the whole process consisted of three “cedaços” or “escrutjnios,” that is, sieves or examinations that involved the systematic collection, comparison, and writing of data and its arrangement in three different locations; Tepepulco (Hidalgo), Tlatelolco, and Mexico City.²⁵ During his stay in Tepepulco, from 1558 to 1561, Sahagún composed a “minuta o memoria” (“an outline or summary of all the topics to be considered,”) and then requested the lord and leaders of the town to assign him “capable and experienced people” who knew, he says, “how to give me the information regarding that which I should ask of them.”²⁶ Sahagún explains that the information supplied by this group of Nahua elders was collated and transcribed by the group of Nahua assistants who had been his former students at the College of Tlatelolco. He returned to Tlatelolco in 1561, where he and his assistants gathered further material from another group of knowledgeable elders so that, he specifies, “all I brought written from Tepepulco was amended, explained, and expanded.”²⁷ Finally, in 1565, Sahagún moved to the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City where “for three years, alone,” he remarks, “I examined and re-examined my writings [...] [,] amended them and divided them into Books.”²⁸ Sahagún notes in passing that in Mexico City he again obtained more data from a new group of respondents, whom he names the Mexicans. These, he says, “amended and added many things to the twelve Books” as the assistants were writing a clear copy. ²⁹

The interpretation of this passage by Luis Nicolau d’Olwer, Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois, and León-Portilla—three of Sahagún’s biographers who have studied how his 1558 commission unfolded in the three different locations—is that Sahagún was the “creator of the method of anthropological investigation,” that he enquired the Nahua elders time and again “not because of human mistrust, but because he had scientific sense,” and that “because of his outline, method, and achievements of his investigation [...] he has been named with reason the father of anthropology in the New World.”³⁰ These opinions are briefly developed by Nicolau d’Olwer and Howard F. Cline who, borrowing modern terminology, posit that Sahagún “designed a strikingly modern questionnaire, […] carefully selected the best-equipped informants […], crosschecked his data […], [and] empirically used a rigorous method of ethnographical research, a method that might be called interview/roundtable agreement.”³¹ Thus, Sahagún is said to have himself selected the group of “informants,” with whom he discussed matters related to their culture following a “modern questionnaire” in a relaxed “roundtable agreement.” This approach raises certain reservations. It is true that since Sahagún was interested in recording vocabulary in texts that would illustrate the Nahuas’ manners of speech, he would at times have allowed them to respond to his questions more or less freely. However, on other occasions, Sahagún enquired the Nahuas on their pre-Hispanic deities, ceremonies, and beliefs, which he condemned as diabolical and zealously wanted to obliterate. This fact does not help to conjure up the image of relaxed interview sessions during which the Nahuas would have replied without measuring their words and Sahagún would not have dwelt on questioning the data that he found unsatisfactory. It is in regard to Sahagún’s attitude that Klor de Alva adopts an even more debatable stance than Nicolau d’Olwer and Cline’s, claiming that upon doing “fieldwork,”

Sahagún struggled against the boundaries of his scholastic training […]. His methodological and ideological approach [...] marks the beginning of an objective and thorough ethnographic procedure that justifies calling its first consistent practitioner the ‘father of modern ethnography’ who, anticipating twentieth-century attitudes, […] was conscious of the fact that meaningful research in the field implied the study of reality as free from preemptive judgments as Christianity permitted.³²

For Klor de Alva, Sahagún attempted to trespass across his own ideological presuppositions rather than to abide by them. The mission that took him to New Spain and kept him engaged in the evangelization of the Nahuas for the rest of his life, although acknowledged, can be relegated to a secondary stage. Klor de Alva and other scholars who brand Sahagún as a pioneering ethnographer take into account, to a more or less extent, Sahagún’s clerical training and the environment in which he operated. However, once this “caveat” has been mentioned, they shift their focus of attention to superficial coincidences that are shaped by twentieth-century premises. Sahagún behaved in a manner similar to that of a modern-day anthropologist because he lived with the Nahuas, mastered their language, conducted fieldwork by designing questionnaires and interviewing informants in three different locations, and eventually reported collated results in a unique encyclopaedic work that covers the same subject matters that are of interest to present-day anthropologists.

Scholars who have questioned these coincidences and the accuracy of categorizing Sahagún as an anthropologist appeal to the anachronism of the term. Influenced by the historian Jesús Bustamante García, Walden Browne openly contends that Sahagún’s work is born out of “a context that was alien to the nineteenth-century disciplinary organization of knowledge in which anthropology introduced itself into a university setting,” and that the reason behind this anachronistic label lies on some scholars’ intent, above all León-Portilla’s, to legitimize “nationalistic claims of Latin American invention of a scientific discipline.”³³ If scholars accept that Sahagún is a missionary and pioneering anthropologist, they have to count on the misinterpretations and the pitfalls that this simile contracts for both anthropology and Sahaguntine studies. Tzvetan Todorov is adamant that although Sahagún put “his own knowledge in the service of the preservation of the native culture,” which has been and will be beneficial to anthropological studies, the fact that Historia universal is a precious source in the study of Mesoamerican anthropology does not make Sahagún an anthropologist.³⁴ In this sense, Lockhart believes that the contents of Historia universal “had a great deal in common not with the ethnographic tradition but with the current of interest in texts and ‘tropes’ that is so strong today in anthropology.”³⁵ Sahagún wished to preserve full original texts on topics that have been classified in our time as of anthropological value, not because he was a pioneering ethnographer but rather as a sixteenth-century philologist who wanted to illustrate the Nahuas’ vocabulary, concepts, commonplace metaphors, and idioms. As Solodkow also maintains, Sahagún is a missionary fulfilling conversion purposes; he is not “rescuing” the indigenous word and recording objective information on the world of the Nahuas to preserve it for its own sake. His title of “father of anthropology” is ironic, paradoxical, and counterproductive for the origins of the discipline because Sahagún is applying his own Eurocentric perception of the world to the portrayal of the Nahuas’ culture, which becomes an object to transform and even to make disappear.³⁶

In Browne’s opinion, crediting Sahagún with the foundation of modern anthropology has had a detrimental effect on Sahaguntine studies in that at times this attribution has diverted scholars’ attention away from the fact that Sahagún’s socially constructed knowledge of reality belonged to a different time and place. A proper understanding of the man and his work requires contextualizing him in his sixteenth-century mindset, insisting on his confines of Spanish Catholicism and the prejudices that “supplied the terms of his interpretation,” and forgetting anthropology and ethnography, which “create interpretive blind spots and close off discussion before it even gets started.”³⁷ Amongst a number of studies focusing on Sahagún and his socio-cultural milieu, those by Robertson, Bustamante García, and Browne deserve to be mentioned for having broken new ground.³⁸ Robertson associated Sahagún’s organization of contents with the medieval encyclopaedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, and Bustamante García examined the links of Historia universal with Ambrosio Calepino’s lexicographic work Cornucopiae, and with the rhetorical recommendations and encyclopaedic models of Augustine in De doctrina christiana and De civitate dei contra paganos. As for Browne, he has demonstrated the manner in which Sahagún struggled to give form to all his material within a medieval “pagan Summa,” which made sense of the new and alien environment that the world of the Nahuas meant for him and his European contemporaries.

Continuing Bustamante García and Browne’s line of investigation, the purpose of the current study is to contextualize the three main reasons underpinning Sahagún’s title of pioneering anthropologist within the socio-political and ideological structures of sixteenth-century Spain and America. Thus, Sahagún’s sincere and profound admiration of the Nahuas’ level of perfection or “quilate” is framed within the achievements and aspirations of the College of Tlatelolco, and conceived as part of the debates, on both sides of the Atlantic, on the rational capacity and natural ineptitude of the indigenous peoples. Historia universal will be argued as a work that inserts the Nahuas into the subject matters of the Christian Universal History, and also as one of Sahagún’s 1558 intended doctrinal works; a reference text for preachers and confessors that combines the contents and categorization of knowledge found in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, collections of sermons, treatises of vices and virtues, and confession manuals. These were all texts that he fully consulted for the first time while taking his vows at the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca, and which he felt were needed in New Spain for the conversion of the Nahuas. Sahagún’s sixteenth-century missionary experiences buttress that during his gathering of data he conducted research, not only in the manner of a philologist who wished to codify the Nahuatl language the way it was spoken, but also as a confessor and inquisitor-like friar who interrogated penitents and offenders of Christianity, and whose method of data collection is informed by confession and inquisitorial techniques. Notwithstanding the importance of Sahagún’s respondents and, primarily, of his assistants for the creation of Historia universal, the contention of this study is that Sahagún is the heart of the whole project. He designed a content outline and elaborated the questionnaires in order to elicit the information he judged relevant, asked questions to different respondents, ensured that the collation and writing of the texts in the Nahuatl language met the linguistic and content quality he demanded, and adjusted material to his intellectual taxonomies.

In the understanding that when fulfilling all these tasks Sahagún did not do anthropology, this study aims to suggest a new overarching label that covers every step of the composition process of Historia universal and that, contrary to the title of pioneering anthropologist, can be assigned without reservations. Paradoxically, theoretical problematizations of anthropology and ethnography, the very fields that are said to have obstructed further consideration of Sahagún and his work, lead the way to this new label. In their introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography James Clifford and George E. Marcus explore the manner in which ethnography decodes and encodes foreign cultures, and compare the production of ethnographic writings with the act or process of translating. This view was expressed already in the 1950s by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt. Ethnographers, keen to grasp and interpret cultural Others, adapt and confine them outside their real context. In doing so, the problem of describing

how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own […]. Eventually, we try to represent their conceptions systematically in the logical construct we have been brought up to use.³⁹

According to Lienhardt, the comprehension of the cultural Other—or, as he notably calls it by the custom of the time, “the primitive”—means accommodating it within the target language and the ethnographer’s cultural parameters. Drawing similarities between ethnography and translation, Talal Asad and Vincent Crapanzano likewise state that ethnography is an act of cultural translation, and that their practitioners behave as translators who interpret the world they are living in and render the foreign familiar.⁴⁰ Like translators, ethnographers provide written results in accord to their societies’ cultural and literary conventions. It could not be otherwise because, as Asad observes, their texts are “addressed to a very specific audience, which is waiting to read about another mode of life and to manipulate the text it reads according to established rules, not to learn to live a new mode of life.”⁴¹ The translators-ethnographers’ observations exist within their own textual constructs, and they find it difficult to separate from or transcend the conventions of representation laid down by their discipline, institutional life, and contemporary society. Therefore, ethnographers and translators use, and might abuse, their authority when making their interpretation of the cultural Other convincing for the target audience with whom they wish to create or maintain a bond, which results in texts that are “incomplete, only partially committed to truth.”⁴²

For its part, translation studies adopted the phrase “cultural translation” to broaden and deepen the understanding of translation as process and product. Reflecting on Asad and Crapanzano’s arguments, Ovidi Carbonell i Cortés holds that translation is a cultural contact “a superior level of interaction [that] takes place whenever an alien experience is internalized and rewritten in a culture where that experience is received.”⁴³ Translation implies not only the analysis of the source text and its transcodification into the target text, but also the rendering of a culture, a unit of translation in itself, into another. The act of translating becomes an interaction and a process that demand sensitivity to the broader issues of context, history, and convention, which affect the way in which translators encode and decode messages.⁴⁴ The study of cultural translation, as a transaction and a process that shape the writing of a text, casts translators into a wider social situation and involves the analysis of a number of extra-textual constraints. These comprise the ideology of the translator; the roles of the commissioner, the source-text producer, and the target receiver or user with culture-specific knowledge and expectations; and the purpose or skopos of the translation.⁴⁵ Ethnographers and anthropologists, aware of how these extra-textual constraints can be detrimental to representing the cultural Other in an objective manner, might struggle against their preconceptions, whereas cultural translators see themselves entitled to and are expected to recur to them.

Colonial encounters throw light upon an invaluable field to explore the development of cultural translations and the extra-textual constraints that dictated them; the sixteenth-century encounter of the Old World and the New emerging as an illustrative scenario.⁴⁶ A number of conquerors, chroniclers, and missionaries incorporated the colonized peoples within their universal scheme and conceived “new” territories and inhabitants according to their Christian, medieval, and classical tradition, ultimately complying with the power strategies and desires of the empire at the service of which they operated.⁴⁷ Their works ensured the survival of knowledge that otherwise would have fallen into oblivion, and at the same time have retained the colonizer’s discourse, purposes, and invented image of the “New World.” Sahagún and Historia universal belong to this context. Behaving as a cultural translator, he relocated the world of the Nahuas, in itself a translation unit, into his target culture by adhering to a series of extra-textual constraints; namely, his scheme of knowledge and beliefs and his commissioners, audiences, and purposes.⁴⁸ The intention of this study is therefore to reconsider his so-called pioneering ethnographic method and the ethnography-like contents of Historia universal as pertaining to a cultural translation process that, under these extra-textual conditions, can be divided into three main interrelated stages, sometimes occurring simultaneously. These are the design of a content outline and a series of questionnaires; the gathering, comparison, and codification of data; and its arrangement into a written text.

The interpretation that this study makes of Sahagún’s own account of the composition process of Historia universal stands as follows. In 1558, commissioned to elaborate a body of texts in the Nahuatl language for the evangelization of the Nahuas, Sahagún designs a minuta, the content outline from which the subject matters of his entire project derive. One of his planned works is a wide-ranging description or “history” of the world of the Nahuas. For its production he lays out a series of questionnaires that are based on his minuta, and which originate from the compartmentalized template of knowledge that is necessary in order to present the Nahuas in a recognizable and coherent manner to his first target audience of preachers and confessors. In Tepepulco and Tlatelolco, the Nahua elders’ answers and accounts undergo an accommodation to Sahagún’s cultural beliefs and classification of knowledge, as collected material is filtered, drafted, and organized by the Nahua assistants under his supervision. In Tepepulco, he commands them to confine data into paragraphs, singleline definitions, and lists of vocabulary. In Tlatelolco, he expands this information and envisages the composition of a three-column page work that he thinks best adjusts to its proselytizing aims—with the Nahuatl source, lexicographic glosses, and translation into Spanish. Finally in Mexico City, Sahagún structures all the manuscripts into an encyclopaedia of twelve books to which, after the enquiring of a third group of Nahua respondents, he says that more data was added. The twelve books in the Nahuatl language constitute the product of the translation process, which, embedding the world of the Nahuas into his Christian discourse, proselytizing purposes, and audience of churchmen, he submits to a Provincial Chapter for approval around 1570. The continuation of the work from 1575, a two-column page manuscript in Nahuatl and Spanish, responds to a different audience and purpose, that of Spanish officials of the Council of the Indies who are gathering information about New World territories and peoples.⁴⁹

The title of this study, Translation as Conquest, serves as a two-fold metaphor that associates translation, conquest, and conversion and claims the role of Sahagún as the controlling mind of the translation process and as the editor of the cultural translation product.⁵⁰ First, Historia universal is Sahagún’s appropriation of the Nahua world; it is a compilation of data that was relocated within a new ideological space defined by his sixteenth-century authoritarian scrutiny and perceptions. Second, since Historia universal was produced to support the apparatus of colonial power exercised by the Spanish Empire, Sahagún placed his knowledge in its service, participating in the colonization of the Nahuas. The accumulation and classification of data for the composition of Historia universal is inextricably linked to the equation of power and knowledge. It is Sahagún’s colonial position to create a corpus of works that would subject the Nahuas to his Christian culture that propelled the translation of their world into a doctrinal reference text.⁵¹ Needless to say, this study disputes neither the value of Historia universal as an inestimable and exhaustive source about the Nahuas nor the involvement of the Nahua elders and, above all, of Sahagún’s assistants in its composition. Rather, it strives to give a fuller understanding of the problematic nature of Sahagún’s legacy.

Chapter I offers an overall picture of the translator’s ideology, centring on Sahagún’s scholastic and early humanist education, his religious instruction, and the missionary environment that he imbibed before leaving for the New World. The forging of his cultural presuppositions is explored in order to examine how he was to understand the Nahuas and shape the writing of Historia universal the way he did. The chapter starts by outlining the sixteenth-century Spanish curriculum at grammar schools and at the University of Salamanca, where Sahagún probably attended the Faculty of Arts. It looks at courses that he is likely to have studied as well as the influence exerted by the renowned professors who taught at Salamanca at the time. A second section of the chapter is concerned with Sahagún’s religious schooling and missionary training in the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca, a distinguished Franciscan centre of studies even after the imposition of the Strictissima Observantia rule. An analysis of the missionary work that the Franciscan Order undertook in the Canary Islands, in conquered Muslim lands like Granada, and in the New World is intended to assist in the understanding of how Sahagún was to conduct himself as an active member of the conversion of the Nahuas. Consequently, chapter II deals with Sahagún’s contribution to the proselytizing project masterminded by the first Bishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga. Thus, it examines Sahagún’s role as a tutor at the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco and the evolution of his approach towards the composition of works in the Nahuatl language. Two of the arguments that have been put forward to name Sahagún a pioneering anthropologist—Sahagún’s praise of the Nahuas and, contrary to other “missionaries-ethnographers” like Motolinía or Durán, his decision to write the text in the Nahuatl language in order to preserve the purity of the documents—are put into context by unpacking the extra-textual elements surrounding the production of Historia universal; namely, the patrons, the instructions or “cultural translation” brief, the target audiences, and the purposes. These lead to the presentation of the work as being constructed upon three interrelated axes. First, within the framework of the Spiritual Conquest, Historia universal is an auxiliary reference book for preachers and confessors that also codifies Nahuatl as the language of evangelization; second, within the debates on the “uncivilized” indigenous peoples, it is a document that proves the virtuous qualities of the Nahuas and their value to become Christians; and third, within the royal requests for accounts of the New World, it is a work that complies with colonial demands at the Council of the Indies.

After this contextualization of Sahagún and Historia universal, the subsequent three chapters focus on the cultural translation process that Sahagún describes in his second prologue. To begin with, chapter III explores the first and third stages of the translation process; the intellectual and literary sources Sahagún considered for the design of the content outline in which he was to categorize the world of the Nahuas, and upon which he also modelled the arrangement of material into a final twelve-book encyclopaedia. Following Bustamante García’s statement that Sahagún did not follow one model in particular but amalgamated different ones, this chapter looks at some of the conventions of representation that he could have used as a template, including classical and medieval encyclopaedias and doctrinal texts.⁵² The exposition of links and comparisons between Historia universal and these archetypes are succinct and perfunctory, based on titles of books, chapters, and relevant paragraphs. However, this study opens up discussion about different religious models that could have influenced Sahagún, such as confession manuals and treatises of vices and virtues, which might stimulate further research on the matter. Added to this, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that the themes of Historia universal, coinciding with those dealt with by present-day anthropology, ethnography, and ethnology, echo Christian doctrine and works of encyclopaedic nature in which churchmen had to be fully instructed for their evangelical mission. Chapter IV similarly unveils Sahagún’s method of data collection, which only on the surface equates to that of present-day ethnography, as informed by confessional and, above all, inquisitorial techniques. This argument is based on the fact that in the same manner as Sahagún resorted to the intellectual models that he knew for the composition of doctrinal works, he imitated the contemporary methods of enquiry and data collection with which he was well acquainted. In proving it, this chapter analyses the influence exerted by Olmos, inquisitor and first missionary to compose texts on the indigenous peoples’ cultures, and Sahagún’s involvement in inquisitorial practices. The chapter also tries to describe the first and second stages of the translation process, speculating on how Sahagún designed questions by drawing on the intellectual archetypes of his outline, and how these questions might have been asked and answers received. His method of data collection is therefore portrayed as an imposition of his Eurocentric stratification and conceptualization of knowledge, rather than formed free of ideological strictures and ethnographic in the modern sense.

Finally, chapter V engages with the second and third stages of the cultural translation process; the relocation of source-culture information into Sahagún’s target text. The first section of the chapter provides an insight into the Nahua elders and assistants’ background, social status, and cultural knowledge, which aims to contribute to the exploration of the roles that they played during the translation process. The section attempts to show that, already during the composition of the Códices matritenses, data was very likely censored by the Nahua elders and inescapably omitted, partially registered due to the impossibility of transferring the totality of oral and visual codes into a written one. Furthermore, oral and pictorial data was filtered through Sahagún’s questionnaires, recorded in writing, collated, and drafted by his assistants according to a Eurocentric taxonomy of hierarchical encyclopaedias and religious texts that was palatable to the work’s target audience of churchmen. The product of the cultural translation process with which this chapter is concerned, the Nahuatl texts of the Códices matritenses and the Florentine Codex, is a striking testimony of polyphony; the fusion of the voices of the Nahua elders, Sahagún, and his assistants. Nevertheless, those voices are not represented on equal terms for it is Sahagún and his assistants who have the ultimate say. Thus, a second section of this chapter continues to unravel their manipulation of the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex and examines the Eurocentric references that they entered throughout its folios.

Little is known of Sahagún prior to his departure from Spain in 1529. The Franciscan chronicler Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta, who met him in his lifetime, reports in Historia eclesiástica indiana that Sahagún hailed from the town in the province of León that bears his surname, which he adopted in accordance with the common usage of his order when becoming a Franciscan.¹ Nothing but speculation exists as regards his family name of “Ribera” or “Ribeira” and the social position of his parents, and again Mendieta is the only source to account for Sahagún’s education, noting that “as a student in Salamanca he took his religious vows in the Friary of San Francisco in the same city. Once he had been taught sufficiently in theology he left for New Spain.”² Articles and books that have sought to reconstruct Sahagún’s life and argue the case for his Spanish intellectual background have traced his origins to the town of Sahagún and the University of Salamanca.³ The familiarity with classical authors that he must have gained in Salamanca, his passion for the education of the Nahuas and the acquisition of their language, and his portrayal of the Nahuas as virtuous human beings has resulted in an overall tendency to qualify him as a humanist. Nevertheless, in his overarching and meticulous doctoral dissertation Bustamante García concludes that Sahagún’s linguistic and ethnographic-like work on the Nahuas stemmed not only from classical but also from medieval analytical and descriptive models.⁴ Sahagún, Bustamante García stresses, blends late medieval knowledge with Humanism and, led by the necessity of the New World environment, applies and modifies humanist premises, Franciscan mysticism, and Nominalism.⁵⁶Historia universalHistoria universal