Nahuatl Theater. vol. 1. Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico

Abstract

This volume (the first of four projected volumes) contains transcriptions and English translations of seven religious plays in Nahuatl that have survived from Mexico’s colonial period. The plays themselves are preceded by Miguel León-Portilla’s foreword and four analytical essays. The foreword reviews the historical context of the plays, summarizes the work of scholars writing prior to the 1974 publication of the first volume of Fernando Horcasitas’s El teatro náhuatl: Epocas novohispana y moderna, and an appreciation of the career of Horcasitas. The 1974 volume was intended as the first of five, but the project was cut short by Horcasitas’s death in 1980. Burkhart and Sell’s preface sets forth the abundance of research on colonial Nahuatl published since then and discusses the impact of this scholarly work for the transcriptions and translations of three plays that appear here and in the Horcasitas edition. They also detail their methodology.In the first of the four essays, Sell quotes James Lockhart, who said of the Horcasi-tas volume that the transcriptions “mainly modernize the orthography, with consequent loss of distinctions, although some idiosyncrasies of the originals are retained.” In fact, Horcasitas recast, in a somewhat modernized and standardized style, both the plays in question and two volumes of folktales told by Doña Luz Jiménez. He intended to make this Nahuatl material more widely accessible to Mexican readers unfamiliar with colonial orthographic abbreviations and phonetic transcription. Such an editorial policy, not primarily intended for an audience of philologists, was hardly the result of carelessness or ignorance on the part of Horcasitas. We can only be grateful for the new versions now made available by Sell and Burkart. Sell’s essay also locates the seven plays in historical, philological, and thematic context, examining dates that appear within the texts themselves, cross-references to plays in other contemporary writing, rhetorical features, and subject matter as it reveals ecclesiastic and social anxieties of the times.Burkhart’s essay looks at the concept of the “good death” and how this played out among the Nahua in terms of care for the dying, last confession, final disposition of material possessions, the survival of the soul, and divine retribution. Daniel Mosquera compares the possible Spanish sources for the plays with their Mexican counterparts, and Viviana Díaz Balsera devotes her essay to one play, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” with its fraught theme of human sacrifice in the context of Mesoamerican society, where the indigenous practice of human sacrifice was still a recent memory.The transcriptions and translations of the plays, printed on facing pages, facilitate cross-reference between the Nahuatl and the English. Footnotes at the bottom of the left-hand pages refer to issues of transcription, while footnotes on the right-hand pages present alternative translations and identify translations that are tentative. Differences in tone are partly due to the translator: Sell being primary translator of four of the plays and Burkhart of three. Sell tends to a more colloquial style. For instance, in translation, Ishmael speculates that he can spirit Isaac away from their father’s feast by sneaking him out (p. 153). Later, the messenger angel bearing God’s command to offer up Isaac tells Abraham, “Now listen up!” (p. 161). In another text, Don Sebastián scorns the practice of “hanging around at Church” (p. 275). The Nahuatl verbs that Sell translated in this colloquial fashion are neutral with respect to this degree of informality.On the other hand, some differences of tone appear to reflect the relative age of the Nahuatl texts themselves. The play about the Final Judgment, translated by Burkhart, is rife with the Nahuatl high rhetoric also to be found in the Florentine Codex and the Bancroft Dialogues, both products of the sixteenth century. In the play, there is a decidedly indigenous character whose role is to get people to sweep, keep vigil, rise early, expose themselves to cold, and abstain from food—all precontact practices adapted to Christian life (p. 193). On the other hand, the play about an avaricious merchant (whose dialogue mentions the year 1627) is for the most part free of precontact rhetorical devices, although there is a classical reference to the slippery earth (p. 261).The plays illustrate a pervasive preoccupation with sudden-onset mortal illness and final confession. For this reason, two other recently published books, Daniel T. Reff’s Plagues, Priests, Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) and Osvaldo F. Pardo’s The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2004) can be profitably read together with Nahuatl Theater. Reff has a chapter on disease and the rise of Christianity in colonial Mexico, and Pardo has one on penance and contrition among the Nahuas.