Holy Wednesday

About seventy years after the conquest of Mexico, a native scholar recast a Spanish Holy Week play in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Like its extant Spanish model, the Nahuatl text dramatizes Christ's departure from Mary on the Wednesday before his crucifixion.

But the Nahuatl version is a far different play from its European model - a nativist document written by a master of oral-poetic style, a much-expanded work that subtly revises the message of Christ's Passion to fit the author's own aesthetic sensibility and his interpretations of Christian teachings.

Identified only in 1986, the Nahuatl Holy Week play is the earliest known dramatic script in any Native American language. In Holy Wednesday, Louise Burkhart presents side-by-side English translations of the Nahuatl play and its Spanish source. An accompanying commentary analyzes the differences between the two versions to reveal how the native author altered the Spanish text to fit his own aesthetic sensibility and the broader discursive universe of the Nahua church.

A richly detailed introduction places both works and their creators within the cultural and political contexts of late sixteenth-century Mexico and Spain. The most in-depth analysis of a Nahua-Christian text ever published, Burkhart's Holy Wednesday explores both the art of translation and the process of evangelization under Spanish rule. It offers an unparalleled opportunity to witness, as if from within, an early moment of colonialization and cultural appropriation.