The discourse of translation in culture contact: "The Story of Suhuy Teodora", an analysis of European literary borrowings in the Books of Chilam Balam
Description
The Books of Chilam Balam are a series of manuscripts produced in Yucatecan Maya in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries that previously were believed to record information on the precolonial Maya belief system. However, much of the information contained therein stems from European sources. The Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua (2002), in particular, contains many European borrowings, including a translation of 'The Story of the Maiden Teodora,' a Spanish version of a chapter of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights . This story has a long history of translation, from Arabic into various European languages and, ultimately, from Spanish into Maya. In the Books of Chilam Balam, this tale serves a didactic purpose, informing its Maya readers of various cultural traditions in the European world. Of particular interest are the sections dealing with astrological prognostication and presenting a series of riddles, which represent intellectual traditions present in precolonial Maya and medieval European societies Analysis of the translation of Spanish-language texts into Amerindian languages can shed light on the cultural interactions that took place between Hispanic and indigenous civilizations within New Spain. The borrowed passages in the Kaua reveal the nature of the discourse that took place between the two cultures via an analysis of Maya translation techniques. They show how the Maya perceived European texts, how much European ideology had been synthesized into the colonial Maya worldview, and, based upon which sources were not borrowed, which Maya concepts were indelible. In the process of translation, the authors decided which pieces of the original text required additional commentary or could be translated directly, as well as which texts merited inclusion but could be maintained in their original language. Amerindian literature need not deal strictly with native topics to represent an authentic literary movement; instead, these European sources were used to augment, not replace, the Maya literary tradition. Taken as a whole, the Kaua is representative of the wide range of European literature adapted into colonial Maya, and 'The Story of the Maiden Teodora' can be viewed as a microcosm of this process of literary adaptation and translation