Burkhart, Louise M. 1996. Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

The illustration below is of The Crucifixion, with John and Mary. It is the title page of the Psalmodia christiana, 1583. It also appears in Burkhart's publication, "Holy Wednesday." She secured the rights courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

In this publication, Louise M. Burkhart analyzes a Nahuatl drama titled miercoles santos, or "Holy Wednesday." Significantly, this manuscript is the earliest known extant script of a play in the Nahuatl language--or any other Native American language.

Early on, Burkhart  points out the groundbreaking importance of "Holy Wednesday." After centuries of sitting on the private library shelves ofEuropean auctioneers, this play text was finally recovered for scholars andthe general public in 1986, by an American dealer with expertise in Nahuatl documents. David Szewczyk, of the Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts Society, recognized the drama for what it was, and realized its significance as the only known sixteenth-century manuscript of a Nahuatl play.   

As Burkhart explains, "Holy Wednesday belongs to a genre of theatrical performances born of the encounter between the Nahuas of central Mexico and their Franciscan evangelizers" (3). More specifically, "the relevant encounter was between the friars and the young boys of the native nobility whom they took as students" (3). As many scholars of the Spanish conquest are well aware, the first three Franciscanfriars to reach Mexico arrived in 1523; a party of twelve friars came in1524 to set up the first official mission. By the early 1530s, Nahua students of these friars were translating and performing public dramas based on Christian themes. Select, indigenous students first translated the friars' dramas from Spanish into Nahuatl, then staged the dramas for members of the native community in a language that they understood. This process of translation-- Christian writings into the Nahuatl language-- was, at least initially, a keystone of the evangelizing agenda of the Spanish friars. Since they had little comprehension of the indigenous languages, they needed their students to convey their Christian teachings. 

One way to understand "Holy Wednesday," then, is simply as an indigenous translation of a Spanish religious drama entitled Lucero de Nuestra Salvación , or "Beacon of Our Salvation." Yet the whole point of Burkhart's analysis is that the surviving Nahuatl manuscript is far more than merely a straightforward 'translation' of Spanish religious traditions and thought. Rather, she posits that the Nahuatl theatre in which this playtext emerged was not just a theatre based on translation, but also a "theatreof transformation" (48). In this indigenous theatre of transformation, Christian narrative "were accomodated to the Nahuatl language and given local nuancesvia word, costume, and gesture. The sacred beings of Christianity appeared in Nahua guise and spoke to their fellow Nahuas" (48).

Starkly to contrast Richard Trexler's view that Spanish friars had total control over the performances they scripted for the indigenous peoples ofMexico,Burkhart puts forth a unique thesis about the political potentialof early Nahuatl theatre. She posits that, in the first few decades after the conquest,"the local church patio, sacred heart of the community, became Bethlehem,Jerusalem, Assisi, and Eden" (48) for the indigenous peoples.In short, "Christianity slipped from the friars' controlling grasp; Nahuas negotiated directly with sacred forces that governed their conflicted, colonized reality" (48).

Burkhart also contends that the Nahuas' theatre of transformation was at once "a theatre of self-legitimation, in which Nahuas represented themselves as pious Christians who understood Christian narrarives, followed Christian teachings, and knew how to handle crosses, gifts of the Magi, and other props and costumes" (48). In describing how the distinctly European tradition oftheatre became a political forum for the defeated peoples of "New Spain,"Burkhart draws attention to the local vested interests at stake. She explains that"since members of the native nobility were more likely thanthe commoners to plan, finance, and perform in these plays, theatre was one means for nobles to establish and assert their claims to leadership" (48).For this reason,the Nahua noblility "determined what discourses and practices would be authoritative within Nahua Christianity, thus mediating between Spanish overlords and Nahua commoners, as well as controlling the form and extent of resistance" (48).Burkhart  posits that the representations of native Christianity staged by the Nahuas (after being translated by those young members of the nobility who were also students of the friars) were"directed not only at other Nahuas,but also at Spaniards" (48).

Burkhart's comparison of the Spanish manuscript, "Beacon of Our Salvation," with the Nahuatl version, "Holy Wednesday," is fascinating for several reasons. First, she actually performs a word-for-word translation of the two texts into English. In doing so, Burkhart elucidates some of the intricate complexities of the Nahua value system and world view. She also draws attention to the relative simplicity of the Spanish world view. Secondly, Burkhart pointsout specific instances where the Nahuatl translation of the 'original' Spanish manuscript, "Beacon of Our Salvation," takes on a very different sense and stylistic quality than its source. In fact, the Nahua 'translation' of the Spanish original can barely be viewed as the same play during certain moments of the actions.

Burkhart observes that "if this Nahua playwright's approach to translation was at all representative of the interpreter's art, one must wonder how many other Spanish discourses were similarily transformed as they passed, orally or in writing, into Nahuatl" (100). The obvious implication of this observation is that Spanish texts which purport to translate utterances originally rendered in Nahuatl must also be questioned. "Can these actually represent what native people really said?" (100), Burkhart asks.

The scholar concludes her Introduction to this brilliant book with the following, insightful remark: "No translation is ever a completely faithful versionand transparent reproduction of its source, but if the interpreter does noteven attempt accurately to convey the content and meaning of the originalmessage, the result is something other than what is conventionally termeda translation" (101). She points out that, in Nahuatl, the art of translationwas designated as the "turning of words," or tlahtolcuepaliztlu. Theverb cuepa refers to acts of turning around or inside out, of returning,of responding, and of changing. This complex act, "the turning of words,"is in fact what was performed by the unknown Nahua playwright who translated"The Beacon of Our Salvation" into Nahuatl--into "Holy Wednesday."