Late in life, the Franciscan friar and ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún composed psalms or songs to enable the Nahuas to celebrate the holidays of the Christian calendar. His aim was to use native religious forms, particularly song and dance, to convey the Christian message and to extirpate non-Christian belief. Since the native religious calendar had set the rhythms of pre-Hispanic life and its replacement was key to the success of Christian evangelization, a new ritual calendar was vital. Pre-Hispanic forms of celebration revolving around music, dance, and poetry were important cultural expressions with rich implications. In and of themselves, song and dance were not antithetical to Christianity and could be utilized for Christian purposes. The Psalmodia Christiana was composed with that idea in mind. The work is structured on the liturgical year, following the January through December calendar: Christ’s circumcision (Jan. 1) through Christmas. The language is richly poetic, but translator Arthur J. O. Anderson remarks in his preface that Sahagún’s new poetry “never measured up to the old” (p. x).
In this volume, Anderson has produced yet another masterful, lengthy translation from Nahuatl of an important sixteenth-century text. Sahagún, of course, is a towering figure, many of whose works are well known and well studied. This particular one, however, has never been readily accessible to the scholarly community, for two reasons. First, the manuscript itself is quite rare and generally unavailable. Second, unlike other works of Sahagún, the Psalmodia Christiana does not have a contemporary Spanish translation. Thus, scholars who did not know Nahuatl would have been unable to read the text even if they could locate it. Although Anderson in his preface does not explore at length the text’s potential for illuminating sixteenth-century cultural processes, this work is a major source for such exploration. For this reason, the publication of this superb transcription and translation is of considerable importance.
