Grasping an Alter-Native Ethics on Indigenous Sources of New Spain: The Case of

Aesop’s Translations at the “Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco”

This proposal explores the ethical reflections and contents accounted into historical
and literary sources coined by indigenous people in the first phase of the Spanish colonial
period in the Americas. To this purpose I will focus on one particular case related to
anonymous translations of Aesop’s fables made the lettered indigenous scholars of the
“Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco” in the sixteenth century. I will approach the matter at
hand in three correlative movements. The first delves into the analysis on the figure of
Aesop in the Renaissance and his reception in the New World’s colonization. I will relieve
the multiple works made at Tlatelolco in terms of an evangelist project grounded on the
transference of knowledge and technologies of communication, in this case, multiple
European models of narration and discursive skills that were functional both for the
establishment of the colonial order in New Spain, and for the cultural reconstruction carried
out by the indigenous people themselves (Ríos 2015). The second engages the study of the
sources considering a corpus of six Aesop’s fables translated into Nahuatl. To this I will
develop a comparative approach that contrasts the original versions (Hausrath and Hunger
1959) with the texts written in Nahuatl language, regarding as well their translations from
Nahuatl into Spanish (Leicht 1935), English, and German (Kutscher, Brotherson, and
Vollmer 1987). At this level, the fables’ tales address and connect ancient and medieval
models with the indigenous ones, exposing how those models were re-built and re-shaped
across both cultural horizons. Throughout this comparative analysis I will focus on how
these anonymous translations worked in order to re-create a basis for an ethical thought
according to the relational dualism of Mesoamerican worldview (López Austin 2011).
Following Aesop’s ethical contents, among allegories and comparisons in particular with
non-human beings, it is possible to point out that these Aesop’s translations are palimpsests
in which both European and indigenous backgrounds were transformed insofar as they were
integrated. Finally, the third looks for posit new questions according to an interdisciplinary
perspective –perhaps critical (Echeverría 2019) and polylogical (Wimmer 2004, Ette
2013)– that collaborate to expand the philosophical canon towards this type of unknown
and marginalized sources, shedding light on what can be called an “Alter-Native Ethics”
taking place in New Spain during the early Modernity.

Bibliography

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