Resumen de History in pictures: translating the Codex Mendoza
This essay examines the "Codex Mendoza", a pictorial manuscript created in Mexico City c. 1542, through a focus on acts and moments of traslation. Making the codex involved linguistic and cultural translations, transforming images into words, oral narrative into written text, Nahuatl into Spanish, and Amerindian history and costums into viceregal and European versions. The codex was then physically translated or transported from Mexico to Paris, London, and Oxford. It later moved across media, from manuscript to print, and also interpretively, as publications provided different readings. The essay argues that mobility was not a physical accident that happened to a stable and immutable object, but rather a series of constitutive acts of translation, selection, and interpretation that produced multiple versions of the objects itself.
