About This Project

The Florentine Codex is a sixteenth-century encyclopedia assembled through the work of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún together with Nahuatl-speaking elders, scholars, and scribes. It records Nahua life, thought, ritual, and natural history in both Nahuatl and Spanish. Book 6, Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, preserves the Wewetlahtolli, the formal “words of the elders” spoken at births, marriages, funerals, and other moments of counsel.

Because these texts were recorded after the Spanish invasion, some passages contain Christian language and framing that should be approached with care. At the same time, beneath and alongside this colonial context is a substantial body of ancestral teaching concerning character, humility, work, speech, responsibility, and grief that continues to offer meaningful guidance today. The Nahuatl presented with each passage is transcribed verbatim, without alteration, from the Digital Florentine Codex (florentinecodex.getty.edu). Its Nahuatl column follows the Anderson and Dibble transcription of the manuscript. The English presented beneath it is a Chimalteopan rendering based on that Nahuatl text.

Rather than providing a direct translation, which is readily available through a variety of existing sources, this project presents an interpretive reconstruction approached through a decolonial lens. It should therefore not be understood simply as a “new translation.” Instead, it is a decolonial, reindigenized translation.

Reindigenizing translation is a methodology that seeks to reconstruct Indigenous conceptual meanings from an Indigenous-language source while critically identifying and, where warranted by contextual evidence, replacing colonial or Christian impositions. It does not claim to recover an uncontaminated or untouched original meaning. Rather, it seeks to make Indigenous conceptual possibilities visible within a historically mediated text. The goal is therefore to produce a new text representing a reconstructed Indigenous worldview, removing colonial mediation wherever possible.

Where the Nahuatl invokes the sacred, this rendering retains an Indigenous conceptual frame rather than automatically reproducing the vocabulary of the friars. For example, totecuiyo is rendered as “the Giver of Life” rather than “our Lord,” while tloque nahuaque is rendered as “Tloke Nawake, the Ever-Near, the Ever-Close.” Likewise, concepts of compassion, obligation, and the keeping of the ways are used where earlier translations may employ terms such as mercy, piety, or grace. These choices are intended to help disentangle the Wewetlahtolli from Christian interpretive frameworks while making its Indigenous philosophical dimensions more visible. While necessarily imperfect, this project is intended to serve as a starting point for further discussion, research, and engagement with the Indigenous intellectual traditions preserved within the Florentine Codex.