Mason professor Garry Sparks is working with a team to translate an ancient text from the Mayan language of K'iche' to English and Spanish.
His team's work on the text, translating it from the Mayan language of K'iche' to English and Spanish, will shed light on how the first Spanish missionaries shared their faith in the New World in the 1500s. The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Spanish explorers who spread through the West Indies and the mainland of the Americas were accompanied by Franciscan and Dominican missionaries equipped with sermons, catechisms, and songbooks. They translated their lessons to the languages of the people they encountered.
But the Theologia Indorum, written in the 1550s by Dominican friar Domingo de Vico, goes beyond a simple translated catechism. It was initially composed in K'iche', an indigenous language still spoken by more than a million Guatemalans, then translated only into other related Mayan languages, said Sparks, who teaches in the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Reading those texts and comparing their content to ancient images and hieroglyphic texts that predate Mayan contact with the Spanish, researchers can discern the impact of that encounter. Reading the Theologia Indorum in the context of Mayan writings indicates not only how Christianity was transmitted to the native population, but how they received it.
"It's the first time we can actually look at the contemporaneous paper trail and recreate an interreligious dialogue between missionaries and indigenous people," he says.
Sparks and a team of researchers received a National Endowment of the Humanities grant to prepare a critical edition and English translation of the first volume of the Theologia Indorum.
The project's initial goal was to transcribe the first volume. Working remotely, with yearly weeklong, face-to-face meetings every March, the team has been able to make a complete transcription of both Volumes I and II. Their next step will be to produce an English and Spanish translation, both in terms of a literal translation of the document, "and then a much more fluid, idiomatic English translation that will be much more accessible," Sparks says.
With help from Mason's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the team will develop a website that will make the Theologia Indorum digitally available. The site will include full-color, high-resolution scanned images of its K'iche' manuscript of Volume I along with the scholarly transcription and translation.