From the ‘Memoriales con escolios’ to the Florentine Codex”: Sahagún and his Nahua Assistants’ Co-authorship of the Spanish Translation”

It is generally assumed that Fray Bernardino de Sahagún translated the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex (ca. 1577–1579) into Spanish. The surviving ‘Memoriales con escolios’ (Tlatelolco, ca. 1565), a three-column page draft comprising the Nahuatl-language source text, its translation into Spanish and explanatory notes for the clarification of relevant Nahuatl terminology, serves as a point of reference to argue that Sahagún's group of Nahua assistants were co-authors of the column containing the Spanish translation that was eventually transferred to the Florentine Codex. In order to support this argument, this study portrays the learning experiences to which his Nahua assistants were exposed at the Imperial College of Tlatelolco, and which they applied to the creation of the ‘Memoriales con escolios’, and examines a passage from the manuscript that casts light on Sahagún and his assistants' working methods and on the translation techniques that they employed.