Friar Luis Zapata de Cárdenas (1576)’ Catecismo, Cultural Translation. Towards an understanding of Cultural and Religious Colombian history

Abstract

The institutionalized used of catechisms for evangelization, does not limit itself to a spiritual orientation. To ensure its effectiveness, the scope reaches social, urban and physical aspects of those evangelized, their behaviour, and naturally, the language or languages in which the evangelization is carried out. History has registered the event as a total act of imposition of the Catholic doctrine and of suppression of the indigenous. We are trying to understand, from the perspective of cultural translation, whether this crucial event implied negotiations between evangelizers and evangelized, and whether it implied also a deep knowledge of each other. Translation is understood here in the whole sense of transference and abandonment (in the sense Lamy and Nouss give to Benjamin’s Task of the Translator). The exchange experienced in this context of the tasks of the translator and the receptor leads to the knowledge of aspects of those inhabiting America, that is to say, Indians, Spaniards or Europeans in general and criollos. This reflexion takes as a departing point Friar Luis Zapata de Cárdenas’ Catecismo.