Translation, mistranslation, and the violence of evangelization in Fray Ramón Pané’s Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios

Fray Ramón Pané, a Hieronymite lay brother, arrived in Hispaniola in 1493, accompanying Christopher Columbus on his second voyage. Shortly thereafter, and after having learned two local languages, he began to compile and translate the myths and religious practices as told to him by the Taíno people into a volume that later became the Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, doing so to facilitate the evangelization of the Natives with which he was charged. In this article, I demonstrate that, alongside Pané’s translations, the text also possesses motivated mistranslations as Native peoples strove to keep the secrets of their myths and traditions obscured from the Spanish colonizers and evangelizers. Through close reading of the text alongside a detailed look at the circumstances of its production, I speculate on the strong possibility that many of the lacunae and confusions in the text are the result of this Indigenous resistance to Spanish domination, the backdrop to which was the colonial and evangelizing violence that accompanied the turbulent and destructive five-year lifespan of La Isabela, the first colonial settlement in the Americas. The terror of conquest, colonialism, disease, and impending catastrophic demographic demise underwrite and frame Pané’s text and challenge the idea that his Indigenous informants offered him a transparent recounting of their myths and traditions. Inspired by Anna Brickhouse’s concepts of ‘mistranslation’ and ‘unsettlement,’ I analyze translation theory as it intersects with thinking around colonialism to posit how the failed settlement of La Isabela presents a mirror to Pané’s (mis)translated text.