WAVELAND PRESS, INC. Long Grove, Illinois For information about this book, contact: Waveland Press, Inc. 4180 IL Route 83, Suite 101 Long Grove, IL 60047-9580 (847) 634-0081 [email protected] www.waveland.com Copyright © 1978 by Frances Horning Barraclough Reissued 2002 by Waveland Press, Inc. Translated from Los ríos profundos, © by Sybila de Arguedas 10-digit ISBN 1-57766-244-X 13-digit ISBN 978-1-57766-244-0 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 Contents vu ' T RAN S L AT 0 R S NOTE lX INTRODUC TI ON by John V. Murra 3 I. THE OLD MAN 24 2. THE J OURNEYS 32 3. THE LEAVE-TAKING 39 4. THE HACIENDA 44 5. BRIDGE OVER THE WORLD 64 6. ZUMBAY LLU 88 7. THE INSURRECTION 108 8. DEEP CANYON 133 9. STONE AND LIME 155 10. YAWAR MAYU 190 II. THE COLONOS 235 AFTER WORD Dreams and Magic in Jose Maria Arguedas by Mario Vargas Llosa 243 GLOSSAR Y TranslatorsNote Jose Maria Arguedas is one of the few Latin American authors who have loved and described their rural natural surroundings, and he ranks among the greatest writers of any place and any time. He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grim­ ness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the In­ dians who are a part of it. He succeeded in instilling into his Spanish the sentence struc­ ture, the rhythm, and even some of the vocabulary of the Andean people. Although it is impossible to convey all of the nuances of his writing in English, I have translated Deep Rivers in the belief that English speakers deserve a chance to become acquainted with him and to experience the reality of life in Peru as it still exists today, even though the novel describes a period of about fifty years ago. I have tried to salvage, at least in part, the characteristics of the Quechua·Spanish created by Arguedas in the simplest manner possible, by attempting to be scrupulously faithful to the original. The Quechua songs presented in the book have been translated by transposing the author's rather free Spanish version of them into English. I am grateful to Carlin Baraona and Jose Sabogal Weisse for their assistance in translating the Spanish and Peruvian idioms. I also wish to thank Martin Wolf and Claire Eisenhart, who read the English version and made many useful editorial suggestions. F.H.B. Introduction ''You may be surprised if I confess to you that I am the handiwork of my stepmother. My mother died when I was two and a half. My father remarried; his new wife already had three children. I was the youngest and, as I was so small, my father left me in the house of my stepmother, who owned half the town; she had many in­ digenous servants and with it the traditional contempt for and lack of awareness of what an Indian was. Since I was the object of as much of her scorn and rancor as the Indians, she decided that I was to live with them in the kitchen, eating and sleeping there. My bed was a wooden trough of the kind used to knead bread... Resting on some sheepskins and covered with a rather dirty but very sheltering blanket, I spent the nights talking and living so well that if my stepmother had known it she would have removed me to her side .... "I lived thus many years. When my father would visit I was hauled back to the dining room, my clothes were dusted off; but Sunday passed, my father went back to the provincial capital and I to my trough, to the lice of the Indians. The Indians, particularly their women, saw me as one of them, with the differencethat being white I needed even more comforting than they did, and this they gave me in full. But consolation must contain within it both sad­ ness and power; as those tormented comforted those who suffered even more, two things were sadly driven into my nature from the time I learned to speak: (I) the tenderness and limitless love of x : INTRODUCTION the Indians, the love they feel for each other and also for nature, the highlands, flvers, and birds; and ( 2) the hatred they felt for those who, almost as if unaware and seeming to follow an order from on high, made them suffer.My childhood went by, singed between fire and love." (Opening remarks made by the Peruvian author before reading some of his work at a public gathering of fiction writers in Arequipa on June 14, 1965.) Jose Maria Arguedas wrote three types of literature. There was fiction such as Deep RilJers, written in Spanish. Second, he wrote poetry, almost all of it in Quechua.1 Many of his poems were col­ lected posthumously in Katatay. After 1953 he earned his living as a museum curator and ethnographer of peasant life in the Andes. When we compare his technical, ethnological accounts with his novels, we see that the themes are almost always the same, but the language of the analytical reports, standard Spanish, was for him a third language, the only one of the three that he did not create. When Arguedas first came down from the highlands of Peru in the thirties, he meant to be a Quechua writer. Everyone he met while working at the post office and studying part-time at the uni­ versity discouraged him; there were, in fact, no Quechua writers. His earliest stories in Spanish were well received; the few intel­ lectuals in Lima interested in the Andes encouraged him to write and publish; it was opportune, they said, to do so in the language the influential city people read and understood. But, as he regretfully told me in later years, he was finallytalked out of his plan to write in Quechua not by Lima pessimists, but by Moises Saenz, the Mexican revolutionary, then his country's am­ bassador to Peru. Here was the representative of the proindigenous President Cardenas, of the one successful modern revolution in the Americas-a man who cared enough about the Andean popula­ tions of Ecuador and Peru to write books about them. Saenz as­ sured him that the native languages had no chance as literary ve­ hicles in the Americas of our time. Before Arguedas died, by his own hand, in 1969, as he began to write fiction again, after a long, dry (if anthropologically active) writing spell, he regretted this early decision. The Quechua poems of his last period, few in num­ ber but dealing with themes that do not always surface in his fic- I. Quechua is spoken by millions of people in the five countries located in the Andes. There are at least as many Quechua speakers in the world as there are people speaking Swedish. INTRODUCTION : xi tion, were very important to him. He frequently published them himself, sometimes, but not always, providing a Spanish transla­ tion. There are few translations of Jose Maria Arguedas into English and fewer still of his longer work done in the sixties; the daring of Frances Barraclough in undertaking this translation deserves our praise and gratitude. There are excellent reasons for hesitating; Arguedas did not write with us in mind. He was not surprised when a Scottish poet told him he found Los Rios Profundos [Deep Rivers] untranslatable. He had given up Quechua in fiction, but he still saw himself as talking not only about the Andean peoples, but for and to them. This immediately differentiates Arguedas from other indigenista writers of Mexico, Ecuador, or his own country. He not only knew Quechua well and had an emotional commitment to it and its speakers, but, unlike the other proindigenous novelists, he was also aware of its literary potential. "We Quechua speakers know very well that Quechua and Aymara are languages with vast expressive possibilities," he once said in 1966.2 "These possibilities imply an equally vast development of human thought and experience." He not only saw the suffering of the Andean peoples, but used his anthropological work to argue that when conditions were even halfway favorable, they were likely to domesticate and interiorize the dominant culture, incorporating European features into An­ dean institutional forms. When highlanders speak Spanish, they do so on Quechua gram­ matical underpinnings. It is not a matter of a surviving vocabulary, but of sentence structure; even when every word is Spanish, these have been rearranged according to the rules of Quechua syntax, of which the speaker is usually unaware, since the Andean mother tongues are not taught in the primary schools. Speakers and stu­ dents of creole and pidgin languages in the Caribbean and else­ where and readers of George Lamming and Errol Hill will have less difficulty imagining the magnitude of Arguedas's undertak­ ing-how to transmit to the reader of Spanish not only compassion for the oppressed, but a sense that the latter also had a perception, a world view of their own, in which people, mountains, animals, the rain, truth, all had dimensions of their own, powerful, reveal­ ing, and utterly unlike the Iberian ones. In creating this language, Arguedas did not just translate what his characters said, nor was he content with a caricature like the 2. Mesa redonda sobre el monolinguismo quechua ..