Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, with its almost 400 full-page line drawings, has become a canonical text for Latin Americanists who work on the colonial period, but it is also a very challenging work. Guaman Poma’s broken Spanish and his use of Quechua certainly make it awkward to read, but the real difficulty lies in the convergence of Spanish and native Andean modes of thought, semiotic practices, and cultural signifiers. The transcultural complexity of this text is one of the reasons it is so important. Although an English version was published over 30 years ago, a reasonably authentic English translation of Guaman Poma’s work has been unavailable until recently. Roland Hamilton’s new translation makes available for the first time an English translation of the first 366 pages of Guaman Poma’s monumental chronicle.

Translation theorists argue that translation is never a simple act of rearticulating...

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