In this handsome, large volume, with two columns of print to a page, anthropologists Frank Salomon and George Urioste offer the first English translation of an early seventeenth-century Quechua document known as the Huarochirí manuscript. Scholars have long recognized the significance of this untitled, undated, anonymous manuscript, preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid together with Spanish-language papers pertaining to Father Francisco de Avila, the renowned seventeenth-century “extirpator of idolatries” bom in Cuzco. The manuscript is considered a prime source for Andean mythology, comparable to the more famous Popol Vuh text of the Mayas. The author, obviously a native Peruvian with some knowledge of Spanish, wrote in Quechua, the native lingua franca, though he himself originally may well have belonged to the Aru, a non-Quechua linguistic group.
Of the many translations into various languages, the best known are probably José Maria Arguedas’ Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí (1965), long out of print, and Gerald Taylor’s more recent Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí del siglo XVII (1987). As opposed to Arguedas’ classic, which is eminently readable albeit plagued with poetic license, and Taylor’s version, linguistically explicit but stylistically somewhat rigid, the Salomon-Urioste translation is couched in precise but colloquial language with the express intention of attracting the nonspecialized reading public.
The text conveys the unnamed author’s anxiousness to comply with the Christian “persecution of idolatries” by interspersing critical comments throughout an otherwise proud description of his people’s origin myths and ancestral rites. After Paria Caca (more frequently rendered as Pariacaca), the fivefold father of gods and men, destroys the early man-eating fire god Huallallo, he and other mythical heroes have sexual intercourse with the female divinities, giving birth to humans, animals, plants, and lakes. The life-giving property of water is contrasted with its power of destruction through landslides and floods. Animals communicate with gods and men and build irrigation canals, while humans who contravene the wishes of the powerful turn to stone. Rivalry for access to land and water denotes the struggle for survival and supremacy in this rugged, semiarid environment. Descriptions of contemporary rituals in the footnotes shed light on ancient beliefs.
As Salomon explains, the translation has “striven not only for accuracy but also for immediacy,” a difficult goal achieved, at least in part. But despite Salomon and Urioste’s gallant effort to make the manuscript accessible to nonspecialists, origin myths are not the easiest material for the general reader. The Huarochirí document will no doubt continue to be used primarily by Andean scholars already familiar with previous translations.
The major ethnohistorical contribution in this volume may well be Salomon’s brilliant introductory essay (38 pages). Salomon rallies all the known information on the geography, history, and ritual of the province of Huarochirí—located inland from Lima, “the equivalent size of Massachusetts”—and incorporates previous analyses by other scholars. Particularly useful is the section of the essay dealing with Quechua concepts that are difficult to render in another language; for example, huaca, anything that symbolizes the superhuman, from mountain peaks to unusual persons, living or dead; ayllu, the kinship (or other) basic social unit; and llacta, which Taylor has translated somewhat arbitrarily as “community” but Salomon gives more sensitively as “village,” “cultic unit,” or “territorial group,” according to different contexts in the manuscript. Beyond the particular instances that demonstrate his thorough knowledge of Quechua, Salomon’s concern to render the significance of religion in the manuscript reflects his understanding of Andean thought, past and present.
