This little book consists of five chapters. The first sets out to show Garcilaso’s positions—“Attitude toward Inca Culture,” “Attitude toward Spain,” “Humanist and Literary Figure,” “Eyewitness to History,” and “Critic of Spanish History.” There follow a pair of shorter chapters dealing with Garcilaso and the Spanish historians, Cieza, Zárate and Gómara, and a final pair dealing with religious writers, Valera and Acosta. The whole amounts to 111 pages. The author’s husband contributes an appendix and glossary, i.e. a list of indigenous words with the Inca’s definitions copied out in order of occurrence and followed by the same list in alphabetical order with English translations.
The declared object is to “examine Garcilaso’s position as a historian of Inca culture” and to give a “comparative analysis of his sources.” The method is to select extracts, almost entirely from the first part of the Royal Commentaries, and to add such remarks as occur to the author. Since Garcilaso regularly quotes authorities, there is no problem in finding material: however, whether these are sources in the usual sense of the word the author does not trouble to discuss. The comments are, in general, excessively superficial and often betray the text. The first extract is the account of Inca origins heard by Garcilaso from his maternal uncle, which elicits the observation that “in spite of the many years he spent in Spain, Garcilaso still considers Spanish a foreign tongue . . ..” But this is not what Garcilaso says: he was fully aware that Spanish was his paternal tongue and he knew it better than Quechua, which he says he had not heard for forty years. Instead of attempting to define this problem, the author passes on to the difficulty of Spaniards in understanding Quechua, quoting the instance of Garcilaso’s correcting a Dominican’s misuse of a word. The comment is that the audience of friars was “pleasantly surprised”: the Spanish is “se admiraron mucho.” She then goes on to quote the description of seabirds diving for fish as proof of Garcilaso’s love of nature, though how this furthers the argument remains obscure. Some of the comments suggest that the author has understood the text. Others suggest the reverse. Thus when Garcilaso says that Indians climbing a mountain almost die of fear if they hear thunder, the paraphrase shows that she thinks he has said that they would not be caught dead climbing a mountain. The simple fact that all Indians were not Incas has not been grasped.
The two discoveries which the author claims are: (1) that Garcilaso’s references to Cieza and Gómara do not correspond to the printed texts, and (2) that “it has been established here that the source of classical motivation is Padre Acosta.” No effort is made to pursue the first of these claims: “Gómara not being the subject of this study the area of research pertaining to the manuscript has been left to one side. Our analysis is limited to the evaluation of the difficulties in collating the Garcilaso chapter numbers with those of other editions.” The second is simply a false claim. The author gives a partial list of the books used by Acosta from O’Gorman (complete with errors) and asserts that Garcilaso acquired practically all the texts cited by Acosta. The list of Garcilaso’s books is well known, but no attempt is made to compare the two lists, which are naturally quite different. The dangers of this method (or lack of method) are obvious. Thus the name Procopius appears in both collections, but Acosta says explicitly that he has not read the author.
Textual misunderstandings take Zárate to Holland (“forced the young Spanish accountant to postpone his publication until safe in Holland”) and Acosta to the Hebrides. The proofreading is slovenly and the index inept. The publisher, Monsieur Mouton, announces this as the first of a series of Studies in Spanish Literature: after so unpromising a start he might reconsider his plans and revert to more recognizably ovine activities.
