Abstract
José María Arguedas (1911–1969) was a Peruvian novelist, translator and ethnographer, who wrote about the ethnic and social divisions of his native country in a mode he proudly and defensively identified as provincial. For Arguedas, the incorporation of Quechua into Spanish was an attempt to reproduce an idealised mestizaje in language, to give a positive value to a native culture and language perceived as primitive, and to present alternative social and cultural models based on transculturation. This chapter explores Arguedas’s attempt to reconcile hostile linguistic modes in Yawar fiesta (1941) and Los ríos profundos (1958), in which linguistic synthesis and translation inform, respectively, the cultural vision of each novel. Finally, it considers what becomes of these linguistic and conceptual possibilities in the face of personal crisis and rampant modernisation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Another Latin American author to struggle with this question was the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos . In the author’s note to the revised version of his Hijo de hombre (1960, rev. 1982) [Son of Man], Roa Bastos wrote of his own attempt to find stylistic expression for the bilingualism of his native country. This bilingualism encapsulated in turn a division between orality and writing, according to which the indigenous language Guaraní was a texto no escrito or unwritten text (2011, 33) of affect and myth within national culture. Like Arguedas, Roa Bastos experimented with different ways of achieving ‘la fusión o imbricación de los dos hemisferios lingüísticos de la cultura paraguaya’ (34) [‘the fusion or interweaving of the two linguistic hemispheres of Paraguayan culture’], opting in Hijo de hombre for a technique of ‘aglutinación semántica’ [‘semantic agglutination’] that involved finding ‘formas de la experiencia simbólica y semántica que permitieran esta síntesis más allá o por lo menos en una dirección diferente de la simple mezcla de léxico y sintaxis del jopará del castellano-paraguayo hablado’ [‘forms of symbolic and semantic experience that would bring about a synthesis that went further, or at least in a different direction, from the simple lexical and syntactical mixing of the dialect of spoken Paraguayan Spanish’] (34). The lexical and syntactical formula was one he claimed to have used in earlier books sin éxito, without success (34). The semantic approach did not entirely satisfy him either, however, and the revisions to Hijo de hombre twenty years after its original publication drew on the further innovations of his most famous novel, Yo el supremo (1974) [I, the Supreme], in which the uses of language and writing themselves are brought into question.
- 2.
As Arguedas tells us in ‘Entre el kechwa y el castellano’ (1939) [‘Between Quechua and Castilian’], the word mistura was first used pejoratively by a critic who disliked the language of his short story collection Agua (1935) [Water]. Arguedas replied that ‘sólo así, con ese idioma, he hecho saber bien a otros pueblos, del alma de mi pueblo y de mi tierra’ (1939, 32) [‘only in that way, in that language, could I communicate to other people the spirit of my people and my land’]. But he also felt that it wasn’t until Yawar fiesta that he managed to ‘desgarrar los quechuismos y convertir al castellano literario en el instrumento único’ (1968, 15) [‘root out quechuisms and make literary Castilian my only instrument’], overcoming some of the stylistic limitations of Agua in an arduous but intuitive struggle with the language (14–15).
- 3.
The text of a speech given by Arguedas at the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega awards ceremony in October 1968 is reproduced as the final chapter of El zorro de arriba de abajo, under the heading ‘No soy un aculturado […]’ (2011, 357–360) [‘I Am Not Acculturated […]’].
- 4.
‘Antiguo dios, el Amaru, que tenía forma de serpiente y vivía en el fondo de los lagos, fue transformado en toro, según las creencias indígenas’ (2006, 156) [‘The old god, Amaru, which had the form of a serpent and lived in the depths of the lakes, was transformed into a bull, according to indigenous belief’].
- 5.
As Barraclough writes in the Translator’s Note to Yawar fiesta: ‘though [misti] is the word for “white,” it is used by Indians for upper-class people of both white and mixed ancestry’ (1985, viii).
- 6.
In Ríos the festival is twice depicted as a contest between condor and bull: once when the narrator rallies his courage ‘de la misma manera como los indios de mi aldea se encomendaban, antes de lanzarse en la plaza contra los toros bravos, enjalmados de cóndores’ (2012, 257) [‘in the same way the indios of my village would entrust themselves to God, before throwing themselves into the ring against the fierce bulls, saddled with condors’]; and a second time when he evokes the releasing of the condors ‘que amarraron sobre los toros bravos’ (344) [‘that had been tied to the fierce bulls’].
- 7.
Mariátegui was a Peruvian Marxist thinker, author of the seminal Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928) [Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality].
- 8.
In Ríos the narrator describes the k’eñwa as ‘un árbol chato, de corteza roja’ (181) [‘a stubby tree with red bark’].
- 9.
‘The Pisonay tree is one of the tallest legumes of the Peruvian Andes […] Pisonay trees were first cultivated by the Incas, who regarded the species as sacred. Now they can often be found decorating the plazas of Andean towns. Species such as Erythrina edulis are easily recognisable by their numerous, dense clusters of brilliant scarlet-red tubular flowers that are pollinated by many hummingbirds’ (Walker and Lloyd 2007, 32).
- 10.
Interestingly, according to Pío Baroja this buzzing sound is contained in the etymology of the word ‘barbarism’: ‘En sánscrito […] varvari es la abeja que zumba’ (1943, 8) [‘In Sanskrit […] varvari is a buzzing bee’].
- 11.
Both these words mean ‘stranger’, but Arguedas applies a positive value to the latter and a negative value to the former. This is perhaps because the word extranjero refers to somebody of a different nationality, and so points to the exploitative forces of foreign capital in this novel.
Works Cited
Arguedas, José María. 1940. El wayno y el problema del idioma en el mestizo. Educación, Revista de Pedagogía 10 (Mexico). Reprinted in Nosotros los maestros, 35–38. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1986.
Arguedas, José Maria. 1956. Puquio: A Culture in Process of Change. In Yawar fiesta, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough, 149–192. London: Quartet Books, 1985.
Arguedas, José María. 1968. La novela y el problema de la expresión literaria en el Perú [1950, updated 1968]. Prologue to Yawar fiesta, 7–17. Lima: Horizonte, 1980.
Arguedas, José María. 1974. Agua [1935]. Prologue by Antonio Cornejo Polar. Lima: Dirección universitaria de biblioteca y publicaciones, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Arguedas, José María. 1985. Yawar fiesta/Blood Festival, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. London: Quartet Books.
Arguedas, José María. 1986. Entre el kechwa y el castellano, la angustia del mestizo [1939]. La Prensa, Buenos Aires, 24 Sept. Reprinted in Nosotros los maestros, 31–33. Lima: Editorial Horizonte.
Arguedas, José María. 1989. Canto kechwa [1938]. Lima: Editorial horizonte.
Arguedas, José María. 2006. Yawar fiesta [1941]. A Coruña: Ediciones del Viento.
Arguedas, José María. 2011. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo [1971]. Buenos Aires: Losada.
Arguedas, José María. 2012. Los ríos profundos [1958], 11th ed., intro. and ed. Ricardo González Vigil. Madrid: Cátedra.
Baroja, Pío. 1943. Pequeños ensayos. Buenos Aires: Editorial sudamericana.
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. The Task of the Translator [1923]. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1913–1926), trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Bhabha, Homi. 2006. Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences [1988]. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 155–157. London: Routledge.
Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. Debevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1979. La novela indigenista: un género contradictorio. Texto Crítico 14 (Jul–Sept): 58–70.
Cortázar, Julio. 1967. Situación del intelectual latinoamericano: Carta de Cortázar a Fernández Retamar. First printed in Casa de las Américas, 45. http://www.mundolatino.org/cultura/juliocortazar/cortazar_3.htm. Accessed 30 Sept 2016.
Deutscher, Guy. 2011. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Arrow.
Dorfman, Ariel. 1980. Puentes y padres en el infierno: Los ríos profundos. Revista crítica literaria latinoamericana 12: 91–137.
Flores Galindo, Alberto, Carlos Aguirre, and Charles F. Walker. 2010. In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hare, Cecilia. 2000. Arguedas y el mestizaje de la lengua: Yawar Fiesta. Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (Madrid July 6–11, 1998), vol. 3, ed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Carlos Alvar Ezquerra, 156–164. Madrid: Castalia. Also at CVC online: http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/aih/pdf/13/aih_13_3_022.pdf. Accessed 7 Sept 2016.
Johnson, Adriana Michèle Campos. 2008. Narratives and Deep Histories: Freyre, Arguedas, Roa Bastos, Rulfo. In A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, ed. Sara Castro-Klaren. Blackwell Reference Online. Accessed 22 Oct 2014.
Kemper Columbus, Claudette. 1995. Grounds for Decolonization: Arguedas’s Foxes. In Genealogy and Literature, ed. Lee Quinby, 116–133. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kokotovic, Misha. 2005. The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
Lambright, Anne. 2007. Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1984. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana [1928]. Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta.
Ortega, Julio. 1999. Los Zorros de Arguedas: migraciones y fundaciones de la modernidad andina. Ciberayllu http://www.andes.missouri.edu/andes/Especiales/JOZorros/jo_zorros2.html. Accessed 27 Sept 2016.
Rama, Ángel. 2004. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, 4th ed. Mexico: Siglo XXI.
Rowe, William. 1983. Arguedas, el narrador y el antropólogo frente al lenguaje. Revista Iberoamericana XLIX (122, Jan–Mar), special issue on José María Arguedas: 97–109.
Rowe, William. 1989. Competing Rituals: José María Arguedas and the Voice of Native Andean Culture. Review of José María Arguedas, Yawar fiesta, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough (London: Quartet, 1989). Third World Quarterly 11 (4): 274–278.
Semprún, Jorge. 1981. L’Algarabie. Paris: Gallimard.
Steele, Paul Richard. 2004. Handbook of Inca Mythology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
Tarica, Estelle. 2006. El “decir limpio” de Arguedas: la voz bilingüe, 1940–1958. In José María Arguedas, hacia una poética migrante, ed. Sergio Franco, 23–38. Pittsburgh: Instituto internacional de literatura iberoamericana.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1996. La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo. México, D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Walker, Barry and Huw Lloyd. 2007. Peruvian Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide to the High Andes. Chalfont St. Peter: Bradt Travel Guides and Guildford, CT: Globe Pequot.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lonsdale, L. (2018). Transculturation and Mistura: Arguedas’s Provincial Poetics. In: Multilingualism and Modernity. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67328-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67328-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67327-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67328-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)