Language, Poetry, Money

Abstract

Gabriela Mistral gets straight to the point in a text dated July 1930, in Santa Margherita de Ligure, a text she symptomatically titles: “The Spanish Language and Indigenous Dialects in America.”¹ Symptomatically, she goes too far, setting up from the start that untenable (political) distinction between (European) language and (Native American) dialect. An inopinate text, it was written in memory of the Peruvian journalist and activist José Carlos Mariátegui, recently deceased, at age thirty-five, in Lima. Regarding the campaigns to promote the Quechua language that Mariátegui propelled in the Peruvian sierra in the mid-1920s, doña Gabriela not only implied his naïveté but also proposed— and this time explicitly— that alphabetization of indigenous languages would make sense in our America only if treated as a means of learning Spanish. “One must first invite and then order ‘the Indian’ to learn Spanish” [sic]. Then she provides— if only she had not!— her (two) lines of rationalization. First: we doubt, she says, that aboriginal languages— in this case, by synecdoche, Quechua— are suitable for “modern life” (unless “technically” re-created, she notes, adding to them as much as what they already possess). Second: even if such a technical re-creation were possible, it would not suffice, because no one would learn or speak Quechua, apart from the people who already do:

A language that is complete, good and everything else, cannot survive off its pure relations alone but has to gain a clientele among foreigners; it is a real piece of commerce, the same as a check, relying on foreign agents to give it value and confidence. Nobody will learn our poor Quechua, sweet to the tongue, rhythmic in the blood, rich, and whatever you will.² (my emphasis)