Yawar Fiesta

José María Arguedas

tra 2002. · Waveland Press

O ovoj e-knjizi

Fiction. In English translation. José María Arguedas is one of the few
Latin American authors who loved and described his natural surroundings,
and he ranks among the greatest writers of any time and place. He saw
the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social
conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part
of it. Yawar Fiesta describes the social relations between Indians,
mestizos, and whites in the Peruvian highland town of Puquio in the
early twentieth century. Each group’s reaction to the national
government’s attempt to suppress the traditional Indian-style bullfight
reflects their attitude toward social change more generally. Included
with the text of the novel is Arguedas’ anthropological essay “Puquio: A
Culture in the Process of Change,” written eighteen years after Yawar
Fiesta. The article emphasizes the social changes in the village that
resulted from the road construction described in the novel. While
Arguedas’ poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for
his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary,
making translation into other languages extremely difficult. Frances
Horning Barraclough has met the challenge and produced an excellent work
that remains faithful to the author’s use of language to reflect with
lived experience of Peruvian Indians.