José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers, Trans. by Frances Horning Barraclough, Waveland Press, 2002.
read it at Google Books
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. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. While Arguedas' poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. This makes translation into other languages extremely difficult, and Frances Horning Barraclough has done a masterful job, winning the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University for her efforts.
This novel, praised by Mario Vargas Llosa as one of the great Peruvian novels, is a semi-autobiographical novel. Arguedas’ mother died when he was two and a half. When his father remarried, his stepmother already had three children. He was left to the Indian servants, so he ended up with a lifelong love for the native culture and spoke fluent Quechua. In this novel, the fourteen-year old Ernesto follows his father, a travelling lawyer, around Peru, till they stop at Abancay where the father moves on, while Ernesto is sent to school. We follow his lively school days at a religious school, lyrically described by Arguedas, including a salt revolt by the local women, with which he is very sympathetic, fights, girls, and struggling to fit in, ending with an epidemic
+
José María Arguedas’ mother died when he was two and. half. His father remarried but his stepmother already had three children from a previous marriage, so Arguedas was essentially left to the Indian servants, from whom he learned their language (Quechua) and culture. Eventually, when he was older, his father took him on his travels around Peru. This novel is based on those travels.
Arguedas wrote his poetry in Quechua and planned to write his novels in Quechua but was dissuaded from so doing by his publisher. Nevertheless, when writing in Spanish, he deliberately used Quechua syntax in his Spanish for Quechua speakers which, for Spanish speakers, looked odd.We first meet father – Gabriel – and son – Ernesto, aged fourteen – when Gabriel decides to travel to his home town of Cuzco, which Ernesto had never visited. Gabriel has an issue with someone known only as the Old Man. The Old Man used to be Gabriel’s clerk but has now made it on his own and there is clearly bad blood between, though we never know why, only that Gabriel says he is the Antichrist.
Ernesto is really impressed by Cuzco and its Inca walls, which, he says, seem to have a life of their own. Gabriel is proud of his home town and proud to show it to his son but still has his issues with the Old Man. They continue their travels. - The Modern Novel read more here
Vincent Spina: An Understanding of Deep Rivers through an Analysis of Three of its Main Symbols (pdf)
Margaret V. Ekstrom: Crossing Deep Rivers: Jose Maria Arguedas and the Renaming of Peru (pdf)Women's Power in José María Arguedas's 1958 novel Deep Rivers (pdf)