Deep Rivers

If you are looking for an excellent translation of Jose Maria Arguedas, "Los Rios Profundos" this is it. The book retains the integrity of the origianl Spanish, and the spirit of the quechuan explanations which are left in quechuan. With a brief introduction by the translator as well as a glossary of terms at the end this English translation has made Arguedas masterful novel available to the English speaking world.

En la novela Los Ríos Profundos, un niño que ha vivido su infancia en un ayllu (comunidad indígena), emprende un viaje con su padre, quien más tarde lo deja -en busca de un mejor trabajo- en una escuela religiosa. El niño protagonista, Ernesto, nos entrega su visión del nuevo mundo que se le presenta. Así, en su particular percepción del entorno, el lector va decubriendo un entramado de matices de desencuentro, de sometimiento, de represión, de confluencia, de presencia: matices que posibilitan una mirada sobre los mismos elementos constituyentes de la realidad latinoamericana que se tematizan en esta novela.

This is a gem of a book. While there are many things to like about it, I am most enamoured of the richness of detail in its naturalistic description. Arguedas, with his Indian upbringing, has a perceptiveness toward nature not often found in modern, Western society. The translation conveys this beautifully, though I've heard that the original Spanish is even more vivid in its descriptions. The characterization is multi-layered: there's even someone highly reminiscent of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov"...

Non-western thoughts, beliefs and fears still permeate 20th.century Peru, a cultural heritage of the Inca empire. Arguedas, although white, learned Quechua as an infant, forced by circumstances to spend long periods with Peruvians of indian extraction, an experience which he would forever remember with deep tenderness and affection, and which would transmit surviving elements of Inca thought as well. The problem Arguedas faced as a writer was how to express a non-western state of mind in Spanish, a western language. In "Deep Rivers", he sometimes shifts the structures of sentences, or uses diminutives, to mimic Quechua. Stones can talk, and rivers sing. Big black flies are attracted to persons who are about to die. For Inca thought, the reflections from a pool of blood relate to the reflections from rapids in a stormy river. In "Deep Rivers" Arguedas shares with us the deep undercurrents and contradictions which flow beneath the surface of modern-day Peru. Conflicting cultures related through cruelty and despotism. Deep rivers flow in every culture. Not the superficial, visible elements of a culture, but those intimate fears, obsessions, and dreams which lie at the core of its members.

JOse Maria Arguedas depicts two different worlds That can't bridge the difference that exists between them. He describes the conqueror's descendents who feel and think as their ancestors who believe that native Peruvians (Quechuas) are animals, who do not know any better, and therefore should be used and treated as animals i.e. kill and use Quechuas whenever they think is appropriate. The novel is a description of the mentality of the conqueror's descendants and their brutality towards the Peruvian natives (Quechuas),which is exploitation, Killing, no sense of value or least of all respect towards the Peruvian natives.