REMEMBERING JOHN MURRA: LETTERS FROM A COLLABORATION

Abstract

Cordnica y Buen Gobierno stretches back to the mid-1970s. We worked together on the project for three intense years and, on at least two multi-week occasions, Jorge Urioste joined us to carry out his analysis and translation of the Quechua portions of the manuscript. Our three-volume Siglo XXI edition appeared in Mexico City in early 1980. We prepared a slightly updated edition, also in three volumes, in the mid-1980s, and it was published in Madrid by Historia 16 in 1987. (During this same period, our mutual friend and John's longtime colleague Franklin Pease also edited and published Guaman Poma's work, for Biblioteca Ayacucho in Caracas in 1980 and, in 1993, with Jan Szeminski, for the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Lima.) By 1987, John and I considered that we had accomplished our goal: publication in Latin America and Spain of this unique, early colonial source of information on the Andes. John had been bearing such a project in mind for as long as I knew him, since 1972, and, without a doubt, for much longer. Yet when time ushered in the digital age, we were offered a new editorial challenge. In 2000, the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen digitized the complete, autograph Guaman Poma manuscript, which had been in the Danish royal collections for centuries; the docu mentary evidence places it there by 1729, and the circumstantial evidence, by the 1660s (This was Raul Porras Barrenechea's longtime hunch, and investigat ons at the Royal Library have borne it out). Ivan Boserup, the head of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, contacted me in August, 2000, as the project was underway. And I contacted John, seeking his opinion about includ ing in the soonto-be-launched searchable online document the three indices that we had published in our Siglo XXI and Historia 16 editions. Each of these documents had its own story. The information for the onomastic and toponymic index was gathered by me as I sat at my Smith C ona electric typewriter, transcribing Guaman Poma's prose and reading it aloud, following its cadences to be able to identify, to the degree pos ible, its syntactic divisions. John and I then worked over my provisional listing of Guaman Poma's identifications of peoples, persons, and places for months and months, because the Quechua terms for Andean locations, ethnic groups, and languages ften overlapped. Jorge Urioste's Quechua glossary provided its own special challenge. It involved setting forth Andean concepts and terms and creating their alphabetical ordering in accordance with Jorge's rephonologized version of Guaman Poma's simpler Quechua orthography. Memories of the three of us sitting side by side at my dining room table in Syracuse to get this job done are indelible. The greatest of the three indices, however, was John's alone. Decades earlier he had created an ethnological index as a private guide to his own reading of the Nueva coronica. Passing it along to me, we turned these carefully prepared pages, typed by John on his manual typewriter, into the index upon which Andeanist readers subsequently have relied for nearly three decades. John and Jorge were enthusiastic about the prospect of putting on the Internet these aids to the reader, provided that Siglo XXI give approval. Reminding us that we