The First New Chronicle and Good Government, Abridged

Abstract

This is the second English-language abridgement and translation of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, an early colonial-period chronicle of the Andean past that transcends the Inca and Spanish conquests. The author, about whom little is known, appears to have been a member of the local nobility of the central highlands of Peru, as well as a speaker of Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish. The first English rendition, also an abridgement, was the eminently readable but not altogether satisfactory Letter to a King: A Peruvian Chief’s Account of Life under the Incas and under Spanish Rule, [translated], arranged, and edited with an introduction by Christopher Dilke, an amateur historian and traveler (Dutton, 1978).David Frye is a professional anthropologist and skilled translator. His previous work includes Indians into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town (University of Texas Press, 1996), a revision of his 1989 Princeton University doctoral dissertation; and various translations of Mexican and Cuban fiction, most notably José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s Periquillo Sarniento (The Mangy Parrot) and Abilio Estévez’s Tuyo es el reino (Thine Is the Kingdom). Presently Frye is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he has had the advantage of working with Bruce Mannheim, a specialist in the development of Southern Peruvian Quechua after the Spanish Conquest. In this regard, it should be recalled that the dialect, if not language, of Quechua (substituted for runa simi, literally “language of the people”) employed by Guaman Poma de Ayala was that of Southern Peruvian Quechua, more or less equivalent to the Cuzco Quechua of the first half of the colonial period (but not that of nowadays).The First New Chronicle and Good Government, Abridged includes an introduction which provides most of the information needed to understand Guaman Poma de Ayala’s text and Frye’s translation thereof, a map, a glossary, an index, and generally helpful notes that demonstrate a solid command of the relevant primary and secondary literature. The sections of the lengthy manuscript (1,189 pages in the original) selected for translation are representative of the work as a whole: “The Ages of the World,” “The Pontiff’s Throne,” “The Ages of the Indians,” “The Fifth Age of Indians: The Incas,” “The Conquest of This Kingdom,” “Good Government,” “Conquest Society in the Andes,” “Andean Society under Spanish Rule,” and “Conclusions and Appendices.” Frye also includes some of Guaman Poma de Ayala’s several hundred black-and-white drawings, which should be viewed as an integral, not merely supplementary, part of his work. (Some scholars, such as the late John Howland Rowe, maintain that the drawings are more authentically Andean than the text.) Not incidentally, the Incas were familiar with the representational arts of drawing and painting. It is just that no examples of the painted wooden boards on which they recorded their histories have survived.Given that not many students of Latin America read Spanish of the early colonial period, let alone the particular admixture of coeval Spanish and Southern Peruvian Quechua in which Nueva primer corónica y buen gobierno is written, this is a welcome translation, all the more so because it is well done. Not being an Andeanist himself, Frye has been painstaking in his explanation of terminology. I recommend this work for courses on Latin America during the colonial period, or more specifically the Central Andes (i.e., Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia). The literate public at large will also profit from this English version.My only caveat has to do with the illustrations. Although Frye has added appropriate English-language captions to those given by the author, he does not comment on the Andean significance of the chronicler’s black-and-white drawings, especially insofar as the meaning of the layout of the drawings and the relative sizes and juxtapositions of the images represented are concerned. In this regard, albeit parenthetically, some of us are wondering what an analysis of the hues employed by native artists (Guaman Poma de Ayala among them) will tell us.Each color probably had a particular meaning, as found in the watercolors in the 1590 and 1616 versions of Martín de Murúa’s history of the Incas, recently published in facsimile as the Códice Murúa: Historia y genealogía de los reyes Incas del Perú del padre mercedario Fray Martín de Murúa: Códice Galvin (Madrid: Testimonio Compañía Editorial, 2004); and Historia general del Piru: Facsimile of J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16 and The Getty Murúa: Essays on the Making of Martín de Murúa’s “Historia general del Piru” (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008) — the earliest and most extensive post – Spanish Conquest bodies of color Andean iconography.