Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar Thomas Ward Cornejo Polar, Antonio . Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures. Trans. Lynda J. Jentsch . Durham : Duke UP , 2013 . Pp. 212 . ISBN 978-0-822-35417-8 . The original Spanish version of Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures (Horizonte 1994 and CELACP 2003), was the penultimate of Antonio Cornejo Polar’s eleven books published. The book has now been reissued with Lynda J. Jentsch’s beautifully rendered English translation by Duke University Press (2013). Perhaps more than any other, Writing in the Air reoriented and revitalized Latin American literary scholarship. Cornejo Polar’s thesis that there is an enduring oral facet to Latin American literature is obvious, but no scholar before him had emphasized this point so absolutely, so elegantly. The orality element is important because it is tied to the notion of literacy, which is problematic in the Andes. Consider the fact that during the heyday of Golden Age literature in Spain, only a handful of the 200 conquistadores who arrived in Peru with Pizarro and Hernando de Soto could read and write (22). While some Andean people did achieve literacy in Spanish, such as the kuraka Guaman Poma de Ayala, and other Spaniards who were literate came to Peru afterwards, the vast majority of Peruvians remained within the realm of a Qheswaphone oral tradition. The ratio of people literate in Spanish to the total number of people throughout the Andes would have shown the demographic limitations of the notion of literature as a form of communication. Because of the persistence of orality, and because of a more inclusive notion of “literature” than the one held by Spaniards during the sixteenth century, Cornejo Polar’s study ranges from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to several varieties of testimonio published during the 1980s. His theoretical proposal is imperative to understanding why Andean literature is not European literature and why, consequently, it should not be studied as such. Jentsch has accomplished a very readable English-language version that flows and gets the reader through the complex notions of orality, heterogeneity, and identity not always within the experience of the English-language reader. Her word choices generally reflect the intent and the design of Cornejo Polar’s also simple but elegant prose regarding difficult ideas. Many sentences are gems to remember: “There is nothing more basely treacherous than estheticizing in writing a meticulously and radically inhuman reality” (10); “In a certain sense literary history here does not so much tack one text onto another as condense itself in each text in the form of partially superimposed strata” (36); and “The chronicle is a closed discourse that refers back to the person of the author as legitimization of its meaning and truth” (55). There are many other striking examples of beautifully translated language in the book. However, there are a few cases where the meaning does not get through. One example will suffice. Where Cornejo Polar writes, “en las primeras décadas de este siglo, la historiografía latino americana ejecutó la compleja operación de ‘nacionalizar’ la tradición literaria prehispánica, como en el XIX se hizo con la colonial” (see the 2003 edition, p. 7), Jentsch translates, “in the first decades of [the twentieth century], Latin American historiography performed the complex operation of ‘nationalizing’ the pre-Hispanic literary tradition, as one sees in nineteenth century colonial literature” (3). In this translation, the second operation does not come out entirely clear with respect to exactly what the nineteenth century was “nationalizing,” which was the colonial tradition. Another problem occurs when using translations of works from which Cornejo Polar quotes and which have already been translated into English. Consider where Cornejo Polar quotes from Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales: “A los hijos de español y de india o de indio y española, nos llaman mestizos, por decir que somos mezclados de ambas naciones” (see the 2003 issue, p. 85). Jentsch uses the translation of Harold Livermore and thus we see: “The children of Spaniards...