DEEP RIVERS By Jose Maria Arguedas 1978 Hardcover Peru Andes Early Edition Pan

Description: Early English edition of Deep Rivers from the University of Texas Press — a novel translated from Los Rios Profundos. Part of the Texas Pan American Series. A rare hardcover early edition. Some discoloration & foxing from age — see photos for more insight on pre owned condition. Dust Jacket reads - This powerful, poetic novel, set in the Peruvian Andes, has long resisted translation; its publication in English is truly a literary event. José María Arguedas draws upon his own Peruvian boyhood in portraying "the sad and powerful current that buffets children who must face, all alone, a world fraught with monsters and fire, and great rivers... 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 author, the final resolution was his suicide in 1969. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. The games, music, insects, and flowers of his Andean childhood are more vividly alive for Ernesto than the disturbing world of the present. This nostalgia helps to explain the novel's lyrical purity and its poetic, reminiscent tone. A major theme in Deep Rivers is the boy's strong link with the natural world, which is humanized to an extent that surpasses simple metaphor and becomes almost magical. Two of the novel's main episodes- the insurrection of the marketwomen and the suffering of the Indians during a typhus plague involve conflict between the Indians and their Spanish masters. Ernesto observes these events, bewildered by the violence with which the two cultures clash. As Mario Vargas Llosa points out in the afterword, Deep Rivers records historical events and social problems at a personal level, "the only way literary testimony can be living and not crystallize into dead symbols." José María Arguedas was an ethnologist, a poet, a folk musicologist, and the major Indianist novelist of our time. He was born in 1911 in Andahuaylas in rural Peru and, like Ernesto, was raised by Indian servants whom he deeply loved. He earned his doctorate in anthropology at the University of San Marcos in Lima, where he was head of the Anthropology Department at the time of his death. 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. She teaches Spanish at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, and has spent almost twenty years living and working in Chile and other parts of Latin America.

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End Time: 2025-01-12T19:57:38.000Z

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