by the El Reportero’s news services
It’s been more than 10 years in the making, but Quechua speakers will now be able to read El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha thanks to the efforts of 91-year-old Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui. The Peruvian professor and journalist just completed his translation of the second part of the Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra book from the original Spanish to the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
As anyone who’s tried translating from Spanish to English can confirm, it’s no easy task to preserve the meaning or concepts words hold across languages. “Cervantes uses some words in Spanish that are hard to translate into Quechua,”the Peruvian journalist said. “One example is the term hidalgo, which in Spanish means son of a nobleman. But the closest word to that in Quechua is a term for a person who has authority in society, and there are occasions where it’s better to respect the original word.”
And the work is still not done. Yupanqui wants to give Yachay sapa wiraqucha dun Qvixote Manchamantan an extra Andean touch. He wants artists from Sarhua – a district in the Víctor Fajardo province in Peru – to draw illustrations for the book. The first part of book is filled with colorful images.
It is this attention to detail that made Miguel De la Quadra-Salcedo, a Spanish reporter, tap Yupanqui for the project in the first place.
“One day Miguel arrived and, with his Basque accent, told me that he was coming to ask me to translate Don Quijote because in various parts of Argentina and Cuzco they told him that I was the person who could best translate it,” he said. “He surprised me, but I told him that I would do it with the dedication that the work deserved.”
In case you can’t appreciate how much work really went into this feat, then consider that the book is 928 pages in English. (by Yara Simón).
More news about Don Quijote:
Mexican writer Fernando del Paso awarded Cervantes Prize
Mexican writer Fernando del Paso today received the Cervantes Prize 2015 from Spanish King Felipe VI, in the 400th anniversary of the death of the playwright who gives name to the award.
The solemn award ceremony, the most important of Hispanic literature, took place in the auditorium of the Madrid University of Alcala de Henares, attended also by Queen Letizia and acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
The monarch stressed that Del Paso, is the sixth Mexican receiving the Cervantes, honored ‘in the best way our language with the expertise of a goldsmith able to get the best shine from precious metals’.
Paraphrasing the author, Felipe VI distinguished his work entitled Travel around the Quixote (2004), as a book that was born from ‘a curiosity that became love and then turned into an obsession.’
Retired UCR professor looks forward to continuing an “inspiration tsunami”
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, professor of poetry emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, has been appointed to a second term as the nation’s top poet, an honor he said will enable him to continue sharing the “inspiration tsunami” he experienced in the last year.
Herrera, who retired from UC Riverside in 2015, is one of several multiyear laureates, a group that includes UCR alumnus Billy Collins (2001-2003). His second term begins Sept. 1.
Herrera served as California poet laureate from 2012 to 2015. He is the first Hispanic to serve as poet laureate for both the state and the nation.
