Imprensa: "Armed With a Pen, and Ready to Save the Incas’ Mother Tongue"

Mon Jul 14 10:21:44 UTC 2008

The New York Times
June 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/world/americas/07tupac.html
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The Saturday Profile

Armed With a Pen, and Ready to Save the Incas' Mother Tongue

By SIMON ROMERO

CALLAO, Peru

"SOMEWHERE in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to
remember, a gentleman lived not long ago."

Simple enough, right? But not for Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui.

Instead, he regales visitors to his home here in this gritty port city
on Lima's edge with his Quechua version of the opening words of "Don
Quixote": "Huh k'iti, la Mancha llahta suyupin, mana yuyarina
markapin, yaqa kay watakuna kama, huh axllasqa wiraqucha."

Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, theologian, professor, adviser to presidents and,
now, at the sunset of his long life, a groundbreaking translator of
Cervantes, greets the perplexed reactions to these words with a wide
smile.

"When people communicate in Quechua, they glow," said Mr. Túpac
Yupanqui, who at 85 still appears before his pupils each day in a
tailored dark suit. "It is a language that persists five centuries
after the conquistadors arrived. We cannot let it die."

Once the lingua franca of the Inca empire, Quechua has long been in
decline. But thanks to Mr. Túpac Yupanqui and others, Quechua, which
remains the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas, is
winning some new respect.

Mr. Túpac Yupanqui's elegant translation of a major portion of "Don
Quixote" has been celebrated as a pioneering development for Quechua,
which in many far-flung areas remains an oral language. While the
Incas spoke Quechua, they had no written alphabet, leaving perplexed
archaeologists to wonder how they managed to assemble and run an
empire without writing.

SINCE the Spanish conquest, important writing in Quechua has emerged,
but linguists and Quechua speakers hope that the new version of "Don
Quixote" will be a step toward forming a public culture in the
language, through Quechua magazines, television and books, that will
keep its speakers engaged with the wider world.

After centuries of retreat in the Andes, Mr. Túpac Yupanqui's efforts
in fortifying Quechua, through teaching and translating, are being
complemented by various other ventures.

Microsoft has released translations of its software in Quechua,
recognizing the importance of five million or so speakers of the
language in Peru and millions elsewhere in the Andes, mainly in
Bolivia and Ecuador. Not to be outdone, Google has a version of its
search engine in Quechua even if some linguists say that these
projects were carried out more for corporate image polishing than for
practical reasons.

The workings of Andean democracy are also reminding the world of
Quechua's importance. The government of President Evo Morales of
Bolivia, for instance, is trying to make fluency in Quechua or another
indigenous language mandatory in the civil service.

Here in Peru, two legislators from the highlands have begun using
Quechua on the floor of congress. And President Alan García signed a
law prohibiting discrimination based on language, even though its
precise workings remain unclear.

These are small steps for a language threatened by the dominance of
both Spanish and English amid Peru's feverish link-up with the global
economy following a bloody civil war in the last decades of the 20th
century. Few people have toiled as long and hard as Mr. Túpac Yupanqui
to give Quechua a fighting chance to survive a few centuries longer.

Mr. Túpac Yupanqui's fascination with languages began in Cuzco, once
the administrative center of the Incas, where he learned Latin and
Greek as a young seminarian. He quickly seized on the importance of
his native Quechua while traveling with priests to rural areas where
they used the language in their sermons.

The son of a local politician, he was born in one of those highland
villages, San Jerónimo, where Quechua surnames are common: Pachacútec,
Sinchi Roca, Lloque Yupanqui and, of course, his own, Túpac Yupanqui,
which is thought to illustrate lineage to Inca royalty. (Another
esteemed Quechua name, that of Túpac Amaru, the Inca leader who led a
16th century rebellion against the Spanish, served as the inspiration
for the name of Tupac Shakur, the rapper and actor who died in a
drive-by shooting in 1996.)

Mr. Túpac Yupanqui might have remained in the highlands if not for a
youthful philosophical quandary about Europeanized rational thought
and spreading the word of God, which led him to abandon his clerical
studies. "I simply decided that speaking about Descartes was not going
to serve the Andean world," he said.

So he moved to Lima and took up journalism. In the 1950s, he began
writing a column for La Prensa, then an influential newspaper. He
wrote often about the richness and subtleties of Quechua, a language
long scorned by the light-skinned coastal elite.

Interest in his columns encouraged him to open Yachay Wasi, or "House
of Learning," an academy for studying Quechua, in the mid-1960s. The
timing was propitious.

In 1968, a group of leftist military officers led by Gen. Juan Velasco
Alvarado staged a coup. General Velasco's government, an anomaly in an
era when right-wing dictators ruled much of South America, promoted
equal rights for indigenous groups and decreed Quechua to be on an
equal legal footing with Spanish.

The classroom of Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, who was asked in 1975 to
translate Peru's national anthem into Quechua, bulged at the time with
students from Peru and afar. He taught military officers, civil
servants and a few foreign adventurers who took an interest in Peru's
indigenous peasants.

BUT three decades after the leftist generals made Quechua an official
language, little linguistically is remembered by Spanish-speaking city
folk about the Velasco years, which ended in 1975.

"A language cannot become official if a country is unprepared to train
its schoolteachers to lecture in it," said Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, who
advised General Velasco on some of the policies. "No language is given
life through something as fleeting as a decree."

Mr. Túpac Yupanqui soldiered on after that earlier idealistic push for
Quechua. After a stint in politics as spokesman for President Fernando
Belaúnde Terry in the early 1980s, he returned to teaching Quechua at
his one-room academy on the second floor of his home, where he still
lives with some of his nine children.

He also continued making translations into Quechua, completing in 2006
his work on "Don Quixote," a rare accomplishment in what has
essentially been an oral language for more than a thousand years.

"The translation of 'Quixote' is important not as a curiosity, but as
a sign of what is to be done on a broader scale in the Andean
republics if Quechua speakers are to be brought fully into their
respective national communities," said Bruce Mannheim, an
anthropologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in
Quechua.

Indeed, the intricacies of the translation were celebrated by
linguists and literary critics alike, recognizing the challenges
involved in translating the antiquated Spanish of Cervantes into a
living language that, somewhat like Chinese or Arabic, has diverging
dialects that can be mutually unintelligible.

Mr. Túpac Yupanqui's eyes still light up when he discusses the grammar
of Quechua (seven pronouns!) and what can be done to make it more
resilient, like more radio projects and teaching it in schools
alongside English.

"If Latin is said to be the language of the angels, then Quechua is
the language for expressing the subtleties of existence on Earth," he
said. "That is why it is still alive."
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