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Indigenous Literature

Kichka uma / tankar kichka…

  • by Dida Aguirre García

Editor’s Note: This poem is available to read in Quechua and English. Scroll down to read in English.

 


 

Kichka uma
tankar kichka
ñawiymantam
yuraq qasa inti suturimun

chuyunyaq orkokunapi
Wanchuy chuya maypi

sapan
sapachallan

yana tutawan maytukuykuspa
llakillay
puriptin.
Chaynama
llaqtanchik
yuraq qasa inti lloqlla
kay
chaki allpapi
laswa sachachakuna laqwasq jina

Kichka uma
tankar kichka
ñawiymantam
layqa

rimarimun

manañam
laswa sachachakuna kanku

allpatam
patarichimunku
raku raku sapinkunawan

ninayasqaña
qaqayasqaña

llipipikuq
sacha kaspa.

 

*

 

Little Tankar1 of thorny head,
ice crystals like a white sun
fall from my eyes
over desolated regions, where the Orqos2 lives,
over pristine waters born in the Wanchuy tree3.

Lonely
very lonely,
the body is one with the fateful night
when my sorrow walks across this land.
Our territory is like
a white frost
a sun of dust.
This infertile land
is crawling like the muddy and fallen trees in an avalanche.

Little Tankar of thorny head,
through my eyes
the Layqa4 speaks in this land
And there are no muddy and fallen trees anymore

The trees
are shaking the soils with its strong roots

What a fire is burning now!
What perennial rock is rising now!

Because they are new beings, splendid trees!

Translated from Quechua to English by Christian Elguera

From the book Jarawi (Lima: Editorial Universidad Federico Villarreal, 2000)

1 The Tankar is an Andean tree with a thorny body.

2 In the Andes, local people consider Orqos or mountains as mighty beings.

3 Andean populations believe trees such as the Wanchuy to be the mothers of rivers.

4 According to Guaman Poma de Ayala and Cristobal de Molina, Layqa means a diabolic sorcerer. However, Layqa is an indigenous religious specialist with the skills to interact with powerful deities or non-human entities in Andean rituals.

 

Photo: Woman weaving, Cusco, Peru, by Adrian Dascal, Unsplash.
  • Dida Aguirre García

Dida Aguirre García (Huancavelica, 1952) is the author of three books of poetry in Quechua and Spanish: Arcilla (1989), Jarawi (1999, National Prize for Poetry in Quechua, Universidad Nacional Federico Villareal, 1999), and Qaparikuy (2012). Her work appears in the anthologies Poesía Peruana: Siglo XX (Vol. II, PETROPERÚ, 1999) and Poetas peruanas de antología (2009). She has taken part in international poetry festivals in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and México. The book Pichka harawikuna: Five Quechua Poets (1998) includes her poems in translation to English.

  • Christian Elguera
christianelguera

Christian Elguera is a Lecturer in Spanish at The University of Oklahoma and a visiting professor at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru). He has a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Languages and Literatures from The University of Texas at Austin. His research is concerned with the production and circulation of cultural translations by and about Amerindian peoples from the 16th century to present in Abiayala, particularly in Andean and Amazonian areas. His forthcoming monograph, Traducciones territoriales: defensoras y defensores de tierras indígenas en Perú y Brasil, analyzes poems, chronicles, radio programs, and paintings enacted by Quechua, Munduruku, Yanomami, and Ticuna subjects in order to defy the dispossessions, extermination, and ecocides promoted by the Peruvian and Brazilian States. Alongside his political interest in the struggles of Indigenous Nations, he researches the relationship between Marxism and the Peruvian Avant-Garde Poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, he will publish the book El marxismo gótico de Xavier Abril: decadencia y revolución transnacional en El autómata (Ediciones MYL, 2021).

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