Yawar Fiesta Author:Jose Maria Arguedas, Frances Horning Barraclough (Translator) Named Jose Maria Arguedas' best novel by fellow writer Mario Vargas Llosa [winner of Nobel Prize for literature, 2010], Yawar Fiesta dramatically portrays the clash of cultures in the small highland town of Puquio, Peru, where Arguedas himself lived in early childhood and adolescence. — This first English-language translation of Yawar Fiesta is p... more »ublished with "Puquio: A Culture in Process of Change," Arguedas' essay describing the Indian communities of Puquio as they existed some eighteen years after the time of his novel. Readers of this essay and the fictional work may therefore perceive the same society from Arguedas' viewpoints as anthropologist and as creative artist. The essay also reflects its author's musicological expertise, as it includes the lyrics and some of the music from Indian religious chants and a secular love theme.
Born in 1911 in Andahuaylas in rural Peru, Jose Maria Arguedas was an ethnologist, poet, folk musicologist, and the major Indianist novelist of our time. 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 in 1969.
While his poetry was published in Quechua, Arguedas invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. For this reason, translation of his work into other languages is extremely difficult. Frances Horning Barraclough has proven herself more than equal to this task, however, in her accomplished translations of both Yawar Fiesta and Deep Rivers, also published by the University of Texas Press, and was presented the Columbia University Translation Center Award in 1978.
First published by University of Texas Press in 1985, with a third printing in 1993. ISBN 0292796021.« less