Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (31)
Juan Wallparrimachi, Bolivia/Quechua, 1793–1814, 'Kacharpari [Farewell]'
Transcreated by Matthew Rothenberg and Javier Taboada from a Spanish/Quechua translation by Jesús Lara
is it true
my sweet dove
that you’re flying away
to a far distant land
& you’ll never come back?
then who’s gonna remain
in your poor empty nest?
in my sadness & pain
to whom should I run?
just show me the road
that you’re rambling on down
I’ll get there before you
& wet the hard ground
with my tears where you’re walkin’
& there on that road
with the sun beating down
my breath is a cloud
& the cool of its shadow
comes down like a gift
when you feel the bite
of the fiery thirst
my howls will rain down
you’ll have sap to drink
will you rocky creature
with your heart of stone
leave me all alone?
the sun has gone out
my baby has gone
I walk & no one
will have mercy on me
none at all
my dove you were young
& you blinded me then
as if I was looking
straight into the sun
your eyes falling stars
I’m soaked in their glow
& like the night’s flash
they twisted my path
I’ll borrow the power
of an eagle’s wings
to see you again
with the winds in my arms
I’ll give them to you
our lives are entwined
in such a strong bond
that even death
can’t split us apart
we believed that forever
we’d be one and the same
dove
you always knew how
to chase off my pain
wherever I’ll be
as long as I live
you’ll be the dawn
that breaks in my heart
& every time that Mount Misti lights up
remember me
’cause I’m thinking of you
& to reach where your love is
how far must it travel —
my widower’s heart?
COMMENTARY
(1) Writes Sylvia Nagy about the importance of Juan Wallparrimachi (“the poet of absence”): “The arrival of the Europeans to the Tawantinsuyu [literally ‘The Four Divisions,’ i.e. the Incan empire in Quechua language] and their continuous presence since then has produced irreversible changes in the character of the natives and in their literary expression. Pre-Columbian poetry showed a great variety of genres … Some works in Quechua — during colonial times — survived anonymously: Ollanta, Ushka Páukar and Mánchay Puitu. Folklore absorbed and safeguarded the poems of many, without registering or remembering their names. The only exception is the case of Juan Wallparrimachi, a seventeenth-century Bolivian poet, who wrote in Quechua.”
(2) Juan Wallparrimachi was a poet and revolutionary during Bolivia’s independence movement. The legend says that he never used any weapon aside from the Incan slingshot. On August 7, 1814, Wallparrimachi died in battle against the Spaniards. He was twenty years old. Although he developed new poetical expressions — from the merging of his own poetical tradition with Spanish forms (one of the outcomes, for instance, is his appropriation of the ten-line décima and the way he infused it with Quechua imagery and language), his works were — and still are — too often overlooked by literary scholars.
Poems and poetics