Four hundred years after its publication, Part 2 of "Don Quixote" has been translated into Quechua, the most widely spoken indigenous language in South America and from now on, one of the 70 languages in which the crowning achievement of Spanish literature can be read.
Journalist and professor of Quechua Demetrio Tupac Yupanqui, 91, told EFE that it took him two years to translate from 17th-century Spanish to his native tongue the 74 chapters that make up Part 2 of Miguel de Cervantes' most famous work.
Tupac Yupanqui, a descendant of the man of the same name who ruled the Inca Empire in the late 15th century, had already dedicated another two years some 10 years ago to translating Part 1 of "Don Quixote" and so commemorated the fourth centenary of the publication of the first volume in 1605.
Under the title "Yachay Sapa Wiraqucha Dun Quixote Manchamantan" (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha), the famous beginning of Cervantes' work goes like this in Quechua: "Huh k'iti, La Mancha llahta sutiyuhpin, mana yuyarina markapi..." (Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember...).
The translator of "Don Quixote" said "it wasn't an easy task because Cervantes uses some words in Spanish that are hard to translate into Quechua."
"One example is the term 'hidalgo,' which in Spanish means 'son of a nobleman' but whose translation in Quechua refers to a person with authority in society, so sometimes it's better to use the original word," he said.
Yupanqui recalled that the Quechua version of "Don Quixote" could reach the more than 10 million people who currently speak the Andean language, not only in rural areas of Peru and Bolivia, but also in parts of Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Chile that were part of the Inca realm.
The translation of "Don Quixote" into Quechua was a personal commission of the Spanish reporter and promoter of the Quetzal Route, Miguel De la Quadra-Salcedo, who sought out Demetrio at his language school in a neighborhood of Callao, the port city of Lima.
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