Who made this?
- 1. Who made it?
- The whole book, words and pictures, is the work of one man: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Andean nobleman whose family, sent out generations earlier in the Inca's service, had settled in Huamanga, in the highlands of Peru. He was born about 1535, in the first years after the conquest, and learned to read and write from his half-brother, a priest. Scholars have found his signature on court papers from the 1590s, where he worked as an interpreter, so we know the hand is his.
- 2. When, and where?
- Mostly between about 1600 and 1615, in the province of Lucanas, south of Huamanga, with a lifetime of notes behind it. He dated a short letter to the king from the town of Santiago de Chipao on February 14, 1615, saying the chronicle was finished and that he would send it if the king asked. That letter still exists, in an archive in Seville. It is the only proof we have that word of the book ever crossed the sea.
- 3. Why, and for whom?
- It is a letter of nearly 1,200 pages: a new chronicle of the Andes from the beginning of the world to his own day, and a plan of good government, meaning an account of what officials, priests, and landholders were doing to Andean people, with remedies. He made 398 full-page drawings because he judged that pictures would carry his argument to a king faster than prose. He prepared the manuscript for a printing press, with page numbers, running heads, and a note counting the sheets for the printer. It was never printed in his lifetime, or for three centuries after.
- 4. Who has it now, and how did it get there?
- The Royal Library of Denmark, in Copenhagen, where it has been on the shelves since before the library counted its holdings in 1785. How it crossed from Lima to Madrid to Copenhagen is not recorded; the likeliest guesses involve a diplomat with a taste for books. A German scholar, Richard Pietschmann, announced it to the world in 1908. A photographic facsimile was printed in Paris in 1936, a full scholarly edition in 1980, and in 2001 the library put every page online, free. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register in 1999.
- 5. Whose voice is missing here, and where can we hear it?
- His, on every page, in Spanish and in Quechua, which is what makes the book nearly unique: a full account of the Andes under Spanish rule, written by an Andean. The voices missing are the ones he wrote for and the one he wrote to: the people of the villages he walked through, who could not write petitions, and the king, who as far as anyone knows never turned a page of it.
For your notebook: he addressed the most powerful reader he could name, and reached, instead, everyone else, four hundred years late. Was the letter a failure?
Sources: Rolena Adorno, “Guaman Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru,” Royal Danish Library (2001), and Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (2000); Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Revista de Indias (1945), for the 1615 letter; Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 4°, digital edition, kb.dk.
What an interlude is
Every few quizzes, this series stops scoring and tells one story slowly. Nothing on this page is graded. There is one man, one book, and at the end some ruled lines that belong to you. The quizzes teach you to read the test's materials; the interludes are the reason to bother.
The sentence
In December of the year 1600, in the city of Huamanga in the highlands of Peru, a court read out a sentence against a man in his sixties. For years he had pressed a claim to his family's lands in a nearby valley, and for a while he had won. Then the other side found a way to attack not the claim but the man: they told the court he was not the noble he said he was, that his very name was an invention. The court agreed. It called him a common Indian who through deceit had taken the name of a lord, and it sentenced him to two hundred lashes, delivered in public, and two years of banishment from the city where he had grown up. The record of the sentence survives; the record of his answer does not.
His name, the one the court said he had no right to, was Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.
What he did instead
He did not disappear. He walked, and he wrote. In his book he marks the year 1600 as the year he began his travels, as if the punishment had been a commission. For the next fifteen years he moved through the villages of the province of Lucanas, and what he did there, by his own account and by the court papers that keep turning up with his signature on them, was teach. He taught Andean people to read and write. He taught them the form of the legal petition, which was the one Spanish tool that could sometimes be turned against a Spanish official. One of his drawings shows the scene he wanted repeated everywhere: an Andean man at a desk with pen and paper, writing, while another counts his grievances on the fingers of one hand.
He had lost his case for lack of the right papers. So he spent the rest of his life making papers, and readers.
The book
All the while he was building the largest petition ever filed. Nearly 1,200 pages, written and drawn by one hand: the history of the Andes from the beginning of the world, the lives of the Incas, the conquest, and then, at length, the present, official by official, abuse by abuse, with remedies proposed. He called it The First New Chronicle and Good Government. It is addressed to one reader: Philip the Third, king of Spain.
He drew 398 full pages, because he judged that a picture would reach a king faster than his prose could. And he prepared the manuscript as if for a printing press: numbered pages instead of folded leaves, running titles across the tops, catchwords at the corners, and on the title page a note for the printer, counting the sheets. The book is dressed for a press it never met. Again and again through its pages, after an abuse and its failed remedy, he sets down the same four words, like a bell: and there is no remedy.
The walk
Late, with the book already sewn, he added eighteen more leaves: a chapter called Camina el autor. The author walks. It tells how he carried the finished manuscript down from the mountains to Lima, the capital, to place it in the mouth of the road to Spain. He says he was eighty years old. Over the drawing of the journey, now at the top of this page, he wrote its title in his own hand: the author walks, with his son don Francisco de Ayala, leaving the province for Lima to give account to His Majesty — and he leaves poor, and walks in winter. On the way he passed through a valley where a famous campaign was underway to stamp out the old religion, and he wrote down what it was doing to the people of the valley. Of the capital itself, when he reached it, he recorded disorder and misery, and of justice he wrote a sentence that a careful scholar translates this way: there is no God here and no king; “they are in Rome and Castile.”
In February 1615 he sent the king a short letter: the chronicle was done; he would send it if His Majesty asked. The letter reached Seville. It is still there.
The blank
On the next-to-last page of the manuscript he wrote the sentence that was meant to complete the story: that in the city of Lima, the book “was presented before” — and there the sentence stops. The name of the person it was presented to, and the date, were left blank, to be filled in when the moment came. They were never filled in. It is the most eloquent blank in the archive of the Americas: a space the size of a king.
The shelf
The book crossed the sea somehow; nobody recorded how. By the 1700s it was sitting in the Royal Library of Denmark, in Copenhagen, uncatalogued in any way that scholars of the Andes would find. It sat for about two centuries. In 1908 a German scholar named Richard Pietschmann stood up at a conference and announced what he had found on the shelf. A photographic copy was printed in Paris in 1936, a full edition in 1980, and in 2001 the library photographed every page and put the whole book online, free, where it remains. In 1999 UNESCO placed it on the Memory of the World register.
He wrote 1,200 pages for one reader, who never answered. Four hundred years later the letter is delivered daily, to anyone who opens it, in Lima and in Copenhagen and in the Bronx. The king's blank is still blank. Yours is not.
How to read him
Read the book as a letter that is still being delivered, and hold four questions as you go, the same four this series asks of everything. Who made this? One man, whose name a court said he had no right to. For whom? A king. Who reads it now? You. And the fifth question, whose voice is missing, has a different answer here than anywhere else in this series: almost nowhere. This is the voice the other pages are missing. That is why the interlude is his.
The whole book is free to read at the Royal Danish Library's site. The Spanish and Quechua are his own; good English translations are recent and belong to their translators, so this page has quoted only lines short enough to carry, and told the rest in our own words.
Your page
Guaman Poma wrote to the most powerful reader he could name, about the thing he knew best, and he did not wait to be invited. The lines below are ruled and empty on purpose. Print the page if you like; the lines print blank.
1. If you wrote one page to the most powerful reader you can name, about the thing you know best, what would your first three sentences be?
2. He left a blank where the receiver's name should go. Whose name goes in your blank, and why that person?
3. And there is no remedy, he wrote, again and again, in a book that was itself a remedy. Name one thing in your world people call hopeless that you do not believe is hopeless. Say why in two sentences.