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1874, a Peruvian,
Don Jose Fernandez Nodal, published the Quichua text
with a Spanish
translation.
In 1878 Gavino
Pacheco Zegarra published his version of Ollantay, with a
free translation
in French. His text is a manuscript of
the drama which
he found in his
uncle's library. Zegarra, as a native of
Peru whose
language was
Quichua, had great advantages. He was a
very severe, and
often unfair,
critic of his predecessors.
The work of
Zegarra is, however, exceedingly valuable.
He was not only
a Quichua
scholar, but also accomplished and well read.
His notes on
special words and
on the construction of sentences are often very
interesting. But his conclusions respecting several
passages which are
in the Justiniani
text, but not in the others, are certainly erroneous.
Thus he entirely
spoils the dialogue between the Uillac Uma and Piqui
Chaqui by
omitting the humorous part contained in the Justiniani text;
and makes other
similar omissions merely because the passages are not in
his text. Zegarra gives a useful vocabulary at the end
of all the words
which occur in
the drama.
The great
drawback to the study of Zegarra's work is that he invented a
number of letters
to express the various modifications of sound as they
appealed to his
ear. No one else can use them, while
they render the
reading of his
own works difficult and intolerably tiresome.
The last publication
of a text of Ollantay was by the Rev. J. H. Gybbon
Spilsbury, at
Buenos Ayres in 1907, accompanied by Spanish, English, and
French
translations in parallel columns.
There is truth in
what Zegarra says, that the attempts to translate line
for line, by von
Tschudi and myself, 'fail to convey a proper idea of
the original
drama to European readers, the result being alike contrary
to the genius of
the modern languages of Europe and to that of the
Quichua
language.' Zegarra accordingly gives a
very free translation in
French.
In the present
translation I believe that I have always preserved the
sense of the
original, without necessarily binding myself to the words.
The original is
in octosyllabic lines. Songs and
important speeches are
in quatrains of
octosyllabic lines, the first and last rhyming, and the
second and
third. I have endeavoured to keep to
octosyllabic lines as
far as possible,
because they give a better idea of the original; and I
have also tried
to preserve the form of the songs and speeches.
The drama opens
towards the close of the reign of the Inca Pachacuti,
the greatest of
all the Incas, and the scene is laid at Cuzco or at
Ollantay-tampu,
in the valley of the Vilcamayu. The
story turns on the
love of a great
chief, but not of the blood-royal, with a daughter of
the Inca. This would not have been prohibited in former
reigns, for the
marriage of a
sister by the sovereign or his heir, and the marriage of
princesses only
with princes of the blood-royal, were rules first
introduced by
Pachacuti.[FN#4] His imperial power and
greatness led him
to endeavour to
raise the royal family far above all others.