Comentarios Reales de los Incas

The Comentarios Reales de los Incas is a book written by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the first published mestizo writer of colonial Andean South America. The Comentarios Reales de los Incas ^[1] is considered by most to be the unquestioned masterpiece of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born of the first generation after the Spanish conquest. He wrote what is arguably the best prose of the colonial period in Peru.

A direct blood descendant of the royal Inca rulers of prehispanic Peru ^[2] and with equal parts of Spanish blood, Garcilaso Inca wrote these chronicles as a firsthand account of the Inca traditions and customs. He was born a few years after the initial Spanish conquest, and grew up while the process and warfare were still underway. He was formally educated within the Spanish system of his father and for the most part, "Garcilaso interpreted Inca and Andean religion from the European and Christian point of view that he had been taught to adopt from infancy and that provided him with most of his historical and philosophical terminology." ^[3]

The son of Captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas and the Inca princess Isabel Suárez Chimpu Ocllo (or Palla Chimpu Ocllo), he lived with his mother and her people until he was ten and was close to them until leaving Peru. He grew up in the worlds of both his parents, also living with his Spanish father as a youth. After traveling to Spain at the age of 21, he was informally educated there, where he lived the rest of his life. He wrote this account from memories of what he had learned in Peru from his mother's people and in his later years. The first edition was published in 1609 in Lisbon (Portugal) in the printshop of Pedro Crasbeeck.

Garcilaso had previously published a Spanish translation of the Dialogos de Amor and had written La Florida del Inca. This was an account of Hernando de Sotos expedition in Florida and was quite popular. Both works had earned him recognition as a writer.

The first part of the Comentarios deals with Inca life, and the second part is about the Spanish conquest of Peru (1533-1572). The second part of the Comentarios was published posthumously, one year after the author's death, in 1617. This volume was published under the title of Historia General del Peru.

Most experts agree the Comentarios Reales are a scholarly chronicle of the culture, economics, and politics of the Inca empire, based on oral tradition as handed down to Garcilaso by relatives and other amauta during his childhood and teenage years.

Garcilaso's commentaries have to be understood as representing a mixed worldview of the Inca empire, He wrote both as a member of the royal family of Cuzco, and from the base of Spanish-Catholic theology. ^[4]

More than 150 years later, when the native uprising led by Tupac Amaru II in 1758 gained momentum, Charles III of Spain banned the "Comentarios" from being published in Lima in Quechua language, due to its "dangerous" content. Copies circulated secretly, as the native people drew pride and inspiration from their Inca heritage.

The first English translation was by Sir Paul Rycaut in 1685 titled The Royal Commentaries of Peru^[5]

The book was not printed again in the Americas until 1918, but copies continued to be circulated. In 1961, an English translation by Maria Jolas, titled The Incas was published. Another translation was published in 1965, and the work has continued to receive scholarly attention.

References

• José Antonio Mazzotti, Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: resonancias andinas (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996).
• Margarita Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales de los Incas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
• MacCormack, Sabine. 1991. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Reprint

• Linkgua US, 2006, ISBN 84-96428-70-2

• Spanish Wikisource has original text related to this article: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega