Customer Reviews

She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales

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This is a marvelous collection of Quechua folktales, told by various Quechua speakers to anthropologist Johnny Payne. These are short and "catchy" tales printed in English with the Quechua version on the facing page. This gives you a chance to get acquainted with the sentence structure of the Quechua language which I found very helpful. The author also shares interesting insights into the people who tell the tales. I love to travel in Peru and I am going to pass this book on to a Quechua friend who will surely enjoy it as much as I did. If you're interested in the cultures of the Andes, or if you plan to travel there, don't miss this book! .

An enchanting book! Here is a unique opportunity to read stories never before written down, much less translated. The author was told them in the original language in the high Andes by Quecua storytellers. Now he has translated them into English, and in She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales we find, opposite each translated page, a page printed in the original Quechuan language. Fascinating! Johnny Payne further enriches our experience by sharing the similarities that he observed between these stories and stories with which we are already familiar. Included as well are wonderful background stories of experiences and people he encountered in the story-gathering process. For those interested in stories, folk tales, oral tradition, antropology, history, language, travel... This is not only a must-read, but a must-own. It's a keeper!

I know that only a very small percentage of Amazon customers are students of the Quechua language -- but if you are, this book is WONDERFUL. Why? Because it is transcribed from recordings of real people telling real stories in the slangy, colloquial Quechua of real life. If you have studied Quechua from books that have given carefully constructed model dialogues and neat grammatical rules, the Quechua of this book is a breath of fresh air -- it smells like the fresh air of real life, llama and sheep dung and the real language with all its quirks as it is actually spoken in the Cuzco Valley.

And if you have never studied Quechua but are curious about the language, this bilingual English-Quechua book could whet your appetite or give you a feeling for the language.

This book with its meticulous transcriptions and excellent translations could only have been created by someone with a genuine love of the Quechua language. Jallalla!

SHE-CALF is a collection of Quechua folk tales which opens a wide window into the rich oral tradition of the high Andes. Dr. Johnny Payne, one of the few researchers from outside the Peruvian Andes able to translate the complex Quechua into English, conveys deep insight into the ideology and lifeways of the indigenous Andean people. The tales he has collected and translated in "SHE-CALF and Other Quechua Folk Tales" reflect the humor and wit, as well as the sometimes teasing and mischievous temperament, of native Quechua storytellers. This book is a treasure for students of Andean culture, linguistics, folklore and comparative literature. It has been of great help to me in my anthropological research in the high Andes.

The She-Calf features Quechua-language stories (both myths and quasi-historical narratives) on the right pages, with English translations on the left. Also, each story is preceded by a paragraph or two by the compiler Mr. Payne, explaining background and cultural or historical contexts. The book is useful for both linguists and those more interested in Quechuan culture and folktales.

Less satisfied will be those who just love a well-written story, since these were recorded from single tellings by the speakers, and sometimes are missing information important to the plot, or simply don't seem to flow as well as well-edited stories would.

The orthography used for the Quechua-language originals is that Spanish-based spelling which seems to be more or less standard for the language. It is neither phonetically accurate nor phonemically straightforward. I expected this, though, so that my only real complaint about the transcription is that, instead of normal-looking curved apostrophes to mark glotalization, straight ones were used which look so much like the accent marks employed over the vowels that one sometimes has to make a double-take.

Also, glotalization is not always marked, so that "p'unchaw" (meaning "day") is occasionally found as "punchaw". Whether this was a fault in pronunciation by the speaker, a fault in transcription by Mr. Payne, or a fault in editing by the publisher, I don't know. Still, it is easy to look past these as small inconveniences.

All in all, The She-Calf is a very nice collection of Quechua folk tales.

What I like best about this collection is that the author (or editor, really) tells you a little bit about the people who tell the stories. He also includes the original Quechua, which is an interesting touch even if I can't read it. At any rate, if you enjoy fairy tales, and are interested in hearing them from other cultures (there are a few parallels to the traditional Brothers Grimm in this book), this is a good book to buy. If you aren't interested in fairy tales, this is a good book to change your mind.

An excellent collection of stories -- not merely in the presentation of a different set of stories than those which reach the common awareness, but also in the insights it gives to the shape of the Quechua culture and people. It is not presented as an explication of the way these people live, the way the thoughts go, but the stories show that shape, show that means, bring the world alive in a way both subtle and profound.

The stories are presented both in the Quechua language and in English translation, and it is possible to see the shape and patterns of the language with careful text comparison; it makes it worth considering learning the Quechua tongue to pick out the nuances which are inevitably lost in translation.