The Guaman Poma Website

About the transcription and its critical apparatus

By Rolena Adorno

This transcription of El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno is based on the examination of the autograph manuscript that I made in 1977 and it is constituted by the work that John V. Murra, Jorge L. Urioste and I did in preparing our editions of 1980 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores) and 1987 (Madrid: Historia-16). (For the criteria employed in our transcription, see, respectively, pages ix-xi of volume one of the Siglo Veintiuno edition and pages xi-xii of the first volume of the Historia-16 publication.) The current digitized version is presented on behalf of myself and my colleagues John Murra and Jorge Urioste and with their cooperation.

After the digitization of GKS 2232, 4^o, in 2000 and its inauguration on the Internet on May 15, 2001, Ivan Boserup, the Keeper of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Royal Library, and I undertook a review of numerous passages of the digital reproduction. We did so with the dual purpose of correcting doubtful transcriptions made on the basis of my ocular examination of the manuscript in 1977 and, eventually, of presenting on the Internet this corrected version of the transcription that Murra, Urioste, and I published in 1987. Where Boserup and I discovered and corrected errors meriting comment or interpretation, we have added explanatory footnotes.

The original design for the presentation of the text and its critical apparatus is owed to Martí Soler, of Siglo Veintiuno, who supervised the production of the first edition of 1980 with exemplary care. That design was utilized in the 1987 Madrid edition, and we modify it slightly now, thanks to advances in the presentation of textual materials made possible by the electronic medium.

The critical annotation to the text reproduces the version prepared in 1980 and augmented in 1987, with regard to ethnographic, ethnological, historical, linguistic, and literary, etc., themes. The only new notes presented in this electronic edition are the result of the recent study by Boserup and Adorno of the characteristics of the manuscript and the elaboration of its texts.

Indices: The glossary-Index of Quechua words, and the onomastic, toponymic and ethnic-group index, along with the ethnological index, are reproduced from the 1980 edition, thanks to the permission granted by Guadalupe Ortiz Elguea, of Siglo Veintiuno.

The bibliography that appears on this website includes the sources cited in this edition as well as references to pertinent documents and studies, either made known or published since the Madrid edition of 1987. Although augmented, this bibliographic list does not pretend to be exhaustive but rather to take into account the investigations that continue to be carried out on the life and work of Guaman Poma and his contributions to the knowledge of the Andean world.

The introductory essays that Murra, Adorno, and Urioste prepared for the editions of 1980 and 1987, respectively, are six in number. Their objectives, in 1980, were to offer ethnological (Murra) and linguistic (Urioste) perspectives on the content of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno as well as to present a detailed account of Guaman Poma’s composition and correction of the final manuscript (Adorno). All three essays had in mind a limited public of specialized, primarily Latinamericanist, readers. Upon accepting the invitation of Javier Villalba, executive director of Historia-16, and Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois, director of the collection, to include our edition in the “Crónicas de América” series (an invitation we could accept, thanks to the generosity of Siglo Veintiuno and the good offices of Martí Soler), it seemed useful to us to write new introductory essays. This time we did it for a European reading public on the eve of the Fifth Cententary of Columbus’s first voyage, and we attempted to cover, in more global and/or contextualized terms, the themes of the life and work of Guaman Poma (Adorno), his outlook on the Andean world of past and present (Murra), and the variety of his Quechua texts and the character of his written Spanish (Urioste). All six essays are available on this website.

September 2004