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Comentarios Reales de los Incas
The Comentarios Reales de los Incas is a book written by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the first mestizo writer of colonial Andean South America. The Comentarios Reales de los Incas is considered by most to be the unquestionable masterpiece of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and arguably the best prose of the colonial period in Peru.
A direct blood descendant of the royal Inca rulers of prehispanic Peru and with approximately equal parts of Spanish blood, Garcilaso Inca writes these chronicles as a first hand account of the Inca traditions and costumes.
The son of Captain Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas and the Inca princess Isabel Suarez Chimpu Ocllo (or Palla Chimpu Ocllo), he received the best education of both worlds. Written from memory while he was in Spain, the first edition was published in 1609 in Lisbon (Portugal) in the printshop of Pedro Crasbeeck.
Garcilaso had previously written Dialogos de Amor and La Florida del Inca, and both works had earned him recognition as a writer.
The first part of the Comentarios deal with Inca life, and the second part are about the Spanish conquest of Peru. The second part of the Comentarios was only published posthumously, one year after the author's death, in 1617, and published under the title of Historia General del Peru.
Most experts agree the Comentarios Reales are a clean and sanitized 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.
Therefore, Garcilaso's commentaries have to be understood as representing a true cosmovision of the Inca empire, from the point of view of a member of the royal family of Cuzco.
Many years later, when the native uprising led by Tupac Amaru II gained traction, Carlos III of Spain banned the "Comentarios" from being published in Lima due to its "dangerous" content.
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.
References
3. Jose Antonio Mazzotti, Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: resonancias andinas .
Reprint
Linkgua US, 2006, ISBN 8496428702
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Comentarios Reales de los Incas
