Hay Festival Arequipa 2021 – Language

Where is the literary and storytelling tradition of the indigenous peoples kept? How can we access contemporary literary work in indigenous languages? Carmen Pachas Piélago offers an informative, entertaining view of the indigenous peoples of Old Peru through fiction, connecting children with our identity. Roberto Daniel Zariquiey Biondi is an expert in the indigenous languages of Peru and a researcher into the Amazon languages. He has a doctorate in Linguistics from the University of La Trobe in Australia and teaches at the PUCP’s Department of Humanities, Linguistics and Literature. He is also a researcher with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany), Zurich University and the National Geographic Society. In conversation with the historian Jorge Bedregal la Vera.

Translation is a discipline that makes it possible for literature and thought to pass into other languages, but can also be an art in itself, a process of interpretation that can enable the success, or otherwise, of a novel in other latitudes. Nuria Barrios (Spain) is the author of titles including La impostora (2022), a work of essay in which the writer and translator reflects on her two professions, examining the work of translation in all its aspects. Teresa Ruiz Rosas (Arequipa) has studied Philology and Translation in Arequipa, Budapest, Freiburg and Barcelona. She speaks German, French, English and Hungarian. She is a prolific author and translator, and has published award-winning stories, essays and novels; she has translated classic German authors such as Rose Ausländer, Stefan Zweig and W. G. Sebald. They will be in conversation with the writer and journalist Enrique Planas.

Carmen Pachas Piélago, writer and scholar on ancient Peru, will tell her story El sombrero de plumas inspired by a feather headset that is located a the Museo de Sitio Arturo Jiménez Borja – Puruchuco, Lima, Perú. This piece belongs to the ichma culture that developed from 1,100 to 1,450 AD in Lima between the valleys of Chillón and Lurín.

The work of Marco Aurelio Denegri was mainly carried out in the fields of literature, linguistics and sexology. On this last point it should be noted that his work was revolutionary, since it arrived into the conservative public space of Peru in a way that was erudite and came with no sense of shame. A re-edition of some of his texts offers the chance to ask a series of questions about his relevance, what he was right about, and maybe also wrong about. The guests at this event, Romina Castro and Olga Montero Rose, will talk to Katherine Subirana and will discuss these issues in an atmosphere, now in the 21st century, that is different from the times of Marco Aurelio Denegri, in that it is a favourable time to talk about his research, his academic work and his understanding of his cause.

Two authors will talk about the Spanish-language universe. As a homage to the next Language Congress in Arequipa, the Mexican writer Gonzalo Celorio and the Arequipa writer Carlos Herrera will talk to Alonso Ruiz Rosas about the diversity of Spanish, the richness of a language spoken all over the world, but particularly linked to Latin America; cultural traditions, scientific discoveries and major literary landmarks in the language that unites us.