She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales Paperback – February 1, 2000

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!

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.

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.

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 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!