Harawi Spotlight: Poetry and Voice

Harawi as a practice represents poetry from Indigenous peoples in the Andes. This can include lyric poetry through music, as well as literature. As an important tool for Andean creativity and knowledges, harawi reflects the diverse voices and communities that give it life, while also depicting common threads interwoven throughout Andean cultures and peoples.

One major theme that can be found in harawi is Indigenous people’s relationality to the natural world. Andean poets often use their poetry to showcase a profound respect for PachaMama, Mother Earth, that transcends superficial appreciation. This can involve using animals, such as birds, rivers, and mountains in their poetry, which also contributes to harawi’s brilliant and vibrant imagery.

The Library resources and community narratives from Andean poets highlighted in this page help provide deeper meanings and contexts for harawi.

Quechua in the PALABRA Archive

The PALABRA Archive (Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape) at the Library of Congress dates back to 1943. It contains nearly eight-hundred recordings of poets and prose writers participating in sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory and at other locations around Spain and Latin America. The recordings below span from 1950 to 1976 and feature poetry in Quechua and Spanish by poets from Bolivia, Perú, and Chile.

Learn more about the Indigenous voices featured in the Library's PALABRA Archive.

View a complete list of South America authors and poets in the Archive.

Fernando Ortiz Sanz (Bolivia)
Andrés Alencastre (Perú)

Narratives from the Ayllu

In the following interviews, Julio Noriega, Julieta Zurita, and Washington Córdova Huamán discuss their work with poetry as Andean and Quechua speaking writers and poets. Noriega’s dissertation about Quechua poetry was inspired by his nostalgia for the Peruvian Andes while studying in the U.S. Noriega shares his appreciation for the recent literary boom for Quechua poetry, especially given the history of Quechua language suppression.

For Quechua Bolivian poet Zurita, Quechua and Andean poetry are expressions of ancestral wisdom and the relationality between human beings, their environments, and their spiritual lives. As a poet and writer from Apurímac, Perú, Córdova Huamán’s poetry is filled with vivid imagery about the natural world.

From the Library

This selection of resources introduce the people, culture, geography, and region of the Andes for general audiences and researchers. Staff in the Hispanic Reading Room can provide access to the materials located at the Library of Congress. If you cannot visit us in person send us a message through Ask a Librarian to further assist you.

Books
Collections

La doble voz : poetas argentinas contemporáneas by Alicia Genovese.
Call Number: PQ7633 .G46 1998 LANDOVR
ISBN: 9507861963
Published/Created: 1998
Argentine poetry and women authors. This book includes a selection of poems by Diana Bellessi, María del Carmen Colombo, Irene Gruss, Tamara Kamenszain, and Mirta Rosenberg.
The Mestizo As Crucible by Christine De Lailhacar
Call Number: PN1136 .D38 1996
ISBN: 0820428914
Published/Created: 1996-11-01
Contemporary culture consists of many crossing threads. Mestizo poets, as ethnic and cultural cross-breeds, find themselves at the points of intersection. This inquiry deals with contemporary poets of partly Andean or African roots. In their poems, the underlying indigenous oral discourse, which shapes their perceptions, forms a palimpsest with a more recently «inscribed» Western sensibility. The method of this study in Comparative Poetics is linguistics - its focus philosophy. Its aim is to give Western readers of mestizo poems an insight into the interplay between classical Western thought and the one informing indigenous world views and poetic creativity.
Tinkuna : relatos en los Andes by Guerrero F., Fernando (Guerrero Flórez), author.
Call Number: PQ8220.417.U375 A6 2013 OVERFLOWJ34
ISBN: 9789942091673
Published/Created: 2013
Poetry and short stories that pay homage to Andean myths. Page numbers are also in Mayan glyphs.
Taki parwa = 22 poemas by Kilku Warak'a; traducción, prólogo y notas de Odi Gonzales
Call Number: MLCS 2001/01575 (P) FT MEADE
Published/Created: 2000
A book of 22 poems, containing text written in Spanish and Ketchua.
Piedra sobre piedra : poesía cusqueña contemporánea by Mario Pantoja [compilador]
Call Number: PQ8492.C82 P54 2000 LANDOVR
Published/Created: 2000
A book of contemporary Peruvian poetry from the Cusco region. Text chiefly in Spanish with some Quechua.
La Autotraducción en la Poesía Mapuche by Melisa Stocco
Call Number: PM5468.2 .S76 2021 FT MEADE
ISBN: 9781433173158
Published/Created: 2021-05-26
La Autotraducción en la Poesía Mapuche interroga las diversas formas, contextos y motivaciones que hacen a la práctica de la autotraducción en la producción bilingüe de seis poetas mapuche contemporáneos: Leonel Lienlaf, Elicura Chihuailaf, Rayen Kvyeh, María Teresa Panchillo, Liliana Ancalao y Adriana Paredes Pinda. Se propone ofrecer un análisis comparativo y atento a las coordenadas culturales y sociohistóricas de la producción poética mapuche bilingüe de los últimos 30 años, a partir de la noción de traful y de una tipología de estrategias de autotraducción. Es un libro orientado a la reflexión intercultural que propone una inmersión en el territorio sensible de la literatura desde la lectura de los cruces, tensiones, contradicciones y complementariedades entre las versiones de los textos poéticos bilingües mapuzungun-español. Se trata de un aporte tanto a la literature comparada en términos de una apertura a las lenguas y discursos literarios emergentes en Abya Yala, como a los estudios de autotraducción.
Tunupa: The Book of Sirens by Odi Gonzales.
Call Number: MLCM 2002/01277 (P) FT MEADE
ISBN: 9972688216
Published/Created: 2002
A Quechua-Spanish book of poems that incorporates Andean myths and stories.
Birds on the Kiswar Tree by Odi Gonzales; Lynn Levin (Translator)
Call Number: PQ8498.17.O5175 A2 2014 CABIN BRANCH
ISBN: 9781940939247
Published/Created: 2014-05-17
Birds on the Kiswar Tree by Peruvian Andean poet Odi Gonzales presents poems that sing in the voices of native birds and speak through the devout, but subversive, Quechua artists of Peru's colonial era. Their religious art provides the imagery for these astounding poems. In the Eden painted by one anonymous artist, Andean kiswar trees grow, native nukchu flowers bloom, llamas graze, and parrots perch in the trees, and in out-of-the-way nooks of Andean churches, rebel angels hide, armed with harquebuses. Canvas by canvas, poem by poem, Gonzales gives us a poetry collection as a living and talking museum in which the Quechua artists of Peru's past demonstrate both their sincere Christian faith and their opposition to the Spanish destruction of the Inca empire. Originally published in Peru in 2005 as La Escuela de Cusco (The School of Cusco), Birds on the Kiswar Tree stands as an elegant and richly imagined tribute to these indigenous and mestizo artists. By extension, it shows how artists may put forth their views when prevailing circumstances make outward protest a perilous option.
Andean Journeys by Ronald Haladyna
Call Number: PQ7814 .A53 2011 CABIN BRANCH
ISBN: 9781426996047
Published/Created: 2011-12-20
Andean Journeys: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Bolivian Poetry is the fourth in a series of books that aspire to address a dearth of information in the English-speaking world about South American poetry of the past thirty years. The fourteen outstanding poets included here represent a diversity of themes, styles, and perspectives in one of South America's more marginalized nations. All of them have published extensively, have been recognized through literary awards and inclusion in national and international anthologies, and continue writing and publishing today. For readers unfamiliar with Bolivia, the introduction provides a brief background of its geography, history, politics, economy, and society. This is followed by an ample selection of representative poems published previously in Spanish, with translations in English on facing pages. The book concludes with a brief biographical sketch of each poet and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources for readers wishing to pursue further reading or research.
Parawayraq Chawpinpi = Entre la lluvia y el viento by Washington Córdova Huamán
Call Number: CALL NUMBER PM6308.9.C38 C6718 2019
ISBN: 9786124297311
Published/Created: 2019
Poetry in Quechua
Bilingual edition: Spanish-Quechua
Illariy by Washington Córdova Huamán
Call Number: PM6308.9.C38 C66918 2019
ISBN: 9786124297311
Published/Created: 2019
Poetry in Quechua
Bilingual edition: Spanish-Quechua

Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature
Listen to audio-recorded readings of former Consultants in Poetry Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost; Nobel Laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Czeslaw Milosz, and renowned writers such as Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Kurt Vonnegut read from their work at the Library of Congress. The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress dates back to 1943, when Allen Tate was Consultant in Poetry. It contains nearly two thousand recordings—of poets and prose writers participating in literary events at the Library’s Capitol Hill campus as well as sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory.

Interconnecting Worlds: Weaving Community Narratives, Andean Histories & the Library’s Collections

Caribbean, Iberian & Latin American Studies: Ask a Librarian

Harawi Spotlight: Poetry and Voice

Quechua in the PALABRA Archive

Narratives from the Ayllu

From the Library