Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/368

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328
GREAT VALUE OF ZEGARRA'S WORK

was obtained for him by Dr. Ruggendas of Munich. The manuscript was a corrupt version, and in very bad condition, in parts illegible from damp. In 1868 Don José Barranca published a Spanish translation, from the Dominican text of von Tschudi. The learned Swiss naturalist, von Tschudi, published a revised edition of his translation at Vienna in 1875, with a parallel German translation. In 1871 I printed the Justiniani text with a literal, line-for-line translation, but with many mistakes, since corrected; and in 1874, a Peruvian, Don José Fernandez Nodal, published the Quichua text with a Spanish translation.

In 1878 Gavino Pacheco Zegarra published his version of Ollantay, with a free translation in French. His text is a manuscript of the drama which he found in his uncle's library. Zegarra, as a native of Peru whose language was Quichua, had great advantages. He was a very severe, and often unfair, critic of his predecessors.

The work of Zegarra is, however, exceedingly valuable. He was not only a Quichua scholar, but also accomplished and well read. His notes on special words and on the construction of sentences are often very interesting. But his conclusions respecting several passages which are in the Justiniani text, but not in the others, are certainly erroneous. Thus he entirely spoils the dialogue between the Uillac Uma and Piqui Chaqui by omitting the humorous part contained in the Justiniani text; and makes other similar omissions merely because the passages are not in his text. Zegarra gives a useful vocabulary at the end of all the words which occur in the drama.

The great drawback to the study of Zegarra's work is that he invented a number of letters to express the various modifications of sound as they appealed to his