Tale
Estudios araucanos
Not translated into English
Rodolfo Lenz · 1897
Synopsis
Materials for the study of the Mapuche language, literature and customs: dialogues in four dialects, folk tales, historical and descriptive accounts, songs, given with a literal Spanish translation, and letters written by Mapuches, according to Memoria Chilena. One part relates in the Huilliche dialect the journey of Domingo Quintuprai, of Osorno, to the land of the Manzaneros; another gathers the texts dictated by Calvun, a young Pehuenche from the upper Perquenco: tales of the three brothers or of the two little dogs, accounts of battles and a brief autobiography.
Context
The texts were collected during stays in Araucanía from 1894 to 1897, after a first encounter with the language at Collipulli in 1891, according to Memoria Chilena. He transcribed them with a phonetic alphabet, without touching up the style or syntax of the narrators. The linguist Gilberto Sánchez reproaches the work for having only one informant per dialect, but holds its alphabet to be the basis of those of later Araucanianists; Belén Villena sees in it the starting point of the ethnographic period of the sources of Mapudungun.
Who it is for
A scholarly work, bilingual in Mapudungun and Spanish, to be consulted in parts; no French or English translation.
Prizes and reception
The first reliable corpus of the Mapuche language, according to Memoria Chilena, and a source still read by those who study it.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.