‘In the beginning was the Word’ (John 1: 1), and that Word needed translating. Alan Durston's Pastoral Quechua is a detailed and complex study of the historical polemics and linguistic mechanics behind the translation of Christian doctrine from Latin and Spanish into indigenous languages, in particular Quechua and Aymara, in colonial Peru. This was no easy task, as one might imagine, for even the translation of this very first sentence of John's Gospel created controversy. A mestizo priest, Francisco de Ávila, chose to render the Latin verbum (‘word’) as the Quechua simi, meaning ‘word’, ‘language’ and ‘mouth’, and provided an explanatory note stating that ‘the Word is the Son of God, who proceeded from the Father and was made flesh, just as speech is first conceived in the mind and then uttered by the mouth’ (p. 231). This was not good enough, however, for Ávila's colleague and rival, Juan Rojo Mejía y Ocón, who, in his own rendition, insisted that such phrases must be paraphrased and suggested using Diospa churin, meaning ‘God's son’, rather than simi (ibid.). Of course, how to translate the word ‘God’ was a whole other polemic, disputed for the duration of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. Did the indigenous Andeans have a word for God? If not, did this mean that they had no concept of God at all? What did this say about their level of humanity with respect to Spaniards? Translating Christian doctrine not only meant that the rendition of individual words and concepts was constantly contested, but also raised and reflected deeper concerns about the human relationship between Andeans, Spaniards and the rest of the world. The problem, as such, was that from the very beginning there existed, as Durston says, tensions between the (urgent) need for the Spanish Church to translate the religious texts in order to be able to fulfil its missionary mandate, and the fear that translation would lead to corruption and betrayal, that the all-important meaning of the message would be, as it were, ‘lost in translation’. While some might be daunted by the task, Durston expertly guides the reader through this historico-linguistic and theological minefield.

The book is written with a two-part structure. The first part is a detailed historical study of the development of translation policy from the mid-sixteenth century through to the mid-seventeenth century. Necessarily, Durston expounds the polemic between those – usually mendicant – clergy who favoured the approach of trying to render key theological concepts in indigenous languages using neologisms and those later, post-Tridentine, arrivals, such as the influential Jesuit José de Acosta, who insisted that loanwords from Spanish must be used instead. Of course, both approaches were imperfect with regard to intelligibility, and these issues were never successfully resolved. Durston contributes considerably to the expanding literature on the debate by demonstrating not only that the more creative approaches were pioneered in the sixteenth century by the likes of the Dominican Domingo de Santo Tomás, effectively shut down by the Third Lima Council (1582–3), but also – and this is relatively unknown – that the pendulum in fact swung back after the turn of the seventeenth century. During this period author-translators such as the Franciscan Jerónimo de Oré and the secular priest Juan Pérez Bocanegra injected a creative flourish into Quechua pastoral texts and revitalised the liturgy, something which had been deliberately neglected by the Third Council in favour of catechetical and pedagogical texts. A second, and no less important, historical struggle that Durston charts is that which took place between the mendicant orders, the secular authorities and the secular church for control over the teaching and licensing in the vernacular languages of clergy petitioning to hold indigenous parishes. A third controversy, which again had a long historical trajectory, was that of which vernacular to use. The hierarchical nature of the Spanish linguistic classificatory system meant that the multiplicity of indigenous languages, and indeed their variants, could not all be considered valid receptacles for the dissemination of the Christian message. The majority had to be corruptions of just a few ‘pure’ languages. The decision to settle on southern (Cusco) Quechua as the standard colonial Quechua for all of the Quechua-speaking Andes led to some absurd historical quirks, such as priests who were native speakers of Chinchay (northern) Quechua having to study southern Quechua in order to be licensed to hold a parish with Chinchay Quechua speakers (p. 127); or, when parishioners of Huánuco complained in 1651 that their priest could not speak Quechua well enough to minister to their needs, he replied rather arrogantly that he knew la lengua better than they did and had the royal licence to prove it (p. 134)!

The second part of Pastoral Quechua is an in-depth linguistic analysis of the key pastoral texts of the period, in which Durston engages with ethnolinguists to argue that, notwithstanding the problems of translating theological concepts from one culture to another, pastoral Quechua was no mere hotchpotch cobbled together by Spaniards ignorant of indigenous languages, but was in fact carefully and methodically developed over time by priests who in the main were, crucially, native speakers of these indigenous languages, and who were by no means ignorant of the nuances of Quechua grammar. In this section Durston also analyses the creative combination of Latin and Quechua poetic systems by clergy such as Jerónimo de Oré, and he draws the book to a close with a fascinating symbolic analysis of key Christian tropes in these Quechua liturgies together with their performative context. Particularly worthy of mention is his study of the sacrifice of Christ and its symbolic interplay (using medieval Christian theological themes) with the earth and its cycles of fertility – the blood of Christ gushing forth to irrigate the ground like the red and swollen rivers of the rainy season. As Durston rounds off this excellent book with Garcilaso arguing that the conquest was the event that would make translation possible, it only remains to be said that Pastoral Quechua, with its subtle and complex analysis, is the long-awaited book that successfully charts the correlation between conquest and religious translation in Peru. ‘In the beginning was the Word’, and that word was translated.