The translation of culture

The suggestion that there is an affinity between the Comentarios reales and Thomas More's Utopia threatens to become a critical commonplace. Menéndez y Pelayo's pronouncement that the Comentarios reales was not a historical text but a Utopian novel like More's insured that the topic would receive further attention. Practically all studies of the Inca's work have taken up the theme of the novelesque or fictional qualities of the Comentarios reales implicit in the Spanish critic's comparison. Zum Felde, Arocena, Cox, Manuel, Durán Luzio, and others have seen a direct if veiled influence of the Utopia on Garcilaso's representation of Tahuantinsuyu. But the accuracy and the implications of the claims made by the influential Menéndez y Pelayo regarding the generic characteristics of the Comentarios reales have gone unchallenged and, for the most part, unstudied. The suggestion that Garcilaso's history of the Inca empire belonged to the realm of fiction and not historiography gave rise instead to an emotional polemic concerning his reliability and integrity as a narrator of the indigenous past. He was accused by his detractors of being a liar and a plagiarizer, which in turn solicited a chorus of defenders whose panegyric echoes can still be heard today. Yet the important critical implications of Menéndez y Pelayo's assertion were generally ignored. Garcilaso was vindicated of the charge of plagiarism and his reliability as a historian bolstered, but the fundamental questions regarding the undeniable similarities between the Comentarios reales and the Utopia were never even raised.