PERUVIAN TRADITIONS
LIBRARY OF LATIN AMERICA
General Editor
Jean Franco
Series Editor for Brazil
Richard Graham, with the assistance of Alfredo Bosi
Editorial Board
Tulio Halperín Donghi
Iván Jaksić
Naomi Lindstrom
Eduardo Lozano
Francine Masiello
PERUVIAN TRADITIONS
By
RICARDO PALMA
Translated from the Spanish by
HELEN LANE
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND CHRONOLOGY BY CHRISTOPHER CONWAY
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Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data
Palma, Ricardo, 1833–1919.
[Tradiciones peruanas. English]
Peruvian traditions / by Ricardo Palma ; translanted from the Spanish by Helen Lane ;
edited with an introduction and chronology by Christopher Conway.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–19–515908–X ISBN 0–19–515909–8 (pbk.)
1. Legends—Peru.
2. Peru—History.
I. Lane, Helen R.
II. Conway, Christopher.
III. Title.
F3409.P173213 2004
398.2’0985—dc21 2003050876
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid–free paper
Contents
Series Editor’s General Introduction
Translator’s Note
Chronology of Ricardo Palma
Introduction
FIRST SERIES
Palla–Huarcuna
The Christ in Agony
SECOND SERIES
The Knights of the Cape
The Magistrate’s Ears
A Heretical Viceroy and a Rascally Bell Ringer
Drink, Father, It Will Keep You Alive!
The Countess Who Was Summoned
A Mother’s Love
A Viceroy and an Archbishop
The Corregidor of Tinta
THIRD SERIES
The Inca’s Achirana
A Letter Sings
An Adventure of the Poet–Viceroy
Everyone the Master in His Own House
The Latin of a Young Lady of Lima
Santiago the Flier
FOURTH SERIES
Three Historical Questions Concerning Pizarro
The Scapegoat
Friars’ Work!
Saint Thomas’s Sandal
The Black Mass
Bolívar’s Justice
FIFTH SERIES
Don Alonso the Brawny
Margarita’s Wedding Dress
Abascal’s Clever Trick
SIXTH SERIES
The Demon of the Andes
The Judge’s Three Reasons
The Witches of Ica
The Royalist Smells of Death to Me
SEVENTH SERIES
Friar Gómez’s Scorpion
Canterac’s Bugler
The Protectress and the Liberatrix
The King of the Camanejos
EIGHTH SERIES
Friar Martín’s Mice
Two Excommunications
The Major’s Calf
NINTH SERIES
The Liberator’s Three Etceteras
TENTH SERIES
The Incas Who Played Chess
Between Garibaldi ...and Me
Consolación
Appendix: Listing of the Peruvian Traditions by Historical Period
Bibliography
Series Editor’s
General Introduction
The Library of Latin America series makes available in translation major nineteenth–century authors whose work has been neglected in the English–speaking world. The titles for the translation from the Spanish and Portuguese were suggested by an editorial committee that included Jean Franco (general editor responsible for works in Spanish), Richard Graham (series editor responsible for works in Portuguese), Tulio Halperín Donghi (at the University of California, Berkeley), Iván Jaksić (at the University of Notre Dame), Naomi Lindstrom (at the University of Texas at Austin), Francine Masiello (at the University of California, Berkeley), and Eduardo Lozano of the Library at the University of Pittsburgh. The late Antonio Cornejo Polar of the University of California, Berkeley, was also one of the founding members of the committee. The translations have been funded thanks to the generosity of the Lampadia Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
During the period of national formation between 1810 and into the early years of the twentieth century, the new nations of Latin America fashioned their identities, drew up constitutions, engaged in bitter struggles over territory, and debated questions of education, government, ethnicity, and culture. This was a unique period unlike the process of nation formation in Europe and one that should be more familiar than it is to students of comparative politics, history, and literature.
The image of the nation was envisioned by the lettered classes—a minority in countries in which indigenous, mestizo, black, or mulatto peasants and slaves predominated—although there were also alternative nationalisms at the grassroots level. The cultural elite were well educated in European thought and letters, but as statesman, journalists, poets, and academics, they confronted the problem of the racial and linguistic heterogeneity of the continent and the difficulties of integrating the population into a modern nation–state. Some of the writers whose works will be translated in the Library of Latin America series played leading roles in politics. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a friar who translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract and was one of the most colorful characters of the independence period, was faced with imprisonment and expulsion from Mexico for his heterodox beliefs; on his return, after independence, he was elected to the congress. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, exiled from his native Argentina under the dictatorship of Rosas, wrote Facundo: Civilización y barbarie, a stinging denunciation of that government. He returned after Rosas’s overthrow and was elected president in 1868. Andrés Bello was born in Venezuela, lived in London where he published poetry during the independence period, settled in Chile where he founded the university, wrote his grammar of the Spanish language, and drew up the country’s legal code.
These post–independence intelligentsia were not simply dreaming castles in the air, but vitally contributed to the founding of nations and the shaping of culture. The advantage of hindsight may make us aware of problems they themselves did not foresee, but this should not affect our assessment of their truly astonishing energies and achievements. Although there is a recent translation of Sarmiento’s celebrated Facundo, there is no translation of his memoirs, Recuerdos de provincia. The predominance of memoirs in the Lib
rary of Latin America Series is no accident—many of these offer entertaining insights into a vast and complex continent.
Nor have we neglected the novel. The series includes new translations of the outstanding Brazilian writer Machado de Assis’s work, including Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. There is no reason why other novels and writers who are not so well known outside Latin America—the Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Nataniel Aguirre’s Juan de la Rosa, Joséde Alencar’s Iracema, Juana Manuela Gorriti’s short stories—should not be read with as much interest as the political novels of Anthony Trollope.
A series on nineteenth–century Latin America cannot, however, be limited to literary genres such as the novel, the poem, and the short story. The literature of independent Latin America was eclectic and strongly influenced by the periodical press newly liberated from scrutiny by colonial authorities and the Inquisition. Newspapers were miscellanies of fiction, essays, poems, and translations from all manner of European writing. The novels written on the eve of Mexican Independence by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, included disquisitions on secular education and law, and denunciations of the evils of gaming and idleness. Other works, such as a well–known poem by Andrés Bello, “Ode to Tropical Agriculture,” and novels such as Amalia by José Marmol and the Bolivian Nataniel Aguirre’s Juan de la Rosa, were openly partisan. By the end of the century, sophisticated scholars were beginning to address the history of their countries, as did João Capistrano de Abreu in his Capítulos história colonial.
It is often in memoirs such as those by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier or Sarmiento that we find the descriptions of everyday life that in Europe were incorporated into the realist novel. Latin American literature at this time was seen largely as a pedagogical tool, a “light” alternative to speeches, sermons, and philosophical tracts—though, in fact, especially in the early part of the century, even the readership for novels was quite small because of the high rate of illiteracy. Nevertheless the vigorous orally transmitted culture of the gaucho and the urban underclasses became the linguistic repertoire of some of the most interesting nineteenth–century writers—most notably José Hernández, author of the “gauchesque” poem “Martin Fierro,” which enjoyed an unparalleled popularity. But for many writers the task was not to appropriate popular language but to civilize, and their literary works were strongly influenced by the high style of political oratory.
The editorial committee has not attempted to limit its selection to the better–known writers such as Machado de Assis; it has also selected many works that have never appeared in translation or writers whose works have not been translated recently. The series now makes these works available to the English–speaking public.
Because of the preferences of funding organizations, the series initially focuses on writing from Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andean region, and Mexico. Each of our editions will have an introduction that places the work in its appropriate context and includes explanatory notes.
We owe special thanks to the late Robert Glynn of the Lampadia Foundation, whose initiative gave the project a jump–start, and to Richard Ekman and his successors at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also generously supported the project. We also thank the Rockefeller Foundation for funding the 1996 symposium, “Culture and Nation in Iberoamerica,” organized by the editorial board of the Library of Latin America. The support of Edward Barry of Oxford University Press was crucial in the founding years of the project, as has been the advice and help of Ellen Chodosh and Elda Rotor of Oxford University Press. The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has been serving since 1998 as the grant administrator of the project.
—Jean Franco
Richard Graham
Translator’s Note
Translating Ricardo Palma’s Peruvian Traditions has been a challenging experience. There is the usual problem of being faithful to a nineteenth–century style, and other hurdles as well. I was duly forewarned of them by the Spanish Larousse encyclopedia, which alerted me to the “archaisms, Peruvianisms, and proverbs” that are a hallmark of Palma’s style, and by a book by Palma titled Two Thousand Seven Hundred Expressions Missing in the Dictionary (1906).
Confronted by these rather daunting obstacles as I began my translation, I worked with my editor Christopher Conway to comb through specialized dictionaries and other reference books for answers to lexical mysteries that I had been unable to solve unaided. Despite many successes, there were still problematic words and phrases. I acknowledge with gratitude the indispensable contributions to this volume by Professors Julio Ortega, José Amor y Vázquez and Luis Millones Figueroa, whose detailed input resolved my remaining doubts. Thanks are also due to Jerelyn Johnson, for helping prepare the originals for translation.
—Helen Lane
Chronology of Ricardo Palma
Introduction
In January of 1881 the Chilean army occupied Lima after a string of naval and land victories over Peru’s poor defenses. To the horror of its inhabitants, Chilean regulars vandalized parts of the city, cutting down trees, destroying monuments and fountains, and pillaging all valuables from the medical school, including the wooden benches in the lecture halls. Worst of all, the National Library was taken over by occupying forces and transformed into an army barracks. The library held some 50,000 books and 8,000 rarities, including colonial accounts of the Autos de Fé that had taken place in Lima, an edition of Plato dated 1491, and the Mozarab Missal of Toledo of 1500.1 Almost the entire contents of the library, including portraits of historical personages such as Pizarro and the Spanish Viceroys, were destroyed or dispersed by Chilean soldiers, who shipped some valuables to Chile and sold many of the books to innkeepers in Lima for use as wrapping paper.
The assistant director of the library was Ricardo Palma, a celebrated man of letters who had retired from political life in 1872 to pursue research and writing. When Chilean forces advanced on Lima, they set fire to his house, destroying his personal library and several unpublished manuscripts. Displaced with his wife and children in Lima, Palma deplored the destruction of the National Library and drafted a letter of protest for the director of the library, Manuel de Odriozola, to sign. “To seize upon the libraries, archives, cabinets of physical and anatomic objects, works of art, scientific apparatus and instruments, and all that is necessary for intellectual progress,” he wrote, “is to invest war with a barbarous character foreign to the lights of the age, to the usages of honorable belligerents, and to the universally recognized principles of right.”2 When the protest was sent to diplomatic representatives of the United States, and smuggled out to Ayacucho, where the Peruvian government–in–exile published it, the Chileans briefly imprisoned Palma and Odriozola for undermining their authority.
After the signing of the Treaty of Ancón in 1883, which ended the Chilean occupation of Peru, a minister in the Peruvian administration of President Miguel Iglesias summoned Palma and requested that he become director of the National Library and to supervise its reconstruction. Flabbergasted by the enormity of what was being proposed, and the paucity of resources at his disposal, Palma responded: “Do you propose that I become a mendicant librarian?” “That’s right,” replied the minister, “ask for alms for the good of your homeland.”3Palma agreed and began a letter–writing campaign imploring friends, acquaintances, and public institutions around the world to help rebuild the library. Numerous governments and cultural institutions, commercial firms, and distinguished writers agreed to assist Palma by donating books. Meanwhile, the “mendicant librarian” and his assistants scoured Lima and recovered thousands of books from the original collection. Less than a year after beginning his task with a tenth of the original contents of the library intact, Palma reopened the library on July, 28 1884, with a catalog that was almost 30,000 strong.
The restoration and growth of the National Library under Palma’s tenure, which lasted until 1912, was a mon
umental achievement, but also one full of resonance within the arc of his career as one of the most popular writers of his time on the Latin American continent. For Palma, the cultural terrain of his unstable country was not dissimilar to the gutted library of Lima: the manifold stories of the republic’s past, as woven into custom, tall tales, and popular speech, needed to be preserved for posterity. Beginning at mid–century, before the disastrous war with Chile, Palma experimented with a new way of combining history and fiction: the tradition. What began as a romantic exercise in historical fiction, full of the emotional and expressive cliches of that style, evolved into a polished combination of historical fact and invention expressed in the vernacular speech of the inhabitants of Lima.4In the process, Palma succeeded in capturing the comic sensibility of the city’s criollo, whose penchant for irony and satire is well known in Peruvian culture and literary history.5Unlike a significant segment of the nationalist intelligentsia of the continent, which enshrined the civilizing authority of the printed word over orality in the name of “progress,” Palma recovered the humorous inventiveness of popular speech for building and maintaining a national historical memory. His traditions were published in the principal newspapers of Latin America, in Peruvian and Spanish editions, and translated in the North American and British press.6Readers delighted in his irreverent approach to portraying characters and events from Peru’s colonial past, as in the case of a fifteenth–century Spanish captain whose embraces could kill, the rivalry between a bell ringer and a viceroy in the seventeenth century, and the prodigious miracles of a saint who could bring a dog, cat, and mouse to eat from the same plate. “To save literary jewels and historical events from forgetfulness” Palma wrote about his work as a tradicionista (author of traditions), “is to perform a useful service to the cause of America.”7Thus, the epistolary crusade to restore the National Library was a task well suited to Palma, whose traditions were predicated on an allconsuming passion for old manuscripts and books, and on the repositories of historical memory that existed in popular culture. By the end of the century, thanks to Palma’s popularity, the tradition spread across the continent in a variety of forms, as imitators revisited oral traditions and old manuscripts for their own historical fictions.8
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