Palma, Ricardo (1833–1919)

Ricardo Palma (b. 7 February 1833; d. 6 October 1919), Peruvian diplomat, politician, writer, and historian. Born in Lima, Palma was the illegitimate son of Pedro Palma. He began writing as a very young man, as early as 1848. From 1861 to 1863 he lived in Chile. Then in 1864 he journeyed to Europe, living briefly in Paris and traveling to England and Venice.

Upon his return to Peru (1865), Palma served in a number of government posts, including secretary to President José Balta in 1868. In addition he was elected to three terms in the Peruvian Senate. At the same time he worked as assistant librarian of Lima and contributed to the prestigious Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa.

Palma is best remembered, however, for his own written work. He adopted romanticism, which came to Peru from Europe, and became the foremost advocate of that literary movement in his country. He wrote poems and articles but is known primarily for his Tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian Traditions, 4 vols., 1893–1896), short stories that combined history with his own imagination. This was a genre of romanticism that Palma acquired from Spain, where it combined the romantic legend with costumbrismo (articles about customs). Many of his traditions dealt with Inca themes, and he wrote extensively about colonial Peru, to the point that some critics referred to him as "colonialist Palma." Whatever his subjects, he gained for himself and Peru a wide literary reputation outside the nation and the region.

Palma also popularized history for the reading public. Critics, however, complained that he bound literature so tightly with history that people could not extricate fact from fiction, and that therefore he was deficient as a historian.

Also a political activist, Palma tried to overthrow President Ramón Castilla in 1860, but he failed and was exiled to Chile for two years. When the War of the Pacific with Chile began in 1879, Palma enlisted in the reserves, but the invading Chileans destroyed his personal library of several thousand books and manuscripts. Peru's National Library also suffered looting at the hands of the Chileans. After Palma became director of the library in 1883, he spent the next twenty-eight years rebuilding the collection. He catalogued more than twenty thousand books in less than four years and waged such a tenacious campaign to rebuild the library that he became known as bibliotecario mendigo (the begging librarian).

While his library and archival activity was critical to the preservation of Peru's literature, Palma's own written work expanded the historical knowledge of Peru and made the public aware of the nation's past.

See alsoCastilla, Ramón; Literature: Spanish America; Peru: Peru Since Independence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sturgis E. Leavitt, "Ricardo Palma," in Hispanic American Historical Review 3 (1920): 63-67.

Harriet De Onís, The Knights of the Cape, and Thirty-Seven Other Selections from the "Tradiciones peruanas" of Ricardo Palma (1945).

Sturgis E. Leavitt, "Ricardo Palma and the Tradiciones peruanas," in Hispania 34 (1951): 349-353.

Shirley L. Arora, Proverbial Comparisons in Ricardo Palma's "Tradiciones peruanas" (1966).

Rubén Vargas Ugarte, "Don Ricardo Palma y la historia," in Journal of Inter-American Studies 9 (1967): 213-224.

Phyllis Rodríguez-Peralta, "Liberal Undercurrents in Palma's Tradiciones peruanas," in Revista de estudios hispánicos 15 (1981): 283-297.

José Miguel Oviedo, "Ricardo Palma," in Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé (1989), vol. 1, pp. 221-228.

Additional Bibliography

Holguín Callo, Oswaldo. Tiempos de infancia y bohemia: Ricardo Palma, 1833–1860. Lima: Pontifica Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1994.

Santillana Cantella, Tomás Gmo. Ayacucho en las Tradiciones peruanos de Ricardo Palma. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, 2002.

                                       Jack Ray Thomas