Blest Gana Alberto - Martín Rivas

LIBRARY OF LATIN AMERICA

General Editor
Jean Franco

Series Editor for Brazil
Richard Graham, with the assistance of Alfredo Bosi

Editorial Board
Tulio Halpern Donghi
Ivn Jaksi
Naomi Lindstrom
Eduardo Lozano
Francine Masiello

A Novel by
ALBERTO BLEST GANA

Translated from the Spanish by
TESS ODWYER

With an Introduction by
JAIME CONCHA

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Printed in the United States of America
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To my mother and father
Chung Soon and Jack ODwyer

Martn Rivas, Alberto Blest Gana

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 translations 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 Halpern Donghi (at the University of California, Berkeley), Ivn Jaksi (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 which 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 predominatedalthough there were also alternative nationalisms at the grassroots level. The cultural elite were well educated in European thought and letters, but as statesmen, 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 Rousseaus 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 presidency of Rosas, wrote Facundo: Civilizacin y barbarie a stinging denunciation of that government. He returned after Rosas overthrow and was elected president in 1868. Andrs 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 countrys 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. It is still surprising that the writing of Andrs Bello, who contributed fundamental works to so many different fields, has never been translated into English. Although there is a recent translation of Sarmientos celebrated Facundo, there is no translation of his memoirs, Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Recollections). The predominance of memoirs in the Library of Latin America series is no accidentmany 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 Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis work, including Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brs Cubas. There is no reason why other novels and writers who are not so well known outside Latin Americathe Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turners Aves sin nido, Nataniel Aguirres Juan de la Rosa, Jos de Alencars Iracema, Juana Manuela Gorritis short storiesshould 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 Jos Joaqun Fernndez 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 Andrs Bello, Ode to Tropical Agriculture, and novels such as Amalia by Jos Mrmol and the Bolivian Nataniel Aguirres 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 Joo Capistrano de Abreu in his Captulos de histria 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 tractsthough, 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 writersmost notably Jos Hernndez, author of the gauch-esque poem Martn 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.