Rubén Darío Visits Ricardo Palma: Tradition, Cosmopolitanism, and the Development of an Independent Latin American Literature

Abstract

The meeting in 1888 between Rubén Darío, the great Nicaraguan poet, and Ricardo Palma, the author of the Tradiciones peruanas, has recently attracted critical attention outside the field of Spanish American literature, where both writers, especially Darío, have long been acknowledged as major figures. Although, surprisingly, he does not mention Palma by name, this encounter has been singled out by Perry Anderson in his The Origins of Postmodernity as the moment when “the term and idea” of modernism was born (3).¹ There is, as Anderson insinuates, an element of irony in that the origin of a concept frequently seen as defining some of the most adventurous artistic and literary trends of the twentieth century would be linked to Lima, where the two writers met. This city, once the capital of the Spanish Empire in South America, is correctly described by Anderson as, at the end of the nineteenth century, “a distant periphery … of the cultural system of the time” (3). If one looks at the text in which Darío actually coined the term in 1890, a brief essay that recounts his encounter with Palma, one discovers the colonial, that is, premodern, nature of the city is stressed.² For instance, Darío notes, “There floats over Lima still some of the good old time of the colonial period” (“Ricardo Palma” 100).³ However, it could be that the distance between Lima and modernity is precisely what permits Darío to name and theorize his movement, modernismo, and, indirectly, international modernism.