INTRODUCTION
Gray Casement translation
These tales are selected, with minor changes in a few places, from the English version of Cuentos Ticos published in Boston in 1905 and translated by Gray Casement; Mr. Casement prefixed a generous foreword upon Costa Rica and revealed himself as a sensitive interpreter of the people among whom he had been. He had nothing, however, to say of the author, Señor Ricardo Fernández Guardia, and, indeed, in one of the most recent literary anthologies to come out of little Costa Rica I find this illuminating sentence: “Twenty-five years have not yet gone by, and Hojarascas, together with Cuentos Ticos are already two unknown books.” If, then, Costa Ricans themselves have been negligent of tales that have won for their country honor in other tongues, we cannot wholly wonder that Señor Fernández Guardia was left out of Coester’s A Literary History of Spanish America.
At any event, he presents an interesting case of literary dualism. Born in the province of Alejuela in 1867, he went to Paris at the age of six, returning to Costa Rica in 1878 with a French education. In fact, he had to learn his native tongue all over again. Early, he entered the diplomatic career followed by his father, serving his country here and abroad.
It is characteristic of his career that his first essay was written in French, and that it was, as Señor Sotela has said, “an extravagant drama of American adventure ... inspired by the novels of Fenimore Cooper.” In 1891, as a result of an article upon Seville, where he had lived for some time, he won the esteem of Rubén Darío, the great Nicaraguan poet, who had recently arrived in Costa Rica.
This auspicious beginning was strengthened when, in 1894, upon the appearance of Hojarascas, he was lucky enough to win the kind words of Manuel Gutíerrez-Nájera, the great Mexican poet and prosateur. After an interval spent in the Legation at Paris he returned and wrote—just to prove he was not merely a Frenchified stylist—those Cuentos Ticos to which he owes his reputation. There are other historical writings; he has edited, too, his father’s works. Then, in 1921, came his Crónicas Coloniales.
The collected tales derive their name (as the author tells us) from the sobriquet tico applied to Costa Ricans, just as the inhabitants of Guatemala are known as chopines, those of Nicaragua as nicos or pinolios and those of Salvador and Honduras, guanacos. Cuentos Ticos therefore means “Costa Rican Tales.” In these, the Parisian aristocrat becomes the Costa Rican regionalist. He professed to believe that his tales touched no circumference reaching beyond Central America, yet they are better known outside of his native land than any other of its literary products. They are, on the whole, simple, direct transcriptions of the national life,—its politics, its religious creed and superstitions, its folk lore, its peculiarities. Yet in three such tales as I have chosen, they easily attain a wider significance. The Miraculous Saint is a piece of irony that makes fine use of the religious and political background; it even has a hint for United States bootleggers, Anno Domini, 1924; Politics shows that ironical vein in a more satirical, almost cynical aspect, while Chivalry, far from being exclusively Costa Rican, reminded me long ago of Artzibasheff’s later tale about the Russian doctor.
Señor Rogelio Sotela has written sympathetically and in scholarly fashion of his nation’s letters, in two books that deal with the same material: Valores Literarios de Costa Rica (1920) and Escritores y Poetas de Costa Rica (1923). It is in the foreword to the second of these that he has given, as the salient traits of Costa Rican letters, a certain joviality, optimism and measure. There is no passionate debating of “schools” and “movements.” Something of this equability may be found in Fernández Guardia’s tales.
He is not the only Costa Rican writer of recent times that deserves a wider audience. Among others, I hope to present such admirable gentlemen as Señores Joaquin García Monje and Roberto Brenes Mesén.
ISAAC GOLDBERG.
Roxbury, Massachusetts.