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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
America became a reality in western civilization from the early period of the Golden Age in the literature of the Iberian peninsula. By the seventeenth century the works of a few outstanding personalities already born in America had been added to the bibliographical sources available in the European libraries and universities.
The literature of Puerto Rico has also had a place in the panorama of Spanish American letters since the arrival of European culture at the end of the fifteenth century and the era of conquest and colonization during the sixteenth century. The trends of the literary history of this Caribbean island have followed the pattern of the literary development in the New World. It was initiated with the letters and the chronicles, the epic poems and the annals of the first men entrusted with the mission of conquest and settlement in the newly acquired possessions.
1 The first Historia de la Literatura Puertorriqueña, by Francisco Manrique Cabrera, was published in New York in 19 56.
2 Lasierra, Fray Iñigo Abbad y, Historia geográfica, civil y política de la isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (Madrid, 1788).Google Scholar (Reprinted in the first volume of the Memorias geográficas, históricas y económicas by D. Pedro Tomás de Córdova, Puerto Rico, 1831). New edition, with notes and commentaries by José Julián Acosta (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1866). This history is not only an important document as such but a beautiful and inspiring “literary” work in which Abbad y Lasierra appears as a lover of nature and folklore. There are wonderful descriptions in the book.
3 The spelling of the word “jíbaro” appears in Alonso’s book, published in 1849, with a “g.” The origin of this noun and adjective is not clear. It was never used in the books on Puerto Rico or by the writers born on the island until the nineteenth century. According to Malaret, D. Augusto, the “jíbaro” is “the white Puerto Rican peasant.” See Vocabulario de Puerto Rico (New York, 1955), pp. 196–197.Google Scholar
4 Aguinaldo Puertorriqueño. Colección de producciones originales en prosa y verso (Puerto Rico, 1843). There is a recent edition (1946) by the University of Puerto Rico to comemorate the centenary of the first edition. This book, as well as El Gíbaro (1849), is a landmark. A chain of “aguinaldos” followed every year and they are still published. “Aguinaldo” means both a Christmas present and a Christmas song.
5 The poet Francisco Matos Paoli, in the introductory note to the 1946 edition of the Aguinaldo Puertorriqueño, says that the authors “aspired … to direct our literature through the ways of a higher culture than the one offered by the oral source of folklore.” The letter by D. Francisco Vasallo, the father of one of the young authors of the “Aguinaldo,” inserted at the end of the book, called the attention of the writers to the fact that “the traditional customs of our fathers” must be respected and honored.
In the prologue to Juan Bobo y la Dama de Occidente (México, 1956) René Marqués expounds this idea, shared by most writers in the present: “Somos occidentales desde nuestra nacionalidad puertorriqueña. Sólo proyectaremos lo nuestro (arte, literatura, pensamiento) a la cultura de Occidente, partiendo de nuestra raíz nacional. Para ahondar en lo puertorriqueño, elevándolo a valor universal, no es necesario el narcisismo ni la mirada hipnótica, fija en nuestro pasado. Tampoco es preciso, para reconocer nuestra responsabilidad occidental, desintegrar lo puertorriqueño, atomizarlo, para dispersar sus partículas ciegamente, irresponsablemente, en un nirvana insólito creado artificialmente por los que a si mismos se llaman occidentalistas”.
6 J. R. Jiménez (1881—), came to America from his native Spain in 1936 and received the Nobel Prize in 1956. He has lived in Puerto Rico since 1951. His friendship with Darío lasted for many years and the letters between the old master and the young Jiménez have been bequeathed to the Library of Congress in Washington by the Spanish poet. Darío was also a personal friend of the Puerto Rican poets De Diego and Lloréns Torres. Jiménez’s influence in contemporary Puerto Rican poetry is as great in the present as the influence of Darío was in the period which extended from 1898 to about 1920.
7 Carmen Marrero, in her study on Lloréns Torres (New York, 1953), pp. 35–36, has this to say about the Revista de las Antillas: “Esta revista estaba publicada por la Compañía Editorial Antillana, corporación constituida por un grupo de poetas y escritores de solvencia económica. Salía mensualmente y tenía varias secciones donde se acogía material diverso de marcado interés. Llegó a alcanzar una elevada reputación, imponiéndose rápidamente en España y en Hispanoamérica, logrando sumar los colaboradores más distinguidos. Es opinión unánime entre los puertorriqueños que la Revista de las Antillas es lo mejor y más completo que se ha publicado en Puerto Rico en su género. Entre sus colaboradores asiduos se contaba a Rubén Darío, y Santos Chocano hizo una visita a Puerto Rico atraído por el foco intelectual que encarnaba la revista”.
8 The novelist and critic Enrique Laguerre has expressed this idea in his unpublished study on La Poesía Modernista en Puerto Rico (1942). In his recent book Pulso de Puerto Rico (San Juan, 1956), p. 9, he establishes the relation between the contemporary writers and the “modernistas”: “En los años de 1910 a 1930 algunos escritores como Nemesio R. Canales, Luis Lloréns Torres, Pablo Morales Cabrera y Miguel Meléndez Muñoz, se anticipan a lo que ha de ser la preocupación máxima de los escritores de 1930 hasta nuestros días. Pese a su persistente curiosidad de mundo, hay en Canales reiteradas manifestaciones de expresión peculiarmente jíbara, en su zumbonería, y en su aparente inocencia de Juan Bobo. Lloréns Torres busca raíces puertorriqueñas en lo indígena y en lo español y Pablo Morales Cabrera utiliza una narración de alientos universales para captar, en su substancia, los elementos folklóricos de nuestro país”.
9 The son of Virgilio Dávila, José Antonio Dávila (1898–1941), a poet himself, translated into English all the sonnets of Pueblito de Antes. He also made excellent translations of English poems into Spanish.
10 There are excellent critical studies of the poetry of Luis Palés Matos. See: Blanco, Tomás, Sobre Palés Matos (Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños, 1950)Google Scholar; de Vázquez, Margot Arce, “Los poemas negros de Luis Palés Matos”; “El Adjetivo en la Danza Negra de Luis Palés Matos”; “Luis Palés Matos, Mago de la palabra,” in Impresiones (San Juan, P.R., 1950), pp. 43–80.Google Scholar
11 See Meléndez, Concha, La Inquietud Sosegada (San Juan, Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños, 1946; second ed., 1956).Google Scholar See my review of his recent books in Antología Poética (1924–1950), and La Llama Pensativa (Madrid, 1954).
12 See Maria Teresa Babín, “El Tema de Puerto Rico en la literatura del presente,” in Asomante (abril-junio, 1955), pp. 6–17.
13 My book Fantasia Boricua, Estampas de mi tierra (New York, 1956), is based on emotions and thoughts inspired by my homeland. I have recreated childhood memories and experiences through personal and lyrical images inseparable from the feeling for the land itself.
14 A statement of the main bibliographical sources available on the literature of Puerto Rico is annexed.