AN UNBRIDGED GAP
Rodell, Katherine
An Unbridged Gap THE KNIGHTS OF THE CAPE, and 37 other selections from the Tradiciones Peruanas of Ricardo Palma. [Translated from the Spanish by Harriet de Onis. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. Reviewed...
...Nothing could make this contrast more dramatically clear than this little book of sketches by the Peruvian writer, Ricardo Palma...
...The wealth and splendor, the cruelty and the constant and joyful fighting and killing, the superstition and the Inquisition, the tortures and the love affairs, make fine Sabatini-Hollywood reading until one stops to realize that it is one of the most authentic pictures we have of those early days...
...The English who came to New England had been detached from the soil by the breaking up of the feudal estates, and they had a tradition of hard work and a fierce desire to own their own land and be their own masters...
...SR...
...The transla-tion, by Harriet de Onis, is excellent and faithful...
...And until one compares it with some chronicle of early New England such as, say, Win-throp's journals or old Samuel Sewall's diary...
...Yet the inheritance from 16th Century Spain and from 17th Century England represented not only a difference in race and time but also a century of revolutionary economic and political development...
...PALMA is one of Peru's most respected writers, but I can not but believe that this is because he has preserved the records of a glamorous past, rather than because of any particular literary merit...
...The Spaniards who went to South America came from a country still feudal, where there was no middle class and manual labor was despised, and where centuries of religious wars had made the sword and the Cross the most important elements in society...
...Then one recognizes again that the gap has not yet been bridged, and that only by understanding something of this background can we ever hope to understand anything of modern Peru or South America...
...Reviewed by Katherine Rodell THAT the cultural heritage of North and South America is utterly different in every important respect is so much of a commonplace that, as with most cliches, it is generally stated and as generally ignored...
...They are gossipy anecdotes about the conquistadores and the folk tales and legends of the earliest days of Spanish rule in Peru and of the pomp and intrigues of the Vice-Royalty...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 45
