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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).' 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 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 where Dario actually coined the term in 1890, a brief essay that recounts his encounter with Palma, the colonial, that is, pre-modern, nature of the city is stressed.2 For instance, Darío notes that 'There floats over Lima still some of the good old time of the colonial period" ("Ricardo Palma" 10O).3 However, it could be that the distance of Lima from modernity is precisely what permits Darío to name and theorize his movement, modernisme, and, indirectly, international modernism.
But if Darío's visit to Palma is of significance in the history of international modernism, it arguably also represents a central moment in the evolution of Spanish American literature. The encounter between Palma and Darío can be seen as that of two alternative approaches to the creation of independent national and regional literatures. Palma, as the author of the Tradiciones peruanas frequently set in the viceregal period, can be identified with the construction of a Peruvian and, by implication, Latin American literature by means of the reinterpretation and extension of the colonial cultural and literary legacy. As his coinage of the term modernismo attests, Darío can be linked to the incorporation of the region's literature into what Pascale Casanova has called a world republic of letters, characterized by cosmopolitanism and...