Pablo Palacio

Pablo Palacio (born January 25, 1906 in Loja (Ecuador) , † January 7, 1947 in Guayaquil ) was an Ecuadorian writer and professor.

Life

Palacio's father, the hacienda owner Agustín Costa, did not confess his illegitimate son with the seamstress Clementina Palacio, who came from an impoverished upper-class family (later the father offered his son his own surname, but the latter refused). His mother died young, so that he spent his youth in the care of an uncle who worked in a high position in the administration of the city of Loja. Thanks to the support of his uncle, he was able to take up law studies in the capital Quito, which he graduated in 1931. He became a lawyer and one of the leading members of the Socialist Party of Ecuador . In 1932 he was appointed Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Education (under the new Minister of Education Benjamin Carrión and his successor). In 1936 he was appointed professor of legal history and legal philosophy at the Universidad Central del Ecuador . In 1937 he married Carmita Palacios Cevallos. From 1938 he began to suffer from a mental illness which was attributed to a syphilis infection . He withdrew bit by bit from public life and moved with his wife to Guayaquil for medical treatment in 1940, but could not be cured there either.

plant

Palacio's literary work is relatively small, yet he is one of the few Ecuadorian writers who gained fame across the country's borders in Latin America.

In the ten years of his literary productivity between 1921 and 1932 he created a work of its own that was very different from the work of his contemporaries in Ecuador (including Jorge Icaza and Demetrio Aguilera Malta ), who leaned towards social realism . Palacio wrote about psychology and madness, sickly people and cases, sadistic cannibals and jealous Siamese twins, scared orphans and women looking at the stars. He wrote about everyday but immortal comedies.

His complete works consist of only four books, the volume of short stories Un hombre muerto a puntapiés (“A man killed by kicks”, 1927), the novel Débora (1927) and Vida del ahorcado (“The life of the hanged man”, 1932) and the stage play Comedia imortal ("Immortal Comedy", 1926). His first novel Ojeras de la Virgen (" Dark Circles of the Virgin") won a literary prize from the Loja Province, but was not published. The manuscript is considered lost, a partial publication took place in Quito in 1925 as Un nuevo caso de mariage en trois (“A new case of a three-person wedding”).

The extravagance of Pablo Palacio's work, together with his later mental illness, led contemporary critics to dismiss him as a “madman”, although all of his traditional works were published long before 1938 and his work was largely forgotten or not understood. It wasn't until the 1970s, when authors like Julio Cortázar had an excellent reputation with a comparable independent style, that the Palacios renaissance began. His works are included in numerous anthologies, including the Antología crítica del cuento hispanoamericano del siglo XX , published by Alianza in Madrid in 1992 . Vol. I: Fundadores innovadores ( ISBN 8420672777 ), edited by José Miguel Oviedo , which has been reprinted several times. In 2000 his collected works ( Obras completas ) appeared in a critical edition arranged by Wilfrido Corral . At the end of 2010 the first volume of a bilingual critical text edition (Spanish-German) of the works of Palacio in Germany was published: Pablo Palacio, Kurzgeschichten-Cuentos ( ISBN 9783899752199 ) (edited by Klaus Semsch, Munich: Martin Meidenbauer 2010).

Works

• Un nuevo caso de mariage en trois , Quito 1925, novella
• Comedia inmortal , 1926, stage work
• Débora , Quito 1927, short novel
• Un hombre muerto a puntapiés ( "A man killed with kicks " ), Quito 1927, short stories
• Vida del ahorcado , Quito 1932, novel
• Obras Completas , Madrid, Nanterre u. a .: Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica y Archivos, 2000, ISBN 2-914273-01-0 .
• Short stories / Cuentos. Bilingual edition by Klaus Semsch. Edición bilingüe, Munich: Meidenbauer 2010 (The Complete Works - Obras completas 1) (Series: Ecuador - Studies and Editions, 1)

Web links

• Literature by and about Pablo Palacio in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Pablo Palacio , in: Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, Diccionario Biográfico del Ecuador , Guayaquil 1987-, volume 3.
• Yovany Salazar Estrada, Pablo Palacio, Heraldo de la moderna narrativa ecuatoriana , Quito: Comisión Nacional Permanente de Conmemoraciones Cívicas, 2006, ISBN 978-9978-45-402-2 (238 pages).