Dominican Republic / All works
Short stories
Cosas añejas
Not translated into English
César Nicolás Penson · 1891
Synopsis
Ten narratives, six traditions and four episodes, drawn from the archives and oral memory of Santo Domingo, from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth: the murder of padre Canales by Juan Rincón, the Ponthieux brothers and their friends desecrating the ruins of the monastery of San Francisco, a “martyrdom for honour”, and the murder of the virgins of Galindo, in 1822, at the start of the Haitian occupation.
Context
The volume appeared in 1891 from the Quisqueyana press, sold in instalments of thirty-two pages with engravings, with a prologue by Manuel de Jesús Galván. Penson takes up there the crime of Galindo already sung by Félix María del Monte, and his rejection of Haitian domination is explicit there, notes Acento. Max Henríquez Ureña saw in it the first volume made entirely of Dominican prose narratives; the Archivo General de la Nación reissued it in 2015.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with the author's glossary notes; accounts of old news items, read as much as documents.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the representative works of nineteenth-century Dominican literature, and read in schools.
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