Pedro Paz Soldán y Unanue
Pedro Manuel Nicolás Paz Soldán y Unanue (29 May 1839 – 5 January 1895) was a Peruvian poet, journalist, and man of letters. He was the true founder of Peruvian lexicography with his Diccionario de peruanismos (1883–84). A satirist of the customs of his contemporaries and fierce critic of other writers, he was recognized for the humor and criollismo of his writings.
He was also a diplomat and historian, as well as translator of Virgil and Lucretius, and professor of literature and Greek at the National University of San Marcos. He wrote under the pseudonym Juan de Arona. It was originally the name of the hacienda he inherited from his maternal grandfather José Hipólito Unanue y Pavón, located in Cañete. The sugar plantation seems to have been named after the Spanish town of Arona, which is a municipality in the Canary Islands.
Contents
Biography
He was born in Lima, the son of Pedro Paz-Soldán Ureta and Francisca Unanue y de la Cuba. His paternal grandfather was a native of Carrión de los Condes, in Castilla la Vieja, while his maternal grandfather was none other than the renowned Peruvian physician and independence hero José Hipólito Unanue y Pavón, from whom he inherited a splendid library in addition to the San Juan de Arona hacienda in the Cañete Province. From there he took the nickname of Juan de Arona. He was a direct nephew of José Gregorio Paz Soldán, Mateo Paz Soldán and Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán y Ureta. His uncle Mateo Paz Soldán y Ureta also stood out in the field of erudition, with the first great study of the Geography of Peru, which was published in 1860 by another of his uncles, equally erudite, Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán y Ureta.
His first studies were at the convictorio carolino, where the most select youngsters of the country studied, but the political upheavals of those years made the family move to Cañete, where he was able to nourish himself with profitable readings, especially of the classics and apply himself to his Latin translations. "Those were undoubtedly those lush years," says Villarán, "the most peaceful stage of his existence, at least as a whole and as long as he was not agitated by nostalgia and pessimism."[1]
He remained in Cañete (except for sporadic trips to Arequipa or Iquique), until the age of 18 when he spent a whole year in the city of Valparaíso. In 1859, he embarked for Europe in the longest and most profitable of his trips, which he always remembered for its "ineffable fruitions and inexhaustible teachings"[2] He arrived in London and from there he went to Paris, to enter Spain by land, visiting San Sebastian, Bilbao, Valladolid and Madrid. He stayed in Spain for six months, visiting renowned literary figures such as Bretón de los Herreros and Ventura de la Vega.
After a regular stay in Spain, Arona continued his travels in France and Italy, from where he went to Egypt, visit Alexandria and Cairo, and then Damascus and Istanbul until returning through Greece to Italy and France, from where he returns again to Peru at the beginning of 1863, year in which he publishes, precisely in Paris, his first book of poems, with a clearly romantic title: "Ruinas ("Ruins").
In 1860, while still in London, as he himself declared, Arona began to devise a work "on this ungrateful subject of provincialisms". In the young Arona "the memories of the homeland and the vivacity of feelings" were combined, treating it provisionally as a "Gallery of philological novelties". It was also during this trip that he was designing the descriptive poems that he would publish in Lima in 1867 under the title Cuadros y episodios peruanos, where he defended the use of Peruvian expressions, although some may accuse him of being "tawdry" and think that good style consists of introducing some flamboyant Hispanicism "brought by the skin of his teeth from the banks of the Manzanares". At the end of the book he included an index of the "Peruvian terms" contained in the book, with a warning that already declareed his intention to publish a complete lexicographical repertoire, which would not see the light of day until 1882.
Arona, a man of atrabiliary and fractious character by nature, always showed interest and concern for language issues. In one of his very numerous satirical poems, he distills a good proportion of bitterness with respect to the situation in which, according to him, the language found itself.
Dictionary of Peruvianisms
Arona fully meets the profile described by Ricardo Palma about those Americans who lived "in love with the language of Castile" and were "more papist than the pope,", because of "the mania we have for the purity of the language".
In his Cuadros y episodios peruanos he offered for the first time his conception of Peruvianism: "I understand by Peruvian term or Peruvianism not only those voices that really are, for being derived from Quechua or corrupted from Spanish, or invented by the Creoles with the help of the Castilian language, but also those that, although very traditional, allude to objects or customs so general among us and so uncommon in Spain that we can appropriate them and call them Peruvianisms as if they were not in the Dictionary of the Spanish Academy. "
The announced dictionary would take its time for maturation, meanwhile Arona would go on to publish some samples in Lima newspapers at the end of 1871 and beginning of 1872, confessing that although more than twenty years have passed since its beginning until its definitive publication, his work was incomplete in relation to works "perhaps less matured", referring to those of Rufino José Cuervo and Zorobabel Rodríguez. With his characteristic intemperance, Arona then lashed out against the "provincialographers" of Spanish America who only accumulate words and expressions. In fact, his work does not deal with all the Peruvianisms that he had indicated in his Cuadros y episodios peruanos, since there are terms such as aromo and frutilla that are not included in the repertoire. Arona justifies himself by declaring proudly that he only paid attention to the unknown and hidden Peruvianisms, since "the rest is a matter of mere vocabulary, which can be recorded by any amateur."
His dictionary is, according to Carrión Ordóñez, more a set of literary pictures than a true lexicographical collection, although it abounds with philological information and it is undeniable that he was a forerunner in the compilation and analysis of Americanisms and in the metalexicographical commentary of the works of his contemporaries.
Literary and historiographic works
When he returned to Cañete, the production of plays by Manuel Nicolás Corpancho (who died in a shipwreck in Mexico) and other romantic writers had just subsided. Despite his classical training, he joined the romantic movement with poems full of pain and despair, although in truth, as Jorge Villarán points out, he had no reason for it, when his life unfolded in the open air "among smiling vegetation, pure atmosphere, a happy home, economic ease".[3] He married Cipriana Valle-Riestra in 1867 and two years later publishes the weekly Saeta, which only lasted two months. He premiered Más menos y ni más ni menos, a one act comic play in in verse, at the Teatro Principal in Lima.
He collaborated in literary magazines and continued writing poetry copiously. In the meantime, he worked as a literature professor at the Guadalupe College and at the San Marcos Faculty of Letters, also teaching Latin and Greek. With a large family to support and difficulties in the management of the estate (which he finally lost to face a series of unpayable debts), he entered the diplomatic corps of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1879, he was Chargé d'Affaires in Chile when the conflict broke out. Then he is commissioned to Buenos Aires, where he begins to edit, in 1882, his Diccionario de peruanismos, which he completes in Lima the following year. He continued to write poems while misfortunes culminate in the death of his wife in 1886.
Academic
"The aggressiveness of his character increased with time", Villarán points out,[4] and certainly the misfortunes and disappointments soured during his last years to the point of obfuscating him "to the point of committing unquestionable blunders". In 1887, the Peruvian Academy corresponding to the Spanish one was inaugurated, but Arona refused to participate until the terms of said "correspondence" were erased. Its first director would be Francisco García Calderón in spite of the fact that Ricardo Palma himself wanted Monsignor José Antonio Roca y Boloña to be its director.
In his later years, his attacks on political and literary adversaries did not abate, slamming Palma, Matto de Turner and others, until his death on January 5, 1895. Even his greatest mentor cannot deny "the bellicosity of his temperament", although he also justifies it by "the stupor and envy that he found everywhere",[5] finding in Arona an unquestionable "moral value" for his independence and his loyalty "to the dictates of his conscience".[6]
