Sources of Palacio Valdes' las Burbujas

Abstract

Armando Palacio Vald&s' Las burbujas is a murder thriller in which the perpetrator of the perfect crime is finally brought to justice.* Although he opens his short story with a quotation from Emerson's essay Compensation, and although he gives Emerson credit for the philosophical thought of his story, the main sources for Las burbujas go back to antiquity. This paper will show that the principal narrative threads are found in variants of the ancient Grecian legend about the cranes of Ibycus, which reappear in Arabic, general European, and Spanish folklore. Las burbujas first appeared in 1911 among the Papeles del Doctor Angelico, a collection of short stories, miscellaneous papers, and disconnected philosophical disquisitions. It is the eleventh of the fourteen stories in Chapter III of the Papeles', where Palacio Valdes used the device of taking the unpublished literary compilations of a dying friend, Doctor Angelico Jimenez, and publishing them under his own name, as the friend had requested. However, the title of the work still gave credit to the supposed author, and served at the same time to explain the loose, unrelated assortment of literary works contained in the Papeles. Astrafia Marin in his prologue to the Aguilar edition of Palacio