Carmen Lyra

**María Isabel Carvajal Quesada** (1887-1949), known by her pseudonym **Carmen Lyra**, was a Costa Rican author.

## Biography

She was born in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, in January 15th 1887, as the illegitimate daughter of Elena Carvajal Castro. After attending the Superior School for Girls and graduating in 1904 she started to work in San Juan de Dios Hospital as a novice in 1906. Because of her condition of illegitimate daughter she wasn't allowed to become a nun, so she started to work as a teacher. Since 1906 she was already writing articles for several magazines and newspapers, and in 1912 she founded along Lilia González the first children's magazine in Costa Rica, called *San Selerín*. In 1918 she published her first novel, *En una silla de ruedas*, that tales the life of a paralyzed boy who grows up to become an artist.

In 1919 she took part of a teacher's protest against dictator Federico Tinoco Granados. There Carvajal gave such a speech that managed to galvanize the crowd so much they ended up the goverment's news office. Carvajal managed to evade the police because she disguised herself as a news seller. Despite the situation she published in 1920 her most well-known and beloved book, the fairy tale collection *Cuentos de mi tía Panchita*. After studying at the Sorbonne and travelling to Italy and England to know the most advanced teaching methods she returned to Costa Rica in 1921 and in 1926 she founded a kindergarten following Maria Montessori's thesis, that she learnt when she travelled to Italy. In 1931 she founded the Communist Party of Costa Rica alongside Manuel Mora Valverde. That same year she published the book *Bananos y Hombers*, that anticipated the banana worker's strike of 1934. Her politics became more and more radical, untill 1948, when after the Costa Rican Civil War the Communist Party was outlawed and Lyra had to exile to Mexico. She died in Mexico City in May 4th 1949 at the age of sixty two, after her petition to came back to Costa Rica because of her fragile health was denied.

## Works

Lyra's collection *Cuentos de mi tía Panchita*, first published in 1920, consists in twenty three folktales that she heard from a real woman, the titular Aunt Panchita, who she described in the book's prologue. Most of the first thirteen tales could be classified as wonder tales, because all of them have in a more or less degree magical elements or plot-wise can be classified on the wonder tales category in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. Because the tales are folk sories from a Latin American country colonized by Spaniards, it's easy to see the influence of the Iberian oral tradition, as we can see for example in La casita de las torrejas, a version of *Hänsel and Gretel* that has more in common with Sergio Hernández de Soto's Extremadurant variant *The Two Brothers* than with the most well known version by the brothers Grimm, or *The Devil's Mother-in-Law*, a version of Fernán Caballero's tale of the same name. The story of *Going Out a Sunday Seven* can be classified easily in ATU 503 *The Gifts of the Little People*, but like in the Spanish versions the magic helpers are here witches celebrating a coven instead of gnomes or elves. *Uvieta* tells a story in which Death gets stuck on a branch of an old man's grapevine and can get down, similar to several tales collected in Spain, although the Spanish versions tend to have Death stuck on an old woman's pear tree. *The Monkey* beling to the ATU 402 *The Animal Bride*, in which the enchanted princess takes the form of a monkey, a pretty common form in Ibero American oral tradition. *The Flower of Olivar* also belongs to a really common type in the Ibero American tradition, the story of the elder brothers killing the youngest to steal him the flower that can cure their ill father, and a flower growing in the place the youngest brother was buried that sings a song narrating the crime. *The Bird Sweet Enchantment* tells a story whose variants have been collected really late in the Iberian peninsula, but pretty common in Latin American, the tale type number 550 *The Bird, the Horse and the Princess*. *The Black Girl and the Blond Girl* is an unusual *Cinderella* variant that doesn't have the iconic shoe test, and the heroine is helped by a doll that turns out to be the Virgin Mary.

But there are exceptions among this group. The tale La Cucarachita Mandinga is a cumulative tale with a plot similar to Caballero's tale *The Little Ant*, while the story El tonto de las adivinanzas could be calssified in ATU 851 *Winning a Princess with a Riddle*, a tale type included in the Romantic tales' category.

The second half consists of what could be considered animal tales with a common protagonist, tío Conejito (**tr.** Uncle Little Rabbit), a trickster protagonist.

## Cultural Impact and Legacy

*Cuentos de mi tía Panchita* is considered still to this day a classic of children's literature not only in Costa Rica, but in all Spanish speaking countries. In the inventory of children's literature *Bienvenidos a la fiesta*, published in 2001, Spanish literary critic Luis Daniel González called Lyra's narrative fluid, with excellent descriptions and timely comments, and put it in his list of recommended books. That same year Odilie Cantillano created an exhaustive study of the book's tales, comparing them with all the Spanish and Latin American variants of the same tale types that the tales in the book belong.