José Asunción Silva

José Asunción Silva was born in Bogotá in 1865 into a family of well-off merchants. A stay in Paris and London, at the age of twenty, acquainted him with the French poetry of the day. The bankruptcy of his father's firm and his father's death left him in charge of a ruined business and of creditors whom he would flee to the end. His sister Elvira died in 1891 and he never recovered. Appointed to the consulate at Caracas, he lost the manuscripts of several books in 1895, in the wreck of the steamer bringing him back. He killed himself in Bogotá in May 1896, at the age of thirty, after having a doctor show him the exact position of the heart.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryNocturnoJosé Asunción Silva · 1894not translated into EnglishLiteraturePublic domain