Poetry
Fausto
Not translated into English
Estanislao del Campo · 1866
Opening lines
En un overo rosao,
Flete nuevo y parejito,
Caía al bajo, al trotecito,
Y lindamente sentao,
Un paisano del Bragao,
De apelativo Laguna:
Mozo ginetazo ¡ahijuna!,
Como creo que no hay otro,
Capaz de llevar un potro
A sofrenarlo en la luna.
On a strawberry-roan piebald,
a fresh mount, smooth and even of gait,
there came down to the low ground at a gentle trot,
sitting handsomely in the saddle,
a countryman from Bragado,
Laguna by name:
a crack horseman, the son of a gun!
and I believe there is no other like him,
one who could ride a colt
up to the moon and rein him in there.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from es.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Laguna, a gaucho on horseback, sees his friend Anastasio el Pollo arrive and the two men embrace, according to Nora Pasternac. El Pollo tells him about his evening at the Teatro Colón, where Gounod's Faust was being performed: the arrival, the crowd, then what he thinks he understands of the plot, the devil whom he calls by many names, a doctor named Fausto, a young girl he compares to the Virgin. He speaks of it as if it were real events, and Laguna moves from astonishment to disbelief. The poem has two parts.
Context
The poem was born from a performance of Gounod's Faust at the Teatro Colón, on 24 August 1866 according to an article from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina; according to Pasternac, the author wrote the first draft that very night, and it appeared the same year. It was first attributed to an older poet who signed as Aniceto el Gallo, reports La Nación. Its 1,278 lines, according to Britannica, mix scenes of rural life, praise of nature and mockery of the cultivated city public; Pasternac stresses that the parody presupposes a reader who knows the opera.
Who it is for
A dialogue poem of about thirteen hundred lines, in the Spanish of the countryside; adapted into French in 1995 for a stage production.
Prizes and reception
For La Nación, a joke that became an “original, serious” work, of a refinement rare in gaucho poetry.
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