Poetry
La miseria del hombre
Not translated into English
Gonzalo Rojas · 1948
Synopsis
Forty-one poems, divided, according to Alfredo Lefebvre, into four sections: man and the world in the first two, eroticism in the third, the denunciation of modern life, from money to false pedagogy, in the last. Death runs through almost every piece; fire is the book's poetic category and the sun stands for death. Fabienne Bradu reads in it an atmosphere of catastrophe, even in the love poems, and a Luciferian voice that defies the Creator, in dense and sometimes obscure images, under the sign of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Villon and Lautréamont.
Context
Published in Valparaíso in 1948, with illustrations by Carlos Pedraza, the collection won first prize in the competition of the Society of Writers of Chile, according to Memoria Chilena. Andrés Sabella immediately hailed its courage; critics later judged its excesses, all the more so as the author partly disowned it and pruned its poems for a 1977 collection, before Marcelo Coddou and Marcelo Pellegrini restored the original versions in 1995, Fabienne Bradu recalls. Ricardo Gullón saw in the book's rarity the reason for its author's modest renown. Bradu translated it into French in 2005 for La Lettre volée.
Who it is for
Dense, dark poems, demanding to read; translated into French, no English translation.
Prizes and reception
The first prizewinning book of a future Cervantes laureate, long rare and little read, according to Ricardo Gullón.
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