Poetry
Tergiversaciones
Not translated into English
León de Greiff · 1925
Synopsis
A first collection signed with three names that are a single man: Leo Legris, Matías Aldecoa, Gaspar. Each speaks in the first person and one passes from one to another without warning. The pieces run from 1915 to 1922 and are arranged in sections bearing the names of musical forms: ballads, rondels, ariettas, ritornellos. They contain coined words, names from the North, a spelling that refuses usage, and a man who begins by saying he is thought a sleepwalker and a madman. The volume opens with an address to the thirteen companions of his youthful review.
Context
The volume appeared in Bogotá in 1925, from the Augusta press, and carries the subtitle premier mamotreto, a word for a large, shapeless book: the author would number all his collections in this way up to the last. Critics regard this book, with another published the following year, as the only one in his country to come close to the European avant-gardes of the post-war period, without having undergone their direct influence: the poets of his generation, new in name only, were still writing in the manner of the previous century.
Who it is for
Two hundred pages in Spanish, with no French translation. The language is difficult by design: coined words, archaisms, a personal spelling. It is better to enter through the ballads than at the beginning.
Prizes and reception
First book of a poet regarded as one of the most original in the language, and one of the texts through which the avant-garde entered Colombia.