Novel
Maria: A South American Romance
María
Jorge Isaacs · 1867
Opening lines
Era yo niño aún cuando me alejaron de la casa paterna para que diera principio a mis estudios en el colegio del doctor Lorenzo María Lleras, establecido en Bogotá hacía pocos años, y famoso en toda la República por aquel tiempo.
I was still a child when they sent me away from my father's house to begin my studies at the school of Doctor Lorenzo María Lleras, established in Bogotá a few years before and famous throughout the Republic at that time.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from es.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Efraín returns from his studies to his father's hacienda on the banks of the Cauca and meets again María, the cousin raised with him since childhood. They love each other without having said anything, in a country of rivers, mountains and household people whose stories the book also tells. The father decides that Efraín will go and finish his studies in England. María falls ill with the illness that carried off her mother. The young man leaves all the same, and the letters take months to cross.
Context
Written between 1864 and 1867 and published in Bogotá, the book is set in the landscape where its author had grown up and which his family had just lost. He began the first chapters in a camp set up beside a river, where he was supervising the cutting of a road, and finished it the following year in his father's house. His brother, a teacher of grammar, corrected the text before it was sent to Bogotá, where four men of letters from the literary circle reread it. Its success was immediate throughout the continent.
Who it is for
A sentimental novel in polished language, which has to be read in Spanish: no French edition could be found. The descriptions of the valley are the best pages; the plot is thin and slow.
Prizes and reception
The most widely read Spanish-American novel of its century, translated into some twenty languages and adapted several times.