Narrative
El gran Burundún-Burundá ha muerto
Not translated into English
Jorge Zalamea · 1952
Synopsis
The great Burundún-Burundá is dead and is being buried. The narrative is that of the procession: the official bodies, the brotherhoods, the churches, the foreign colonies, the police, the horde of courtiers, each in rank behind the coffin, described one by one. The dead man had been a dictator who abolished speech and silenced his country. The narrator details the uniforms and the jaws, and waits for the coffin to be opened at the end of the march.
Context
Published in 1952 in Buenos Aires, during its author's exile and at the height of Colombian violence, the text names no country and dates nothing: this is what has allowed it to be read everywhere as the portrait of any tyrant, although it targets the president of the time. Its author regarded it as a hybrid form between the poem and the pamphlet, and wanted it to be declaimed rather than read. Reissued in Bogotá in 1966, then in facsimile in 1979, it appeared in French in 2018, in a bilingual edition.
Who it is for
A short text, in Spanish, halfway between narrative and poem. The sentences are long and the enumeration constant; one has to let oneself be carried along.
Prizes and reception
It has become a classic of the text against dictatorship in Latin America, translated and often staged.