Poetry
De mi villorrio
Not translated into English
Luis Carlos López · 1908
Synopsis
Sonnets about a small provincial town: its notables and its idlers, its streets, its Sundays, the boredom that settles in. The poet looks at his fellow citizens without indulgence and does not exempt himself from the picture. The vocabulary is that of everyday life, against the ornament that the poetry of the moment demanded, and the closing lines of the sonnet serve to bring the character down rather than to raise him up. Beneath the village, it is the author's own town that one recognises.
Context
The author's first book, printed in Madrid in 1908, as were the next two in 1909 and 1910: it was from Spain that this poetry came back to Colombia. What it rejects is the cosmopolitanism and aestheticism of the then-dominant modernismo, to which it opposes the small town, its types and its boredom. Part of his work did not appear in his lifetime: the poet said he had lost his best poems when a publisher refused to print them with the preface he wanted. His death went almost unnoticed by critics.
Who it is for
A slim collection of sonnets in Spanish, with no French translation. The irony is aimed at a provincial society of 1900 whose types are no longer familiar, but the tone comes across without effort.
Prizes and reception
First book of a poet whom critics regard as the introducer of satire and prosaism into Colombian poetry, against the current of modernism.