Poetry
Registro del mundo
Not translated into English
Jorge Carrera Andrade · 1940
Synopsis
An anthology of the poet's collections published from 1922 to 1939, from El estanque inefable to País secreto. The eye lingers on things, fruit and tropical nature, on the Andean highlands and their festivals, as in "Fiesta de San Pedro" or "Régimen de frutas", and on intimate figures, with "Biografía secreta del hijo" or "Segunda vida de mi madre", carried by an ever-watchful metaphor.
Context
Printed in Quito on the presses of the Central University, the anthology gathers nearly twenty years of writing in 326 pages. Critics of the time saw in it a visual poet, full of sensual joy, who makes metaphor his chief tool, and likened him to Pablo Neruda. Claude Couffon took up the title for a bilingual selection of poems, Registre du monde, published in Paris in 1997 and reissued in Quito in 2002. The author had already been translated into French in the thirties.
Who it is for
For discovering a diplomat poet who travelled through Europe, Asia and the Americas, through twenty years of selected poems.
Prizes and reception
Tomás Gracián judged him in 1941 a colourist without drama; the book's band placed him with Neruda among the three foremost poets of the Americas.