Poetry
Las falsas apariencias
Not translated into English
José Batres Montúfar · 1845
Synopsis
A tale in verse that recounts, in the manner of Quevedo, a picaresque love story in the aristocratic society of the capital: a deceived husband becomes the laughing stock of the town there, and the heroine hardly obeys the narrow morality of her time. The author paints the corrupt manners of the high society he frequented, without ever concluding as a moralist.
Context
The narrative forms, with two other tales in verse, the triptych of the Traditions of Guatemala, which its author wrote in the last years of his life and gave to the press. It is composed in ottava rima, stanzas of eight hendecasyllables taken from Italian poetry rather than from the usual Spanish forms. The author died in 1844 and a large part of his papers was lost through the negligence of his family: only what he had published survives. The volume appeared the following year.
Who it is for
In Spanish, in eight-line stanzas. The reader must accept a constant irony and a raciness that offended the morality of the time.
Prizes and reception
Rubén Darío regarded the three tales as jewels of the continent's literature and said that their octaves laugh all by themselves.