Poetry
Lascas
Not translated into English
Salvador Díaz Mirón · 1901
Opening lines
Insensibles á fiestas y grimas
y con alas de luz de centellas,
pero esquivos á cautas doncellas,
difundíos por gentes y climas.
Unmoved by feasts and by horrors,
and winged with the light of lightning,
but shy of wary maidens,
spread yourselves through peoples and climes.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Forty previously unpublished poems, short and chiselled, which the author gathers in Xalapa. The title designates the chips struck from a stone being cut. Among them are “Ópalo”, in which the poet tells of his repentant visit to the grave of the man he killed, and “El ingenioso hidalgo”, in which he mocks himself by comparing himself to Quixote; elsewhere, street and country scenes, observed closely and versified with an almost maniacal exactness.
Context
The book appeared in Xalapa in 1901 and brings together poems written from the imprisonment of 1892 onwards. In his preface the author denounces the editions made without his consent in New York in 1895 and in Paris in 1900, full of “horribles yerros de imprenta”: it is the only book he authorised. He gives its rights, fifteen thousand pesos, to equip the library of the preparatory school of Xalapa. Critics see in it the harbinger of modernism.
Who it is for
Short pieces of highly polished workmanship, with rare vocabulary, that demand attention; no French or English translation.
Prizes and reception
The only book its author authorised, regarded as his major work and one of the most studied in Mexican poetry.
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