Poetry
Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea
Cantos de Cifar
Pablo Antonio Cuadra · 1971
Synopsis
Cifar, a sailor of the Great Lake of Nicaragua, that freshwater sea dotted with islands, lives by his boat and his love affairs. When his mother begs him to leave the waters, he answers that he prefers the strange to the known, and he sets out: we follow him from island to island, from the empty island to the beggar woman's island, to an unknown port where night overwhelms him with loneliness. Between his adventures, the master of Tarca, who speaks eleven times, delivers his maxims, and other voices tell of the fishermen, the women and the legends of the lake.
Context
The first poems appeared in 1969 in a Majorcan journal, and the first complete edition was published in 1971 in Spain, in Ávila; the Nicaraguan Academy of the Language brought out an expanded edition in 1979. The character takes his name from a real sailor of the lake, Cifar Guevara, who was called the poet of the lake, and whose mourning the author, as a young man, had seen on the shore. A large selection appeared the same year in English in New York.
Who it is for
Narrative poems in Spanish, in a simple language close to speech. Knowing the Odyssey sheds light on the allusions without being necessary.
Prizes and reception
The Spanish poet José María Valverde saw in it a battle won for Spanish-language poetry: having done in verse what should have been done in a novel.