Poetry
El paraíso recobrado
Not translated into English
Carlos Martínez Rivas · 1943
Synopsis
A poem made up of a prologue and three stopovers, placed under an epigraph from Milton in which Adam and Eve leave paradise. The prologue tells the story in a few words: the poet loved a young girl he met in San José de Costa Rica, who then left for Cartagena de Indias, and he made a song of this love. In the first stopover, written from his school in Granada, he calls out to Yadira, offers her all the things of the earth, then invites her on a journey they will make alone, flying towards two other selves of theirs who are waiting for them above the clouds.
Context
The poem was written at the Colegio Centroamérica by an eighteen-year-old pupil, for Yadira Jiménez, a fourteen-year-old girl known in the Costa Rican capital, where he often visited his father. It appeared in the notebooks of the Taller San Lucas, a literary workshop in Granada, and at once brought its author recognition. Ten years later the last collection published in his lifetime appeared in Mexico City; the early poem was added to it in the Costa Rican edition of 1973, then in the Mexican edition of 1994.
Who it is for
A long love poem in Spanish, translated into French by Norbert-Bertrand Barbe. It is now read after the 1953 collection, which absorbed it in its reissues.
Prizes and reception
Nicaraguan critics date their author's consecration from this poem, written when he was not yet twenty and had already received the national poetry prize at sixteen.
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