Poetry
Días roturados
Not translated into English
Elvio Romero · 1948
Synopsis
Subtitled “poems of the civil war, Paraguay, 1947”, the collection is dedicated to the native land, “bitter synthesis of pain and violence”. An elegy opens it; there follow poems written in combat and in flight, a field hospital, the memory of the dead who fell for a just cause, the homeland seen as a nightmare of glass and gangrene, the contained rage of an exile that is beginning. The poet, who is twenty-one, asks that the dead be remembered, and that only they be pitied.
Context
The book appeared in 1948 in Buenos Aires, from Lautaro, thanks to Nicolás Guillén and Rafael Alberti, whose dedicatory poem in redondillas opens the volume. Accounts differ on its genesis: according to Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá, the author crossed the Chaco with his poems in hand; according to Francisco Pérez-Maricevich, he lost them in flight and had to rewrite them from memory. This first book opens a body of work written entirely in exile, which the Stroessner regime nevertheless allowed to be read in Paraguay.
Who it is for
In Spanish, never translated into French. It helps to know that in 1947 a large part of the author's generation was thrown out of the country.
Prizes and reception
The first book of the Paraguayan poet best known abroad, introduced by a poem by Rafael Alberti.