Poetry
Ceniza redimida
Not translated into English
Hérib Campos Cervera · 1950
Synopsis
The collection opens on a handful of earth: the exile asks nothing of his homeland but this handful, which bears the smile and the blood of its dead, then declares himself naked and desolate, far from it, on a cliff of memories. The sequences that follow pass through the trace of man at work, the woodcutter, through words to name his own people, among them a poem to Federico García Lorca, through ballads, solitude, the sea and love. Two veins cross here: the intimate, haunted by slow dying, and solidarity with the humble.
Context
The book appeared in Buenos Aires in 1950, from the Tupa press of Anselmo Jover Peralta, with a preface by Juan Silvano Díaz-Pérez, the author's cousin: it is the only one he himself put together. He wrote to Óscar Ferreiro that it had come out on the day his third son was born; the colophon gives 5 July. The poems, gathered over nearly twenty years, bear the mark of surrealism and, for some, of García Lorca's Romancero gitano, which he seems to have known in the Río de la Plata in 1933. In Montevideo, he had lost the manuscript of a novel.
Who it is for
In Spanish, never translated into French. Mostly free verse; the first poem is enough to set the tone for the whole.
Prizes and reception
The only book published in its author's lifetime, regarded by Paraguayan critics as a foundation of the country's modern poetry.