Poetry
La torre de las esfinges
Not translated into English
Julio Herrera y Reissig · 1909
Synopsis
A long poem of some forty ten-line stanzas, divided into seven parts, several of which bear Latin titles drawn from the evening offices. It tells no story: in a night lit as if by a magic lantern there pass multiplied figures of women, oriental, Egyptian and religious images, a Gothic hermitage, a shepherd, Phaedra or Orion, in a tone at once solemn and grotesque. The tight rhymes and the breaks marked by ellipses carry the meaning more than the sentence does.
Context
The poem forms, under the title “Tertulia lunática” and the subtitle “psicologación morbo-panteísta”, the section La torre de las esfinges of Los peregrinos de piedra, published in Montevideo by O. M. Bertani in 1909, the only collection the author arranged himself. Studies disagree on its genesis: one says it was finished in 1908, another that it was begun in 1909 and reworked again while the author was correcting the proofs of the book. It continues a vein opened in 1903 by La vida and Desolación absurda. The posthumous editions of 1942 and 1966 changed its presentation.
Who it is for
A long poem in Spanish, in rhymed dizains, without narrative and difficult to approach; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by one critic as its author's most important poem and as a first break with modernism; others have judged it excessive.
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