Poetry
The Agriculture of the Torrid Zone
Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida
Andrés Bello · 1826
Synopsis
The poem hails the torrid zone, which the sun makes fruitful, and lists what it gives: maize, the vine, sugar cane, cacao, indigo, tobacco, cotton, the banana tree, and the herds of the plains. It then turns to men: it praises the happy life of the simple ploughman and blames those who abandon their lands for the idleness of the towns. It asks the young nations of America to honour the work of the fields, to love peace and to keep ambition under the law.
Context
Its author had been living in London since 1810 when he published this text, in 1826, in El Repertorio Americano, a review he edited. It is the second of the two fragments, together with the Alocución a la poesía that appeared in 1823 in La Biblioteca Americana, of a great poem on America that he never finished; the two are brought together under the name Silvas americanas. The model is Virgil, but the matter is the nature of the New World, which the poets of the continent were then leaving aside according to Biografías y Vidas. Lecturalia reads a social concern in the moral part, which contrasts the ploughman with the landowners who have left for the city.
Who it is for
A long poem in a single piece, in a Latinising language full of plant names; an English translation appeared as early as 1920.
Prizes and reception
Biografías y Vidas sees in it the birth of the great lyric poetry of Hispanic America; Britannica compares it to the Latin Géorgiques.
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