Poetry
Mi padre, el inmigrante
Not translated into English
Vicente Gerbasi · 1945
Synopsis
A long elegiac poem in thirty cantos, in which the son speaks in the first person to his father, an Italian immigrant who came from a small town on the Tyrrhenian coast to Canoabo. One and the same line, which says that we come from the night and return to it, opens it, closes it and recurs within it; the night is death and nothingness. In between, the landscapes of Italy and America intertwine, almond trees, lakes, snows and volcanoes, forests and rivers where the jaguar, the snake and the armadillo pass, the father's journey and the son's, and childhood memories.
Context
The poet's father, Juan Bautista Gerbasi, who had come from Vibonati, had died suddenly in 1928; the poem appeared in 1945. Ida Gramcko judged its language closer to the magical than to the logical, and critics link it to symbolism and surrealism. The Biblioteca Ayacucho reprinted it in 1986 in its author's Obra poética, and Italian scholarly journals still study it, attentive to the country the father left.
Who it is for
A long poem in thirty cantos, to be read in one sitting; a French translation appeared as early as 1949, under the title Mon père, l'émigrant.
Prizes and reception
Translated into French four years after its publication, it is studied as far afield as Italy, in journals devoted to emigration.
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