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Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
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This essay analyses the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) in terms of its disruption of the colonial and patriarchal structures of the society of New Spain (as Mexico was then known) in which she lived. It begins with an analysis of her Reply to Sister Philotea (dated March 1, 1691) in which she alludes to her love of learning as well as her rejection of the notion that women have less right to knowledge than men, passes to a discussion of her famous “Philosophical Satire” in which she berated sexual injustice: “You foolish and unreasoning men/ who cast all blame on women,/ not seeing you yourselves are causes/ of the same fault you accuse.” The issue of the connection between Sor Juana’s poems which owe their very existence to the patronage system in which she operated (a poem celebrating the Viceroy of Mexico’s birthday, that of his wife, as well as the baptism of their son) and her so-called “personal lyrics” is discussed. The compositional rhetoric of the poems that have endeared Sor Juana to later (often feminist) audiences – sonnets such as “This afternoon when I spake with thee beloved…” and “Tarry, shadow of my scornful treasure…”) – is analysed in terms of the reality-appearance trope which underpinned so much Renaissance literature. The essay concludes with an analysis of her long poem, First Dream, and her verse plays such as Divine Narcissus.
This chapter studies the life and work of the Mexican poet and intellectual, Octavio Paz (1914-1986), who dominated Latin American intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. He rewrote the Mexican poetic tradition along avant-garde lines, setting up Ramón López Velarde and José Juan Tablada as founders. He became leader of a group of Mexican and Latin American poets, who shared his vision of poetry. He edited prestigious magazines that include Plural (1971-76) and Vuelta (1976-98). He won just about every literary prize from the Cervantes in 1981 to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. This essay explores the reasons why he rose so high and also asks whether, with his passing, this high reputation will survive.
Avant-garde poetry – in Latin America as elsewhere – has always responded vigorously to the challenges offered by technological change, and this continues to be true in relation to the advent of digital technologies and new media applications. This chapter first explores key questions of definition, terminology, and recurrent themes such as the critique of mass media and the exploration of posthumanist themes. It moves on to examine the relationship of this type of poetry to its literary antecedents, both in Latin America and globally, as well as flagging up the first exponents of this kind of poetry in the 1960s such as Argentinian Omar Gancedo. It then explores in more detail examples of some of the most common forms of (new) media poetry: digitally influenced but still printable poetry, including code poetry; visual and kinetic poetry; digital multimedia poetry; interactive and hypertext poetry; generative poetry; and digital sound and performance poetry. Specific attention is devoted to poets/artists such as Ana María Uribe (Argentina), Belén Gache (Argentina/Spain), Wilton Luiz de Azevedo (Brazil), Eduardo Navas (El Salvador/USA) and Gustavo Romano (Argentina/Spain).
This chapter focuses on the rise of colonial poetry between the 16th and 18th centuries. The way in which Spain and Portugal approached the colonization of the New World had a deep impact on the development of poetry in Spanish America and Brazil. Key to this process was the early establishment of the printing press and universities in Mexico City and Lima, which allowed for the growth of a local literary identity revolving around a sophisticated lettered community. This is the same that partly assimilated and partly obliterated indigenous cultures and traditions, though people such as Bernardino de Sahagún and the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega contributed significantly to its preservation. European literary trends reached the New World and established themselves in the sixteenth century, which saw the development of epic and religious poetry. Both played a crucial role enforcing imperialism and evangelization, though texts such as Ercilla’s La Araucana presented also the ambiguities of colonial discourse and the devastating effects of war. Other genres such as Petrarchism and satire allowed for further transatlantic dialogues strengthening the literary culture of the New World. Poetry thus played a key role in political and aesthetic discussions that shaped Latin American identity.
This essay compares the poetics of two canonical Latin American writers. Both enjoyed fame and consecration during their lifetime in their respective countries. Lisboa in Brazil and Pizarnik in Argentina, authored thin and unforgettable volumes of poetry. Both came from loving families and enjoyed iconic status in literary circles and yet, Lisboa constructed a poetics of joy, pride and beauty to be found in all things Brazilian as well as the phenomena touched by the self conceived as light and love; while Pizarnik's brave an incisive struggle with language and the self produced one cutting and bleeding revelation after another at the expense of self, consciousness and self-love. Both poets sought to live in the house of language. But while Lisboa worked to build her dwelling place, Pizarnik could not but seek to build by paradoxically dismantling the architecture of language. Close readings of key poems sustain the study of the poetics of each poet.
This chapter offers a brief survey of the main anthologies of Spanish-American poetry published in English translation from the late nineteen-forties to the early sixties. It succinctly traces the change in translation approaches during this period, from an initial emphasis on literal translations to the more personal approaches taken by American poets, who aimed at a recreation of the source poem and who went on to fully integrate translation into their own poetics. The survey further highlights the attention which Anglophone translators have given to the work of three Latin American poets in particular—César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz—and some of the qualities that became associated with their work, such as irrationality and a tendency toward political commitment. The chapter concludes with a final survey of the main publishers who are currently editing Spanish-American poetry in the Anglophone world and some reference is made to the difficulty of moving beyond the names of Vallejo, Neruda, and Paz.
This chapter highlights the work of Afro-Hispanic poets who continue to gain recognition, despite the fact that they have not been incorporated into the broader literary canon and thus frequently remain at the margins of mainstream Latin American Literature, both in the U.S. and Latin America. A careful study of Afro-Hispanic Literatures and Cultures reveals the existence of a significant number of twentieth-century Latin American writers of African descent. This essay focusses on the works of Nicomedes Santa Cruz (Peru), Nancy Morejón (Cuba), and Luz Argentina Chiriboga (Ecuador). Slavery, emancipation, self-esteem, and national identity are shown to be predominant themes in their work. These writers challenge official conceptions of nationhood that excluded the significance of African culture. Morejón and Chiriboga, for their part, question the dominant patriarchal systems that have marginalized women. The desire for freedom from slavery in their works is articulated in tandem with each nation’s struggle for freedom from colonial bondage and imperial domination. These poets, each in their own way, through their use of poignant imagery, metaphors, and poetic forms, ask the reader to critically interrogate set definitions of identity and nationhood.
This essay examines how in the nineteenth century, Latin American Romantic poets such as José María Heredia (Cuba, 1803-1839) and Antônio Gonçalves Dias (Brazil, 1823-1864), and modernistas such as José Martí (Cuba, 1853-1895), Rubén Darío (Nicaragua 1867-1916) and Delmira Agustini (Uruguay, 1886-1914), were shaping Latin American cultural politics through their poetry. From the Romantic poetics of exile and anticolonial discourse in Heredia and Dias to modernismo’s meta-poetic reflections and their redefinition of poetry through metaphors as the swan, this essay discusses that aesthetic and philosophical shift in Latin American nineteenth-century poetry. While Martí’s critique of the modern city is more in touch with the political and poetic questions that emerge in avant-garde art, Darío’s modernista aesthetics show his preoccupation with a cosmopolitan, “universal” vision of poetry, highly problematic in its reification of women, but not necessarily “apolitical” or completely detached from the social struggles of the era. The essay concludes analyzing how Agustini’s poetic drive and rhetorical risks take modernismo to another level, transgressing poetic and social norms that bounded women to submissive positions, and redefining the poetics of desire in Latin American poetry.
This essay focuses on the three phases – or “gardens” – César Vallejo’s life and work. Vallejo’s poetry is divided up between three collections of poetry, Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), and Human Poems (1938), he lived under the sign of three “isms” (modernismo, Dadaism and Trotskyism), and there were also three very important women in his life (Otilia Vallejo Gamboa, his niece; Otilia Villanueva Pajares, his lover in Lima; and Georgette Philippart, his wife). The significance of the poem “Embers” within the overall structure of Black Heralds is underlined, given that it was a love poem inspired by Vallejo’s niece, Otilia Vallejo Gamboa, and his use of the style and topoi characteristic of modernismo to portray that love is analysed. The love-affair that Vallejo had with Otilia Villanueva Pajares, a young girl who lived in downtown Lima, in 1920-1921, is seen as pivotal in the creation of a new poetic language in Trilce. Poems such as Tr. IX create a poetic pornography that depicts the sexual act in an unprecedented way. This essay concludes by alluding to Vallejo’s political interests and uses the poem “Salutación angélica” as evidence to propose that his covert affiliation with Trotskyism may have been more deep-rooted and long-lasting than has been assumed until now.
The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry provides historical context on the evolution of the Latin American poetic tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day. It is organized into three parts. Part I provides a comprehensive, chronological survey of Latin American poetry and includes separate chapters on Colonial poetry, Romanticism/modernism, the avant-garde, conversational poetry, and contemporary poetry. Part II contains six succinct essays on the major figures Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Octavio Paz. Part III analyses specific and distinctive trends within the poetic canon, including women's, LGBT, Quechua, Afro-Hispanic, Latino/a and New Media poetry. This Companion also contains a guide to further reading as well as an essay on the best English translations of Latin American poetry. It will be a key resource for students and instructors of Latin American literature and poetry.