Julio
Herrera y Reissig [Uruguay]
1875-1910
Julio’s health, however, was precarious
from early on; at age 17, a congenital heart defect, aggravated by typhoid
fever, forced him to abandon his studies. He was not allowed to travel, apart
from a visit to Buenos Aires, and remained confined to Montevideo and the Uruguayan
interior.
To relieve his boredom, the young poet
became an avid reader, and beginning in 1900, held literary gatherings at his
family mansion in the penthouse nicknamed La Torre de los Panoramas due to its
remarkable views of the Rio de la Plata.
During these gatherings he transformed
from a Romanticist to an avant-garde Modernist and Surrealist, becoming, along
with Leopoldo Lugones, Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, and Salvador Díaz Mirón, one of
the major figures of early Latin American poetry.
Despite his notable output, Herrera y
Reissig died young, at the age of 35, with many of his works published
posthumously.
Although he wrote novels and essays as
well, the poet’s reputation rests primarily upon his poetic texts, which
contain a number of paradoxes in that, although Herrera y Reissig drew from Uruguayan
village life, his metaphors belonged very much to the world of the French Symbolists.
And although his impact was primarily within the Latin American community, his
vision was primarily European in focus.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Canto a
Lamartine (1898);
Epilogo wagneriano a “La politca de fusion”
con surtidos de psicología sobre el Imperio de Zapicán (1902); Las pascuas del tiempto (1902); Los maitines de la noche (1902);Los parques abandonados (1902-1908); La vida (1903); Los éxtasis de la montaña (1904, 1907); Sonetos vascos (1908); Las
clepsidras (1909); Los peregrinos de
piedra (1909); La torre de las
esfinges (1909); Obras copletas (1909-1913);
Los paarques abandonados (1919); Las pascuas del tiempo (1920); Las lunas de oro (1924); Poesías completes y páginas en prosa (1961);
Tratado de la imbecilidad del país por el
Sistema de Herbert Spencer [transcribed and published by Aldo Mazzucchelli]
(2006)
July
Cold,
cold, cold!
Furs, memories, and mute sadnesses.
Above
the spleen of the landscape,
calm,
and damp, floats a migraine;
and
there in the shadows the frogs celebrate,
with
a strange ventriloquism.
The
mountain’s mind—its grey neurasthenia—
with
a peculiar telepathy
recalls
in its close and gloomy mania
a
senile convent in Brittany.
To
add up the sum of these illusions,
the
Eucharistic flock is fused
like
a Jordan of fleeces, white as snow;
and
far away the pensive crow
is
dreaming, maybe, of an abstract Cosmos
like
a black and terrifying moon.
—trans.
from the Spanish by Andrew Rosing
(Reprinted
from Los maitines de la noche, 1902)
The Sorrowful Shadows
The flocks went bleating; the roads
were crowded with sorrowful crowds;
an agony of ancient holocaust
smothered-over the silent countryside.
Under
mysterious elegant veils
you
call forth perplexing symbols,
O
Priestess, lost and claimed into the distance
with
you moist and deathly gaze.
Even
your evil brother joined us, but
meanwhile
your hand—with an utmost confidence—
squeezed
mine, speaking to me with silent touches,
and
the distant rain, wailing that sorrow
that
moves toward absence, stained
the
lucid dreaminess of the infinite evening.
—trans.
from the Spanish by Andrew Rosing
Grey
Dawn
Grey in the sky and grey in my soul;
red in the East and red in my
soul.
This
is how it was. Lilac preoccupations
disturbed
the morning’s illusions,
and
a childish heron on his inane blank page
stroked
backwards on the restless waves.
And
a shuddering—like a Sibyl’s fit—
rattled
at the windows, when all
at
once a wind-minded myth
intruded,
through my darkened pupils.
“Good-by,
good-by,” I cried: into the sky
grey
sarcasm rose, from her delicate glove,
flying
like my own red jealousy,
A
crow croaked Wagnerisms into the air, and the woods
felt
at the very moment a complete
and
cataclysmic crash.
—trans. from the Spanish by Andrew Rosing
__________
Poems
reprinted from Stephen Tapscott, ed. Twentieth-Century
Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1996). Copyright ©1993 by Andrew Rosing. Reprinted by permission of
Stephen Tapscott.
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