Poetry
Santos Vega o los mellizos de la Flor
Not translated into English
Hilario Ascasubi · 1872
Synopsis
Near the Espadaña lagoon, the singer Santos Vega meets Rufo Tolosa; the mark of La Flor on the latter's horse reminds him of an estancia, and in the rancho where Tolosa lives with Juana Petrona he tells the story of the twins who were raised there, according to Pisano and Borello. Luis, the bad one, becomes a criminal capable of any crime; Jacinto, his brother, is the good one. Around them appear the master, don Faustino Bejarano, and Azucena, accused when her husband seems to have been murdered. The action takes place between 1778 and 1808.
Context
The poem was begun in 1850: a first unfinished version, of about two thousand lines, appeared that year in Montevideo, according to Pisano and Biografías y Vidas; the author took it up again in Paris and published it in 1872 in his complete works, the same year as the great gauchesco poem of a younger poet. Borello counts in it more than thirteen thousand octosyllables, in sixty-four cantos and an epilogue. Pisano notes that it places the gaucho in the colonial past, outside the civil wars, within an orderly society without conflict; Borello sees in it a failure, redeemed by a few pages such as the description of dawn.
Who it is for
A very long poem in Spanish about the countryside, slow to read; no known French translation.
Prizes and reception
The masterwork of its author and one of the great works of gauchesco literature, according to Biografías y Vidas.
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