Poetry
Autumn's Legacy
Herencia del otoño
Laureano Albán · 1980
Synopsis
Poems born, according to their author, of his first autumn in Spain, a season his tropical country does not know. Autumn becomes a symbol there: starting from an evocation of the natural world, the book reaffirms being, and critics note in it the link between nature and existence, time that creates and destroys, friendship, pain and solitude. The language, turned towards the old Spanish poetic tradition, welcomes words coined by the poet, such as “impermanence”.
Context
The book received the Adonais Prize in Madrid in 1979 and was published in 1980 by Rialp, the very year it won the Costa Rican national poetry prize; Editorial Costa Rica reissued it in 1981. The author had earlier signed, with Julieta Dobles, Ronald Bonilla and Carlos Francisco Monge, a transcendentalist manifesto that caused controversy in the country. Critics see in the collection a turn towards the Spanish tradition, and Mauricio Molina, who judges the poet's influence on his juniors to be negative, makes an exception for this book. Frederick Fornoff gave an English translation of it in 1982.
Who it is for
A collection of poems in Spanish, in an elevated language into which invented words slip; an English translation exists.
Prizes and reception
Crowned in Spain with the Adonais Prize, then in its author's own country with the national prize, the collection was translated into English in 1982.
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