Poetry
Canto secular
Not translated into English
Eloy Fariña Núñez · 1911
Synopsis
Nearly twelve hundred lines for the centenary of independence. The poem surveys the stars and landscapes of the country, its orange trees, its coconut palms, its cicadas and bees, then its customs, the dance, the serenade, the harp, pottery, ñandutí lace, and the beings of belief, the póra and the Pombero. It evokes the colonial city and the revolt of the comuneros, then the republic. The last lines are a series of wishes: that the country be great and rich, a paradise of the planet, and that it weigh by its sciences and its arts on the spirit of the world.
Context
The poem was to appear in an official centenary album prepared by Arsenio López Decoud, a friend of the author; as the album was delayed for political and financial reasons, the text appeared alone, as a pamphlet, in mid-1911 in Buenos Aires. Its author, who had lived in Argentina since childhood, said he wrote it by reconstructing in imagination the world of his early years. Critics note in it, beneath the modernist manner, the mark of arielism, which gave the leading role to youth and claimed a double American and Greco-Latin ancestry; Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá read in it a Hellenizing vision of the country.
Who it is for
A long poem in Spanish, never translated into French. It helps to know that ñandutí is a Paraguayan lace and the Pombero a spirit of the countryside.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the longest poems in Paraguayan literature; it won its author recognition from the press in Asunción.
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