Poetry
Surgente
Not translated into English
Manuel Ortiz Guerrero · 1922
Synopsis
The poet's first collection, some forty pieces in Spanish written from adolescence to the first days of misfortune: nostalgias, serenades, twilights like that of “Saudade”, tributes to beloved women and to music, and above all love, a sacred law, beautiful and sinful. The title designates the spring that gushes from the rock, and the whole book is placed under the sign of thirst. A few pieces, such as “Magdalena eterna” or “La guitarra del desengaño”, arrange their verses to draw their subject.
Context
The collection appeared in Asunción in 1922, from the Zurucu'á press that the author had just founded with his companion Dalmacia, the same year as a tragedy in verse. Critics see in it the modernist side of a body of work that his poems in Guarani, which became songs, made popular throughout the country, some granting him more popularity than aesthetic reach. ABC Color notes that several pieces shape their subject with their lines of verse, a decade before this manner was recognised elsewhere as an avant-garde.
Who it is for
Poems in Spanish, of modernist style; the Guarani texts set to music, better known, are found in other volumes.
Prizes and reception
First book by the poet regarded as the most popular in Paraguayan literature, reprinted in his posthumous complete works of 1952.