Poetry
Elena y los elementos
Not translated into English
Juan Sánchez Peláez · 1951
Synopsis
The collection brings together seventeen poems, a sequence in five fragments, Mitología de la ciudad y el mar, and three final pieces that each express a state of love; it moves from prose to verse according to the tension of desire. A distant, haughty woman, the beautiful stranger, passes through water, sea and ports, wind and mist, clay and roots, sun and torches; the speaker experiences desire as delirium and flight. He remembers the love letters of his childhood, memories of a lost paradise, and the hills of his native land, from which his quest set out.
Context
The collection came off the presses of the Tipografía Garrido, in Caracas, on 1 December 1951, printed in five hundred copies illustrated by Mateo Manaure, twenty of them numbered and not for sale, with an original engraving. It sketched a properly Venezuelan surrealism, which marked the avant-garde poets of the sixties; the Museo del libro venezolano sees in it the opening of the post-avant-garde. The author later became more concise, and Monte Ávila published a fiftieth-anniversary edition in 2001.
Who it is for
A first collection in Spanish, with no French translation, which mixes verse and prose; it helps to know the Chilean surrealism of the Mandrágora.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the founding books of Venezuelan poetry of the nineteen-fifties; the University of the Andes made its author an honorary doctor in 2001.
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