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Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts and the black revolution
(1968)
Notes and discussion: Miguel Angel Asturias on literature, pp. 352-355
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Page 353
in his hexameters on the ways of the Indian as artisan, farmer, fisherman and artist. Then there is a second period which stretches from 1810 to 1860. At this time the writers and poets appear who will be in at the foundation of our nationality. Here we have a poet like Olmedo, who chants the Bolivarian epic, and the Argentianian, Echevarria, who, apart from giving us a poem of social insight, La Cautiva, leaves behind a number of social reforms. The Argentinian legislature was to be inspired by his preoccupations. In this period too, the Venezuelan, Andres Bello, who in his famous Silva directs his muse to the richness of the tropics. With Bello one is always offered the contrast between the validity of American being or its potential, and the misery of its inhabitants. During the Romantic epoch, Jose Marmol, the Argentinian poet and author of the famous novel Amalia reaches a certain peak in our literature. One could mention as well the work of Rojas in Argentina, and above all the work of Sarmiento, whose novel Facundo is fundamental to an understanding of Latin America. Sarmiento offers the contrast between Barbarism and Civilization, and perhaps reflects on many of our problems as they are today. And so we come to the figure of Jose Marti in the final years of the nineteenth century and who is projected into the twentieth century through his vision and sacrifice. Then comes Modernism, which is another of the golden moments in our literature, with Ruben Dario at its fountainhead; the centenary of his birth was celebrated in January 1967. Ruben Dario transforms the poetry of the Spanish language, revolutionises it, makes it live anew. Accepted Spanish poetry in Spain and America was a litany of rhetoric, disconcerting and overwhelming. Dario shakes up the language, imparts a new freshness to its poetics and method, and, apart from this, launches the Modernist movement which we place between 1880 and 1920. All over America the poets make brilliant headway; Lugones in Argentina, Silva in Columbia; and in this period one has to think of Jose Enrique Rodo as a sort of guide, Americanist, almost Greek in his thinking, and of great human authenticity. Then we come to 1920, the end of the First World War and it is here that we ought to place the end of the nineteenth century in our literature. The twentieth century begins in 1920 when the writers abandon the traditional poetic forms and begin to express themselves in prose, and there apears what we call the Contemporary Latin American Novel. JMF Is Latin American literature passing through an exceptional period or is it just a period of extraordinary achievement in the work of two or three writers. MAA It is not a question of an exceptional moment, it is rather the result of a whole poetic and literary movement. It began by imitating, as usual, the masters of European literature and only since 1920 has it been seeking to discover its own means of expression in the novel and in the short story. Latin American literature is characterised by the landscape, by the idiom, by the situation. The character is different in the European novel because our novel is more 353
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