Picture of author.

Estanislao del Campo (1834–1880)

Forfatter af Fausto

10 Works 60 Members 3 Reviews

Om forfatteren

Værker af Estanislao del Campo

Satte nøgleord på

Almen Viden

Medlemmer

Anmeldelser

Impresiones del gaucho Anastasio El Pollo en la representación de esta ópera. Con un prólogo de Juan Carlos Gómez
 
Markeret
museosanalberto | Jan 14, 2021 |
Clásicos de la literatura Argentina
 
Markeret
BibliotecaOlezza | 1 anden anmeldelse | Oct 3, 2019 |
If I were to make a list of my favorite fictional premises that I have come across through the years, Estanislao del Campo's Fausto would rank very, very high. In the time of the War of the Triple Alliance, two gauchos, Anastasio "El Pollo" and Laguna, meet on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. They sit down and roll some cigarettes, one of them goes and grabs a bottle of gin, and Anastasio tells the incredible story of how he saw the devil at Teatro Colón. El Pollo, ignorant of the nuances of city life and civilized culture, watched a performance of Faust at the newly-constructed theater believing that the events that transpired on stage were actually happening. He recounts the performace to an incredulous Laguna as they drink and smoke.

I had been wanting to read this poem for a long time, and I was quite entertained by it. I was a bit surprised by how lighthearted and straightforward it was, as I was expecting a bit darker and more extensive poem than what I got. The premise presents the perfect vehicle for the development of the 19th century Argentine dichotomy of civilization versus barbary: the ignorant gaucho, making his way through the crowds at the theater in the cultural capital of civilized Argentina, cranes to see a high-class theatrical production of an educated, Western European man's fantasy, which he interprets as reality. I imagined Fausto as a work of poesía gauchezca that would more or less serve as a poetic companion to Martín Fierro, or to Domingo Sarmiento´s Facundo. In truth, this poem appears to be written to entertain, not to moralize. El Pollo tells his story in a matter-of-fact way, and Laguna sits there, listening and having a good time, occasionally interjecting brief commentary about how he can't believe that El Pollo was able to keep his cool as the devil himself was up there prancing around on stage. The description of the two friends' horses at the beginning of the poem is rather light-hearted, and the tone of the two friends' conversation is jovial throughout, with repeated references to the beauty of the pastoral, gaucho lifestyle interspersed with El Pollo's recount of his bizarre experience with the cityfolk at Teatro Colón. In the introduction to this book there was a short run-down of various prominent Argentines' feelings regarding "El Fausto Criollo." While some of them derided it or looked down on it, Jorge Luis Borges praised it for having two things in spades: beauty and happiness. For me, these two qualities are enough to make any book well worth reading, and Fausto certainly does possess them both.

This poem was written during the War of the Triple Alliance, fought by Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay (the triple alliance) against Paraguay. The proceeds generated by the sales of the poem were donated to the victims of the war. Anastacio and Laguna make reference to the war and how difficult it has made things for them, because money is tight in the city and they have nowhere to sell their goods. I'm extremely interested in the War of the Triple Alliance, and I enjoyed reading a book that was so closely related to the war effort in its genesis and setting. It's not a war that many people know too much about, and I'm going to make a note to myself that the next time I'm at the library looking for books, I should try to find a good history of this bloody war that decimated Paraguay's population.

I was able to obtain and read this book because I just joined a new library with an extensive collection of books in Spanish. I was like a kid in a candy store as I browsed their collections, grabbing all the books I'd been wanting to read but was unable to find. I really enjoy how academic libraries organize their Spanish literature by country (at least I think this is usually the case). I'm thinking that in future visits, I'll plan on picking up a couple of books, then just look at what else is in that country's section. The edition that I grabbed from the four or five choices that the library presented me with was illustrated by a man named Oski. While I greatly enjoyed the cartoon illustrations of the characters, it was a bit incongruous for the 19th century poem to be illustrated in a 20th century comic style. It reminded me of when I started to watch the movie The Informant!, starring Matt Damon, which is set in the 1990s but with a soundtrack of significantly older music. It's strange to have that separation between the story and the images or music that accompany it. However, I do love older Argentine comic strips, and I may have to track down some of Oski's work now that I'm familiar with his name and his style.

February 2, 2012

Since this is the second time I've read this book since joining LT, I have but a few notes to add to my initial review:

1) Josefina Ludmer, in her awesome, awesome book El género gauchesco--which I'm reading right now and which brought me back to Fausto--mentions the connection between Estanislao del Campo and another of the most prominent authors of the genre, Hilario Ascasubi. Ascasubi wrote books in the gaucho genre like Santos Vega o los mellizos de la flor and Paulino Lucero, and he also wrote a poem entitled "La refalosa", wherein a gaucho mazorquero (a member of Rosas' violent political apparatus) describes with sick pleasure the methods of torture he's about to employ on a member of the Unitario opposition. This violent poem has endured in the Argentine tradition, and its environment of tyrannic political violence has inspired stories like Borges and Bioy Casares' "La fiesta del monstruo" and Osvaldo Lamborghini's El fiord. In any case, what Ludmer mentions is that Hilario Ascasubi was a major financial contributor to the construction of the Teatro Colón, and that a journalist affirmed upon its opening that its ornate architectural crowning merited the title of "the Crest of Aniceto el Gallo" (which was the name of an Ascasubi character and something of a pseudonym for the author himself). Del Campo, then, not only plays homage to his predecessor by naming his gaucho Anastasio el Pollo (which alludes to Aniceto el Gallo), but also through his situation of Anastasio's story in the (opera) house that Ascasubi helped build.

2) There's a rather less positive way to look at the premise for this story. Estanislao del Campo was not a gaucho: he was born in the city, he was an educated man, and he was the son of a military hero who accompanied General Lavalle's corpse to its final resting place in Potosí. I think it's fair to say that del Campo knew a lot of gauchos and fought alongside gauchos in his military career, but it's also fair to say that there were some fundamental differences between himself and his gaucho compatriots in terms of their upbringing and education. By writing a story about a gaucho who is unable to differentiate between reality and representation (he thinks the devil he sees on stage is real), del Campo is painting a rather un-politically correct picture of the gauchos. "They're so stupid they can't even tell what's real and what's not." I think about if a really rich person wrote about a bunch of poor people who were unable to exercise a fundamental aspect of human reason. Or if a white person wrote about black people in this fashion. Some people would probably be really offended, and I can't say I'd disagree with them. Telling the difference between reality and fiction, and being able to recognize art for art, is a rather essential quality of human beings. I think if you look at it this way, you could say that del Campo is "dehumanizing" the gauchos. One reason I've enjoyed reading this book by Ludmer is that it illustrates how a bunch of non-gauchos created a written representation of the gaucho by appropriating his voice and using it in narrative poetry, and also how that written usage of the gauchos related back to their actual usage by the Argentine military and by the estancieros who needed workers. If you think about how del Campo uses the gaucho, bestowing him with an extreme form of ignorance, it's easy to take issue with this book. You can see it as a rather blatant example of the marginalization of the gaucho and a clear step on the road toward his disappearance from the Argentine landscape.

However, if you do so you'll be taking a fun, happy, lighthearted story very seriously, and you'll be projecting your own conceptions of political correctness and right and wrong onto a story written a long time ago. If I take offense with the portrayal of others by authors across history, whether those others be women, indigenous people, or people of different races and religions, I'll end up purging my bookshelves of a lot of books. I think it's important to balance the positives with the negatives, and in this case, I think my experience with Fausto remains an altogether positive one. Despite his inability to recognize the fictionality of Faust, Anastasio is also painted as a quite intelligent guy who sees through the bullshit of the cityfolk, knows how to employ his storytelling powers to earn the gin and tobacco of his buddy (he also gets a paid meal at the end of the story), and weaves some rather deep commentaries on human existence into his recollection of the time he saw the devil down at the Teatro Colón.
… (mere)
1 stem
Markeret
msjohns615 | 1 anden anmeldelse | Oct 12, 2010 |

Hæderspriser

Statistikker

Værker
10
Medlemmer
60
Popularitet
#277,520
Vurdering
½ 3.5
Anmeldelser
3
ISBN
17
Sprog
1

Diagrammer og grafer