Julio Herrera y Reissig

On the centenary of the death of Julio Herrera y Reissig

(1875-1910)

"Last night came to me in velvet;

bleeding from his wound open fire;

was his poor pale dead

Shipwrecked and eyes without comfort. "

Julio Herrera y Reissig.

THE VOICE OF MODERNISM

Just a series of Wagnerian premiered in 1900 in his country the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig, whom some would see the maximum poet of America. That is so originalcomo the most and above all in some respects, more imaginative, nobody doubts. That is the best Spanish-speaking poet, not even the best in his time-a time when the world walked a lyrical range Ruben Dario, is less than likely. For Guillermo de Torre, its prologue and acute interpreter, Herrera y Reissig the poet who "embodies perhaps fuller meaning in the modern manner," higher than the same Darius who, being more of a poet, not modernism represented so faithfully. Herrera y Reissig was about thirteen years old when Blue appeared in 1888, the first book modernist Rubén Darío, and died too soon, at thirty-five years, so he could later develop a tone foreign to modernism.

"Herrera y Reissig, was actually a romantic, 'said Luis Cernuda-and for him, as for other Americans, modernism was perhaps a last incarnation of Romanticism. His ostensible hostility to the environment, its unsuitability to himself, his extreme individualism were so many consequences of an innate romanticism. And if we remember the unfortunate circumstances that accompanied his life, and how they led to a feeling of sympathy and estimation can wake up to him and his work. He looked the best, what he believed was the best, loved his work and was aware of what the artwork meant a lost art world where social outreach, while its significance became more serious for whom such work and discipline to want to submit. " Our devoted to the poet Miguel Hernández Uruguayan poet inordinate epitaph: "Cream of dust and its people / and cream of the cemetery, / truly serious / lies, really."

Julio Herrera y Reissig was born in Montevideo on January 9, 1875, from Creole family of deep roots in their country. Spent his childhood and youth play environment, education bourgeois in the best schools. But twenty years comes the sinking of the "blacksmith". The future poet must live modestly limited to the press and from holding secondary jobs in Montevideo Customs, the Inspection of Secondary Schools, etc. A month before he died he was appointed librarian. Only leaves his country in 1905 to go to Buenos Aires, where he worked at the Census Bureau for eight months. He died in Montevideo on March 18, 1910. Two years earlier he had married Juliet de la Fuente.

Herrera's work is intimately connected to his life, which is most faithful reflection. This selfish spirit is imprisoned in the tower of ivory, and since it is throwing the four cardinal points, with indifference, his message. The ivory tower is not a simile, is a reality. This ivory tower, where he retired voluntarily Herrera took his life and his name was called the Tower of Panoramas, and played an important role in the dissemination and Uruguayan modernist process. It was a literary circuit where Herrera gathered daily to his friends and admirers, almost all younger than him, he read his verses, heard their applause and, if need were given the accolade of poets.

Herrera begins writing songs to Spain, Castelar, A Lamartine, etc.., This happens in 1898. We are naturally at a romantic. But two years later, in a Wagnerian, published in The Journal, which he directs, has changed its tone. Immediately come Easter time, including in the twentieth century artistic Almanac, indicating total conversion to modernism. And then: Matins of the night, The ecstasy of the mountain, violets Poems, Sonnets Basques, Opals,? Volumes, The Tower of sphinxes, Parks Pianos abandoned and crepuscular. In prose, Conferences, The Renaissance in Spain, The circle of death, and so on.

The poetry of Herrera y Reissig is first and foremost Symbolist. Symbolism amazing, insane, which falls squarely within psychopathology areas, with much of illogicality and much extravagance. This is not to say that Herrera y Reissig was not a poetic temperament of the first order. It was, as demonstrated in many poems, and especially in the Sonnets Basques, who are for us the best of his work. Verbal mastery and sense of music and ironic and playful tone that speaks of the everyday, he goes one step within modernism and about Laforgue: hence sometimes the image search for the image and is mild background avant-garde poetry. His images are bizarre, shocking, like, "Golondrinas: arrows lost last night in defeat," "the doves scattered memories of the old walls wrinkled by age."

"The sixth issue of Horse Pablo Neruda, wrote Green, director of the magazine was left on the street without combining or sew Viriato. He was dedicated to Julio Herrera y Reissig-second Lautréamont from Montevideo, and texts written in homage to the Spanish poets were reflected there with her beauty, without pregnancy or destination. The magazine was to appear on July 19, 1936, but that day was filled with gunpowder the street. A stranger named General Francisco Franco rebelled against the Republic in his Garrison? Africa. "

Unlike other modernists, of Reuben, precursors and followers, Herrera is a rare, one that refuses to be intimate, the outside world, and even the space between the two areas. And, as most personal voice of the poet: "All sighs and laughs. The placidity remote / heavenly dreams the morning routines. / The bell always repeats the same note / candida cricket eclogues morning. / And by the dawn acute skew swallows / like arrows of the night lost in defeat. "



Francisco Arias Solis

Peace can not be reduced to the absence of war

Poetic XIII Festival for Peace and Freedom

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