Article
A short history of Colombian poetry
December 31, 2009
Erratic behaviour, saturated with indecision, characterises Colombia, a country that has yet to achieve political, social, economic and cultural strength. Nonetheless, all of these traumas are the context for a poetry that is evolving day by day; and amidst adversities, it is possible to identify works which together construct what one might call “the Colombian poetic tradition”, risky as that term may be, since the concept of nationality is less applicable within the realm of poetry.
It has been said that “Colombia is a land of poets”. There’s some degree of truth in this considering that, along with a tradition of barbarism, legislators have been successful on the basis of their rhetoric and diplomats have been known to write verses. Yet there are few real poets that have made a mark on the national spirit, although a lot of authors have written verses and a lot of them continue to do so. It is more accurate to say that Colombia is a country of versifiers, and this has to do with the fact that our culture is one of grammarians. The founders of this nation wrote verses, were Latinists and were protected by a spirit of learning.
In this sense, a notable Colombian writer, Hernándo Téllez, referred to Colombian poetry in 1946 in the following terms:
the first literary babble of a people has always been a lyrical one . . . One would think, agreeing with the aforesaid, that Colombia is in its third day of literary creation, precisely because the vast majority of its intellectual production is in the form of verses. But this is not quite so. The development and stabilisation of other literary genres is lagging far behind. As for poetry, the progress does not advance in depth, rather on the mere surface of things. There is a quantitative development, not equilibrated by progress in the quality of the works. There are a lot of verses, but very few poems. There is more production than lasting impressions.
Even so, when we refer to Colombian poetry, a number of writers come to mind who together form a panorama of poetic expression in the country and who have been presented in various anthologies compiled by scholars of Colombian poetry. The most important milestones are the writings of José Asunción Silva, Porfirio Barba Jacob, León de Greiff, Luis Vidales, Aurelio Arturo, Jorge Gaitán Durán, Carlos Obregón, Fernando Charry Lara, Álvaro Mutis and Fernando Arbeláez, all of whom have lightened poetic expression in their struggle to free themselves from excessive rhetoric and high-flown rhymes. Below, we present an overview of this Colombian poetic panorama, by Federico Díaz Granados.
Modernism and the Centenary Generation
Modernism was the first movement to flow through the arts world in Colombia, borne from the guts of America by people like José Martí, Rubén Darío, Julián del casal and José Santos Chocano, and introduced to Colombia via José Asunción Silva. Modernism was also carried through other diverse voices, such as Porfirio Barba Jacob and Guillermo Valencia, which reflected the different incarnations of the movement that resounded across the continent. The Centenary Generation, so called because its prominent figures began publishing their poems with the celebration of the first centenary of the republic, emerged during the final years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century as an adjunct of Colombian Modernism.
Los Nuevos
Los Nuevos (The New Ones), writers, intellectuals and politicians, emerged on the national literary scene as reactors against certain Modernist and Centenarian expressions, with their publication of Los Nuevos magazine in 1925. Although most of its members ended up yielding to tradition and the Modernist voice, this movement was a brushstroke of vanguardism and irreverence in times when an academic and provincial environment ruled in Colombia.
Piedra y Cielo
After the Los Nuevos group came the poets of Piedra y Cielo (Stone and Sky) – a title taken from a book by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jimenez – who, during the 30s, as the Spanish Civil War raged, split their political and literary sympathies between Francoism, the Republic, traditional Hispanic tendencies and the influx of the so called generations of ’98 and ’27. Their aesthetic visions and lyrical expression also garnered the friendship of the Chilean Pablo Neruda. In 1939 the poet Jorge Rojas published a compilation of works by Eduardo Carranza, Tomás Vargas Osorio, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Darío Samper, Gerardo Valencia and Carlos Martín, thus renewing the group’s stance on the subjects of poetry, feeling and national values, and the literary trade itself.
Cantico, Cuadernícolas and Mito
In the 1940s, the Cantico (Chant) chapbooks heralded the successors to Piedra y Cielo. This work revealed both a colloquial and a critical way of appreciating the sensitivity of a country submerged in different political and social changes, something which demanded a great deal of observation and analysis. Some of these poets were called Cuadernícolas (Notebookers) because they were associated with the publications of pamphlets or ‘cuadernos’ around the middle of the century. The Mito (Myth) magazine, first published in the late 1950s became one of the cornerstones of Colombian culture, introducing currents of universal thought as well as studies of contemporary problems alongside to work of various national writers. Under the tutelage of Jorge Gaitán Durán and in one of the most daring literary adventures in Colombia, national prose writers and poets faced their own history head on as well as giving coverage of various contemporary international artistic movements.
Nadaism
The 1960s saw the rise of Nadaism, which, in keeping with several vanguard movements that were appearing at the same time in Latin America and in the rest of the world, was an nihilistic counterculture literary movement in reaction to Establishment culture, the church and Colombian tradition. Lead by Gonzalo Arango, Nadaism recruited several young people from across the country. The tragic death of its founder and some of its members marked the ending of the Nadaist movement. Authors such as Mario Rivero, Eduardo Gómez, Germán Espinosa, José Manuel Arango and Giovanni Quessep were contemporaries of the Nadaists, but they maintained literary and aesthetic independence from Nadaism, both in their lives and works.
The Golpe de Dados Generation
This was the name given by professor Jaime Alstrum in The History of Colombian Poetry, published by the Casa de Poesía Silva, to the group of poets which arose after Nadaism. Born between the 1940s and the 1970s, these poets made up various literary groups such as the No-Name Generation, the Disillusioned Generation and the Uprooted Generation. Most of these poets started publishing in the 1970s, when the Golpe de Dados magazine first appeared. Throughout its work, the Golpe de Dados generation interprets the Colombian lyrical tradition and translates it into a colloquial, reflexive and testimonial language.
There are many poets who cannot be identified as belonging to any of these movements, but who have also contributed to Colombian culture with their work and their particular conceptions of poetry and verbal invention. These are poets whose imagination has forged unique paths in Colombian poetry, such as Raúl Henao, Juan Manuel Roca, Fernando Rendón, Carlos Vásquez, Gabriel Jaime Franco, Víctor Gaviria and William Ospina.
Within the Colombian poetic tradition, there has been a struggle to build an authentic language, one that is free from European influences and trends, and there has been an on-going search for a typically Colombian voice that can give wings to the poetry that is written in this country. One of the contributions of Nadaism to Colombian poetry is that it vigorously introduced the use of colloquial language and free verse, oxygenating the way poetic writing was conceived.
The 1960s marked a transition towards a poetic experience inscribed in the anonymity and secrecy of the poet. In this period, there was a proliferation of authors who struggled between their everyday lives and their poetic selves, between their trades and their own way of understanding poetic expression.
From the 1970s onwards, Colombian poets began writing around a looser poetry dealing with urban subject-matter and characterised by a more informal perspective. From that point on, Colombian poets climbed down from their Parnassian cloud with the realisation that they were but common people moving through a river of social interaction and challenges, separated from that bucolic and pseudo-romantic dimension in which his predecessors lived.
The International Poetry Festival of Medellín is therefore a living book – open, made up of voices of national and international poets – which makes Colombia one of the epicenters of contemporary poetry. With the birth of this festival in 1991 many unpublished or little known poets have been able to communicate their work within a receptive environment. The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has also been a platform for poets with a native indigenous background, whose work had been overlooked previously but whose expressive efforts, in written form, are now much valued in the context of contemporary poetry, such as Guayú poet Vito Apshana, who won the Casa de las Americas award in 2000, and Yanacona poet Feddy Chicangana.
The poets born in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s are the ones who have most benefited from the existence of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, and it is also because of this event that Colombian poetry has been nurtured and enriched through contact with the worldwide experiences of the participants, boding a promising future for the poetic experience of future generations.
I am also talking to you: in between woods, in between resins, in between a thousand restless leaves, from a single leaf, small green stain, of lushness, of grace, lone leaf in which the winds that ran through all the beautiful countries where green is made out of every other color, the winds who sang through the countries of Colombia, vibrate.
Aurelio Arturo
Colombia is a country of contrasts. Its history is an intersection of socio-political conflicts, and a heritage of civil wars has submerged it in an ocean of contradictions. There is no coherent national identity and Colombia’s culture has been subjected to a chain of ambiguities and inconsistencies that have thrown it adrift into improvisation, into the misfortune of upheavals and great tension. Aurelio Arturo
Erratic behaviour, saturated with indecision, characterises Colombia, a country that has yet to achieve political, social, economic and cultural strength. Nonetheless, all of these traumas are the context for a poetry that is evolving day by day; and amidst adversities, it is possible to identify works which together construct what one might call “the Colombian poetic tradition”, risky as that term may be, since the concept of nationality is less applicable within the realm of poetry.
It has been said that “Colombia is a land of poets”. There’s some degree of truth in this considering that, along with a tradition of barbarism, legislators have been successful on the basis of their rhetoric and diplomats have been known to write verses. Yet there are few real poets that have made a mark on the national spirit, although a lot of authors have written verses and a lot of them continue to do so. It is more accurate to say that Colombia is a country of versifiers, and this has to do with the fact that our culture is one of grammarians. The founders of this nation wrote verses, were Latinists and were protected by a spirit of learning.
In this sense, a notable Colombian writer, Hernándo Téllez, referred to Colombian poetry in 1946 in the following terms:
the first literary babble of a people has always been a lyrical one . . . One would think, agreeing with the aforesaid, that Colombia is in its third day of literary creation, precisely because the vast majority of its intellectual production is in the form of verses. But this is not quite so. The development and stabilisation of other literary genres is lagging far behind. As for poetry, the progress does not advance in depth, rather on the mere surface of things. There is a quantitative development, not equilibrated by progress in the quality of the works. There are a lot of verses, but very few poems. There is more production than lasting impressions.
Even so, when we refer to Colombian poetry, a number of writers come to mind who together form a panorama of poetic expression in the country and who have been presented in various anthologies compiled by scholars of Colombian poetry. The most important milestones are the writings of José Asunción Silva, Porfirio Barba Jacob, León de Greiff, Luis Vidales, Aurelio Arturo, Jorge Gaitán Durán, Carlos Obregón, Fernando Charry Lara, Álvaro Mutis and Fernando Arbeláez, all of whom have lightened poetic expression in their struggle to free themselves from excessive rhetoric and high-flown rhymes. Below, we present an overview of this Colombian poetic panorama, by Federico Díaz Granados.
Modernism and the Centenary Generation
Modernism was the first movement to flow through the arts world in Colombia, borne from the guts of America by people like José Martí, Rubén Darío, Julián del casal and José Santos Chocano, and introduced to Colombia via José Asunción Silva. Modernism was also carried through other diverse voices, such as Porfirio Barba Jacob and Guillermo Valencia, which reflected the different incarnations of the movement that resounded across the continent. The Centenary Generation, so called because its prominent figures began publishing their poems with the celebration of the first centenary of the republic, emerged during the final years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century as an adjunct of Colombian Modernism.
Los Nuevos
Los Nuevos (The New Ones), writers, intellectuals and politicians, emerged on the national literary scene as reactors against certain Modernist and Centenarian expressions, with their publication of Los Nuevos magazine in 1925. Although most of its members ended up yielding to tradition and the Modernist voice, this movement was a brushstroke of vanguardism and irreverence in times when an academic and provincial environment ruled in Colombia.
Piedra y Cielo
After the Los Nuevos group came the poets of Piedra y Cielo (Stone and Sky) – a title taken from a book by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jimenez – who, during the 30s, as the Spanish Civil War raged, split their political and literary sympathies between Francoism, the Republic, traditional Hispanic tendencies and the influx of the so called generations of ’98 and ’27. Their aesthetic visions and lyrical expression also garnered the friendship of the Chilean Pablo Neruda. In 1939 the poet Jorge Rojas published a compilation of works by Eduardo Carranza, Tomás Vargas Osorio, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Darío Samper, Gerardo Valencia and Carlos Martín, thus renewing the group’s stance on the subjects of poetry, feeling and national values, and the literary trade itself.
Cantico, Cuadernícolas and Mito
In the 1940s, the Cantico (Chant) chapbooks heralded the successors to Piedra y Cielo. This work revealed both a colloquial and a critical way of appreciating the sensitivity of a country submerged in different political and social changes, something which demanded a great deal of observation and analysis. Some of these poets were called Cuadernícolas (Notebookers) because they were associated with the publications of pamphlets or ‘cuadernos’ around the middle of the century. The Mito (Myth) magazine, first published in the late 1950s became one of the cornerstones of Colombian culture, introducing currents of universal thought as well as studies of contemporary problems alongside to work of various national writers. Under the tutelage of Jorge Gaitán Durán and in one of the most daring literary adventures in Colombia, national prose writers and poets faced their own history head on as well as giving coverage of various contemporary international artistic movements.
Nadaism
The 1960s saw the rise of Nadaism, which, in keeping with several vanguard movements that were appearing at the same time in Latin America and in the rest of the world, was an nihilistic counterculture literary movement in reaction to Establishment culture, the church and Colombian tradition. Lead by Gonzalo Arango, Nadaism recruited several young people from across the country. The tragic death of its founder and some of its members marked the ending of the Nadaist movement. Authors such as Mario Rivero, Eduardo Gómez, Germán Espinosa, José Manuel Arango and Giovanni Quessep were contemporaries of the Nadaists, but they maintained literary and aesthetic independence from Nadaism, both in their lives and works.
The Golpe de Dados Generation
This was the name given by professor Jaime Alstrum in The History of Colombian Poetry, published by the Casa de Poesía Silva, to the group of poets which arose after Nadaism. Born between the 1940s and the 1970s, these poets made up various literary groups such as the No-Name Generation, the Disillusioned Generation and the Uprooted Generation. Most of these poets started publishing in the 1970s, when the Golpe de Dados magazine first appeared. Throughout its work, the Golpe de Dados generation interprets the Colombian lyrical tradition and translates it into a colloquial, reflexive and testimonial language.
* * *
There are many poets who cannot be identified as belonging to any of these movements, but who have also contributed to Colombian culture with their work and their particular conceptions of poetry and verbal invention. These are poets whose imagination has forged unique paths in Colombian poetry, such as Raúl Henao, Juan Manuel Roca, Fernando Rendón, Carlos Vásquez, Gabriel Jaime Franco, Víctor Gaviria and William Ospina.
Within the Colombian poetic tradition, there has been a struggle to build an authentic language, one that is free from European influences and trends, and there has been an on-going search for a typically Colombian voice that can give wings to the poetry that is written in this country. One of the contributions of Nadaism to Colombian poetry is that it vigorously introduced the use of colloquial language and free verse, oxygenating the way poetic writing was conceived.
The 1960s marked a transition towards a poetic experience inscribed in the anonymity and secrecy of the poet. In this period, there was a proliferation of authors who struggled between their everyday lives and their poetic selves, between their trades and their own way of understanding poetic expression.
From the 1970s onwards, Colombian poets began writing around a looser poetry dealing with urban subject-matter and characterised by a more informal perspective. From that point on, Colombian poets climbed down from their Parnassian cloud with the realisation that they were but common people moving through a river of social interaction and challenges, separated from that bucolic and pseudo-romantic dimension in which his predecessors lived.
The International Poetry Festival of Medellín is therefore a living book – open, made up of voices of national and international poets – which makes Colombia one of the epicenters of contemporary poetry. With the birth of this festival in 1991 many unpublished or little known poets have been able to communicate their work within a receptive environment. The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has also been a platform for poets with a native indigenous background, whose work had been overlooked previously but whose expressive efforts, in written form, are now much valued in the context of contemporary poetry, such as Guayú poet Vito Apshana, who won the Casa de las Americas award in 2000, and Yanacona poet Feddy Chicangana.
The poets born in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s are the ones who have most benefited from the existence of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, and it is also because of this event that Colombian poetry has been nurtured and enriched through contact with the worldwide experiences of the participants, boding a promising future for the poetic experience of future generations.
© Jairo Guzmán
Translator: Carolina Mejía
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