Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

El teatro contemporáneo by Alfredo de la Guardia

Review by: Aubrey F. G. Bell
Books Abroad, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter, 1949), pp. 43-44
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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 HEAD-LINERS-
The Spanish poets of Port Chester, New
York were it seemed quite on a par with
the best Spanish poets of Montevideo
and Bogota. The reviewer, being an in-
quisitive person, dropped a line to Port
Chester.
The poet's reply was almost as good
reading as his verses. He told an inspir-
ing life story in a dozen lines. Born in
the Andes, educated in Sucre, for some
years a schoolmaster in La Paz, then an
impecunious foreign student at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, finally a draftsman
with a firm of architects in New York
City. Somewhere along the line, prob-
ably at Ann Arbor, a romance which
blossomed into marriage. No thought of
printed poetry, till some five years ago.
Then all of a sudden the patient, steady
clink-clink of the car wheels as the com-
muter rode back and forth between Port
Chester and the metropolis threw a
switch in his brain and released a pow-
erful stream of poetry. Since then his
poems have come without coaxing. "Los
poemas siguen lloviendome yo no se de
donde." He has written them down,
hundreds of them, but he is a busy man,
and this is the first time he has got a few
of them together and published them.
A hundred years before Mr. Castrillo,
and not two hundred miles away from
Port Chester, the once famous Yankee
poet John Godfrey Saxe penned his jaun-
ty Rhyme of the Rail:
Whizzing through the mountains,
Buzzing o'er the vale,-
Bless me! this is pleasant,
Riding on the Rail.
The Bolivian's ode to the Iron Horse is
pitched in a different key:
El temblor y la trepidacion
nos unifica a todos
en el moler de los minutos
y en la violacion de los silencios
dormidos bajo los puentes.
El temblor
sin miedo,
sin dolor,
sin ilusiones ....
but there is in both of them the touch of
nature that gives them kinship. There
are poets of various tempers, but all poets
are related.-/?. T. H.
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VERSE 43
* Cassiano Ricardo. Martim Cerere.
O Brasil dos meninos, dos poetas e
dos herois. Sao Paulo. Companhia Edi-
toria Nacional. 9th ed., 1947. 240 pages.
- Raul Bopp. Poesias. Zurich. The Au-
thor. 1947. 70 pages.- The essentially
childlike poetry of the jungle, represent-
ing the nativist influence, is an insepar-
able and important part of the Brazilian
cultural heritage, and in these two vol-
umes it is given a superb creative em-
bodiment. It is pleasing to note that in
each case the poet in recasting the old
Amazon tales addresses himself to chil-
dren- but Sr. Ricardo's subtitle is sig-
nificant: it is "the Brazil of young ones,
of poets, and of heroes" that we are deal-
ing with here. The Brazilians have never
drawn the sharp line that we do between
juvenile and adult literature, as is evi-
denced, for example, by the avidity with
which grown-ups devour the children's
books of Monteiro Lobato.
In Martim Cerere, a work that has
been compared to the Argentine Martin
Fierro, a leading modern poet and dis-
tinguished member of the Brazilian
Academy of Letters retells the old In-
dian legend of Sacy Perere (due to Af-
rican influence, Perere became Cerere).
As for Senhor Bopp, modernist out of
the 1920's (one of Oswald de Andrade's
Anthropophagite group), what he gives
us here is a new version of a work that
has been published a number of times be-
fore, having already been well incorpo-
rated into the national folklore. He is
at present a diplomat stationed in Switz-
erland, which accounts for the place of
publication. Indeed, it may be said that
both books have become classics in their
authors' lifetimes.- Samuel Putnam.
Lambertville, N. J.
* Alfredo de la Guardia. El teatro con-
tempordneo. Buenos Aires. Schapire.
1947. 446 pages. $12 m-n. - A very am-
bitious undertaking has been carried
through in this book with no little skill,
although it suffers from a certain lack
of proportion, partly due to what one
may think the author's excessive rever-
ence for the genius of Ibsen and Mr.
44 BOOKS ABROAD
Bernard Shaw. Shaw is set side by side
with Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare,
Alarcon, and Moliere. He is the author
of "the most concentrated and purest
comedy ever written." He receives one
eighth of the whole book, and this leaves
little space for the others. Those of Hol-
land have half a page, the Irish fare as
badly, while the Portuguese, often of
considerable interest, are omitted. In the
section devoted to comedy the psycho-
logical drama of the octogenarian Don
Jacinto Benavente receives eight pages,
but the "generation of 1898" is too sum-
marily dismissed. Among South Ameri-
can writers the Argentines naturally
have the lion's share.
The book's main divisions are the real-
istic drama, the naturalistic drama, the
drama of ideas, and finally satire and
comedy. Under each of these headings
we are given a rapid but well-informed
sketch of the product of France, Spain,
Argentina, Italy, England, the United
States, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czech-
oslovakia, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, and
Brazil. The author allows very little to
escape his net. He addresses both the
student and the general reader, but he
does not fall between two stools; his book
is both scholarly and pleasantly written.
The absence of many well-known
names is explained by the fact that a
second volume will follow dealing with
the most recent dramatists. An index
would have greatly increased the work's
value. There is laudable accuracy in the
spelling of foreign names, although we
may fail to recognize "D'Otway," and
"Chejof" is an unfamiliar spelling. Some
of the titles of French plays are given,
others are translated into Spanish.-
Aubrey F. G. Bell. Victoria, B. C, Can-
ada.
^ Dictionnaire d'ancien jrancais. Moy-
en Age et Renaissance. R. Grand-
saignes d'Hauterive, ed. Paris. Larousse.
1947. xii-f-592 pages.- That conscien-
tious Prince of Lexicographers, old
Pierre-Athanase Larousse, and his heirs,
have given the world one of the
longest lists of reference books ever or-
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ganized by one company, and their
books are uniformly good. M. Grand-
saignes d'Hauterive's new Old French
Dictionary, thoughtfully planned and
carefully edited, is not a mere abbrevia-
tion and modernization of the older dic-
tionaries, but has found its own effective
and often rather original contrivances
for presenting much and varied informa-
tion. It gives what might be termed the
biography of each word, the century of
its appearance and in many instances the
period of its demise. It indicates ety-
mologies where they are not a mere mat-
ter of conjecture. It illustrates meanings,
when that seems helpful, by citations
from old texts. It often mentions related
English and German words. It calls spe-
cial attention to words which are still
alive but have changed in meaning. It
very usefully indicates the tonic accent
of Latin parent words, so that the stu-
dent may see how a particular Latin
word came to assume its particular
French form. It covers the period from
the first literary monuments through the
sixteenth century, until Old French was
replaced by modern French, a different
language.
The editor, it appears, is not a task-
slave but an ardent lover of "la parlure
la plus delitable," and for others who
are stirred by the same affection his book
is full of fragrance.- R. T. H.
"The new 'literary Czars' who have
emerged from the purge are Simonov,
Fadeyev, Gorbatov, Vishnevsky, Kor-
neichuk. All of them are from thirty-
five to fifty-five years old, party members
and mediocre writers, good propagan-
dists who can write fluently about prob-
lems of the day. . . . They are able to
portray reality faithfully (i.e., in such a
manner as is demanded at any particular
period), but do not possess any original
ideas, personality, or other distinction.
Under their leadership, nothing will
change in Soviet literature- it will in-
evitably sink further, in the same direc-
tion that it has been going for the past
fifteen years."- Alexander Rasumovsky
in Partisan Review.