José Hernández
(Perdriel, San Martín, 1834-Buenos Aires, 1886) Argentine poet, author of Martín Fierro , a work that is considered the pinnacle of gaucho literature and an outstanding classic of Argentine literature.
José Hernández
As a child he was in the care of uncles and grandparents while his parents worked in the fields.He studied at the Liceo Argentino de San Telmo, but a chest illness made him leave Buenos Aires and join his father in a field of Camarones; by then the mother had died.The young Hernández stayed there for a few years, immersing himself in the rural world.
He returned to Buenos Aires after the Battle of Caseros (1852), and was involved in the political struggles that divided the country after the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas.Of federal convictions, he joined the government of the Confederation, faced with Buenos Aires.For 1856 some sources place it in Paraná; others delay that residence until 1858, but the truth is that Hernández worked in that city as a commercial employee and that he actively participated in the battle of Cepeda (1859) together with Justo José de Urquiza.
Such harmony is broken when the forced cam arrives and they force him to march to the border with the Indian.This means the dissolution of the family, uprooting and many regrets.Friendship with the gaucho Cruz partially attenuates the bitter feelings caused in Fierro by the injustices and violence of which he is a witness or has starred.In the second part there is a reunion with his children, victims of abuse, like him, whom he advises to lead an honest and working life.There are also small formal breaks in the work.
While the first part can be read as an allegation against the abuses of the presidency of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in the second, made seven years later, the harshness is lowered and leaves room for a more nuanced and complex of the rural world.The poem, like almost all gaucho literature, is written in octosyllables (7210 verses), but not grouped in the traditional tenths or quatrains, but rather in sextinas, stanzas of six lines that allow, in turn, the division into pairs, thus giving them a greater proximity to the gaucho language.
The gaucho Martín Fierro had a great editorial success in his day, but no repercussion among literary critics, on the other hand almost non-existent then.The nationalist ardors that were experienced with the celebration of the first centenary of the May Revolution were reflected, among other ways, in the revaluation of the work by Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Rojas.From that date it became a classic, and Jorge Luis Borges and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, among others, devoted their attention to it.Today The gaucho Martín Fierro and The return of Martín Fierro are known as the two parts of the same work, Martín Fierro , the highest point of gaucho poetry and one of the fundamental works of Argentine literature.
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