Almafuerte

Almafuerte is the pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios, an Argentine poet born in 1854 in the provincial outskirts of Buenos Aires. His name comes up from time to time in my meandering study of Argentine poetry and literature, and I grabbed this slim volume from the library so that I might know a bit about the man and his work. This collection of his prose and poetry was compiled by Jorge Luis Borges, who also wrote a short introduction. In it he recounts his initial exposure to the poetry of Almafuerte:

"Up until that night, human language had not been anything but a means of communication, an everyday mechanism made up of signs; the verses of Almafuerte that Evaristo Carriego recited to us revealed to me that it could be a music, a passion and a dream. Housman wrote that poetry is something that we feel physically, with our flesh and blood; I owe my first experience of that curious, magical fever to Almafuerte."

I enjoy retracing the influences of Borges, and it was nice to gain a cursory understanding of what Almafuerte's verses meant to him in his formation as a person and as a writer. To him, Almafuerte was a sincere man with a very intense, consolidated view on mankind. The flaws in his work are overcome by the strength and unity of his vision.

And what is his vision? I had expected pastoral poems celebrating the rural Argentine lifestyle; what I got was a very particular, very negative view on the poet himself and on all of mankind. His first poem, an extended meditation on "la patria," contains the following lines:

Those are the truth, God of justice
he who has painted this world falsely
and armed the wolf with potent claws,
who has made the path of pleasure a wide one
which leads to death or to nostalgia
who has left the gazelle indefenseless
and armed the wolf with potent claws,
who has divided the world of men
into the many, who suffer and work
and the few, who laugh and fulfill
the mission of guiding the progress of man
and their greatness grows with their lies
and their nobility grows with their murders!

Borges ruminates on other possible outcomes if Almafuerte were born in a different moment in a different place: He mentions Nietzche, and he also hypothesizes that he could have been a religious figure of sorts, a mystic leading groups of men with his dire predications of a world full of suffering, where man lives in a state of anguish and happiness is undesirable. The poems are bleak with respect to man, God and the poet himself. The longest poem, El Misionero, is about a man of the cloth who lays in anguish, exposed to the elements, voicing his suffering to a flock of dogs who sit by him as he speaks. One of my favorites is a song sung to a girl, wherein the poet explains his particular state of being and his negative view of himself, concluding with the following verse:

Given that you already know
the filiation, the prontuary
of the poetic visionary
who bears anguishes as he goes;
and because your soul, perhaps,
being the soul of a lady,
must insist on loving
that which I myself do not;
back from the edge of the abyss
I bid that you retreat.

This wasn't quite the "poesía gauchezca," that I expected, but as I thought about it, it seemed to me to be more authentic and more representative of a state of mind that is more "gaucho" than most of the literature I've read depicting the Argentine cowboy lifestyle. Martín Fierro is a book about a gaucho; the poetry of Almafuerte feels like poetry written by a gaucho. In truth, this is not entirely so: based on the limited biographical information I've found on Almafuerte, he was of rather humble origins, but focused on the arts from a young age. He gave up painting as a teenager when he did not receive a grant to travel to Europe to continue his studies. He then taught in a school in Chacabuco, but was dismissed for not holding a teaching license. He also worked as a journalist in La Plata for a while. In fact, his biography is not entirely disimilar to that of José Hernández, and these poems complement Martín Fierro well. I imagine the gaucho sitting on the open pampa and thinking these things to himself, dwelling on mental images of the rotten humanity found in the city, behind the walls of the fortín or at the counter of the boliche, and knowing that he himself is a member of that mass of suffering, sadness and shame. As I read and re-read the poems in this short compilation, I like them more and more, and am happy I finally took the time to introduce myself to the poetry of Almafuerte.… (más)