The poem, written in a Spanish that evokes rural Argentina, is widely seen as the pinnacle of the genre of "gauchesque" poetry (poems centered around the life of the gaucho, written in a style that evokes the rural Argentine ballads known as payadas) and a touchstone of Argentine national identity. It has appeared in literally hundreds of editions and has been translated into over 70 languages. It has earned major commentaries from, among others, Leopoldo Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, and Jorge Luis Borges (see Borges on Mart�n Fierro).
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2 Style and Structure 3 Critical and popular reception 4 References 5 External Links |
In La Vuelta de Mart�n Fierro, we discover that their hope of a better life is promptly and bitterly disappointed. They are taken for spies; the cacique (chief) saves their lives, but they are effectively prisoners of the Indians; in this context Hern�ndez presents another, and very unsentimentalized, version of rural life. The poem narrates an epidemic, the horrible, expiatory attempts at cure, and the fatal wrath upon those, including a young "Christian" (presumably ethnically Spanish) boy suspected of bringing the plague. Both Cruz and the cacique die of the disease. Shortly afterward, at Cruz's grave, Fierro hears the anguished cries of a woman: he follows and encounters an Indian whipping her bloody over the body of her dead son, her hands tied with the boy's entrails. It develops that she has been accused of witchcraft. Fierro fights and wins a brutal combat with her captor and travels with her back towards civilization, or at least towards Christian lands.
After Fierro deposits the woman at the first ranch they see, he goes on to an encounter that raises the story from the level of the mildly naturalistic to the mythic. He encounters his two surviving sons (one has been a prisoner, the other the ward of the vile and wily Vizcacha), and the son of Cruz (who has become a gambler). He has a night-long singing duel with a black payador (balladeer), in the course of which it becomes clear that the payador is the younger brother of the first man Fierro murdered in a duel. At the end, Fierro speaks of changing his name and living in peace, but it is not entirely clear that the duel has been averted.
The style of the poem shifts several times along the way. Nominally, Mart�n Fierro is a first-person narrator, but the distance between his voice and that of Hern�ndez varies at different points in the poem. The poem moves from a sentimental and romantic evocation of rural life to a brutal work of protest against military conscription and garrison life at the border forts; then it becomes an extended outlaw ballad of the life of a violent knife-fighting gaucho matrero; then it becomes a story of captivity among the Indians, followed finally by a bringing it's protagonist face-to-face with a series of human echoes of his past. This last set of encounters is so improbable that some commentators suggest that the black payador with whom Fierro has a singing duel is actually a figment of his own imagination.
The popular success of the work is unquestionable: at the time of the publication of the second part of the poem, the first part already had 48,000 copies in print in Argentina and Uruguay, almost unimaginable for that time. It was sold not only in bookstores but in pulper�as (rural bars), and was frequently read aloud as a public entertainment.
The poem received its canonization from Leopoldo Lugones who in El payador (1916), who declared it the epic of Argentina, comparable to Dante's Divine Comedy for Italy or Cervantes's Don Quixote for Spain. Ricardo Rojas went way beyond Lugones, claiming the poem to deal, at least metaphorically, with almost every issue of Argentine history, even though, as Borges remarks, most of these aspects are notable in the poem mostly for their absence.
Miguel de Unamuno tried, indirectly, to claim the work for Spain, calling it the "most Spanish" of Latin American literature. Eleuterio Tiscornia brings to the work a European critical apparatus that is doubtless entirely incommensurate with the work in question; both Borges and the Mexican writer Ezequiel Mart�nez Estrada, author of Muerte y Transfiguraci�n de Mart�n Fierro (Death and Transfiguration of Mart�n Fierro), see Tiscornia as a laughingstock in his willful or blind misunderstandings of the text.
Calixto Oyuela tried to bring the focus back from the national to the individual; he emphasized that this is the story a particular man, a gaucho in the last days of the open range; he sees the book as a meditation on origins, a protest, and a lament for a disappearing way of life. In Folletos Lenguaraces, Vicente Rossi goes beyond Oyuela, seeing Fierro as an "orillero", basically a hoodlum.
Borges, in his book-length collection of essays El "Mart�n Fierro", professes himself a great admirer of the work -- "Argentine literature," the writes, "... includes at least one great book, Mart�n Fierro -- but emphasizes that its esthetic merits should not be seen as corresponding to merits of its protagonist. In particular, he characterizes as "unfortunate" that the Argentinians read the story of Fierro forcing a duel of honor upon a man and ultimately killing him "with indulgence or admiration, rather than with horror."