Martín Fierro
Encyclopedia
Martín Fierro is a 2,316 line epic poem by the Argentine
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
writer José Hernández. The poem was originally published in two parts, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). The poem is, in part, a protest against the modernist tendencies of Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history...
. As well, the poem supplied a historical link to the gauchos' contribution to the national development of Argentina, for the gaucho had played a major role in Argentina's independence from Spain.
The poem, written in a Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
that evokes rural Argentina, is widely seen as the pinnacle of the genre of "gauchesque" poetry (poems centered around the life of the gaucho
Gaucho
Gaucho is a term commonly used to describe residents of the South American pampas, chacos, or Patagonian grasslands, found principally in parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Chile, and Southern Brazil...
, 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
Leopoldo Lugones
Leopoldo Lugones Argüello was an Argentine writer and journalist.-Early life:Born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentina's Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry...
, Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.-Biography:...
, Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
(see Borges on Martín Fierro
Borges on Martín Fierro
Like most Argentines, Jorge Luis Borges was a great admirer of José Hernández's poem Martín Fierro.With real or feigned modesty about his own work, he routinely characterized it as the one clearly great work in Argentine literature...
) and Rafael Squirru
Rafael Squirru
Rafael Squirru , is an Argentine poet, lecturer, art critic and essayist.- Biographical notes :Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Squirru was educated at Saint Andrew's Scot School and at the Jesuit El Salvador Secondary School...
. The Martín Fierro Award
Martín Fierro Awards
Martín Fierro is the name of the most prominent awards for Argentine radio and television, granted by APTRA, the Association of Argentine Television and Radio Journalists. The awards were first given in 1959, limited to television. The next year, the awards adopted its current name, after José...
, named for the poem, is the most respected award for Argentine television and radio programs.
Plot
In El Gaucho Martín Fierro, the eponymous protagonist is an impoverished gaucho who has been drafted to serve at a border fort, defending the Argentine inner frontier against the Native Peoples. His life of poverty on the pampas is somewhat romanticized; his military experiences are not. He deserts and tries to return to his home, but discovers that his house, farm, and family are gone. He deliberately provokes an affair of honor by insulting a black woman in a bar; in the knife duel that ensues, he kills her male companion. The narration of another knife fight suggests by its lack of detail that it is one of many. Fierro becomes an outlaw pursued by the police militia. In battle with them, he acquires a companion: one Sergeant Cruz, inspired by Fierro's bravery in resistance, defects and joins him mid-battle. The two set out to live among the natives, hoping to find a better life there.In La Vuelta de Martín Fierro, we discover that their hope of a better life is promptly and bitterly disappointed. They are taken for spies; the cacique
Cacique
Cacique is a title derived from the Taíno word for the pre-Columbian chiefs or leaders of tribes in the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles...
(chieftain) saves their lives, but they are effectively prisoners of the natives; in this context Hernández 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 a native woman weeping 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 leaves 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 payada (singing duel) with a black payador (singer), who turns out to be the younger brother of the 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 avoided (Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
wrote a short story in which this possibility is played out).
Style and structure
Like his predecessors in "gauchesque" poetry, Hernández sticks to the eight-syllable line of the payadas, the rural ballads. However, Hernández also uses a rhyming six-line stanza ("like the six strings of a guitar," said Lugones) with a novel invention. The first line is kept "free" and unrhymed, allowing Hernández to present a "thesis" to the stanza without having to worry about the last word being part of the rhyme scheme. Lines two, three and six rhyme together while lines four and five constitute an independent rhyming group. The first verse of the poem illustrates this structure of six eight-syllable lines. (Note that, in Spanish prosody, vowels from adjacent words are considered to conjoin and form a single syllable, as marked here with a diagonal slash /, and verses ending in an stressed syllable behave as if they had an additional syllable at the end, marked with (+) .)1 A- quí me pon- go/a can- tar (+) Aquí me pongo a cantar
2 al com- pás de la vi- güe- la, Al compás de la vigüela
3 que/al hom- bre que lo des- ve- la Que al hombre que lo desvela
4 u- na pe- na/es- tror- di- na- ria, Una pena estrordinaria,
5 co- mo la/a- ve so- li- ta- ria Como la ave solitaria
6 con el can- tar se con- sue- la. Con el cantar se consuela.
Unlike his predecessors, Hernández, who had himself spent half his life alongside the gauchos in the pampas, in the regular army brigades that took part in Argentina's civil wars and more years engaged in the border wars, does not seek out every rural colloquialism under the sun. He hews much closer to the actual payadores, using a mildly archaic style and giving a sense of place more through phonetic spellings than through choice of words. At times - especially in the payadas within the larger poem - he rises to a particularly stark and powerful poetry, taking on romantic and even metaphysical themes. In La Vuelta de Martín Fierro, at the time Fierro is returning to the "Christian" world, he talks of his notoriety, apparently, in an echo of a plot point in the second book of Don Quixote, as a result of the fame of El Gaucho Martín Fierro.
The style of the poem shifts several times along the way. Nominally, Martín Fierro is a first-person narrator, but the distance between his voice and that of Hernández 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 bringing its 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 episode with the black payador is actually a figment of Fierro's imagination.
Critical and popular reception
Martín Fierro was an immediate popular success; it was also generally well received by the critics, although it required more than a generation for the work to be accorded the status of a classic.Borges, who describes the work as more of a "verse novel" than an "epic", points out that this is partly because it is such an accurate evocation of its own time that it took some distance before its greatness could become apparent.
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
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
, almost unimaginable for that time. It was sold not only in bookstores but in pulperías (rural bars), and was frequently read aloud as a public entertainment.
The poem received its canonization during a series of lectures by Leopoldo Lugones
Leopoldo Lugones
Leopoldo Lugones Argüello was an Argentine writer and journalist.-Early life:Born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentina's Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry...
in 1913 (published as El payador in 1916), where the great Argentine poet crowned the Martín Fierro the epic of Argentina, comparable to Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's Divine Comedy for Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
or Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
's Don Quixote for Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
. 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.
Previously in 1894, the Spanish poet and critic Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.-Biography:...
tried, indirectly, to claim the work for Spain, calling it the "most Spanish" of Latin American literature
Latin American literature
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the...
. Eleuterio Tiscornia brought to the work a critical approach akin to European philology which seems, on the surface, incommensurate with the work in question (see Borges and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada was an Argentine writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic. An admired biographer and critic, he was often political in his writings, and was a confirmed anti-Peronist...
's short-sighted attack on Tiscornia). However today, the scholarly approach of Tiscornia and others, such as Francisco Castro and Santiago Lugones, have helped make the poem accessible to those far from the Argentine context.
Among more contemporary critics, Calixto Oyuela
Calixto Oyuela
Calixto Oyuela , was an Argentine poet and essayist....
tried to bring the focus back from the national to the individual, a critique similar to Martínez Estrada's; he emphasized that this is the story of 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 to pick up where Borges left off, by seeing Fierro as an "orillero", basically a hoodlum.
Borges, in his book-length collection of essays El "Martín Fierro", professes himself a great admirer of the work -- "Argentine literature", he writes, "[...] includes at least one great book, Martín Fierro" -- but emphasizes that its aesthetic merits should not be seen as corresponding to the merits of its protagonist. In particular, he characterizes as "unfortunate" that the Argentines 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".
Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an writer Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
wrote in his essey Derivas de la pesada: "poetically Martín Fierro is not a marvel. But it is as novel alive, full of significances to explore". He also stated that it was a "novel about liberty and filth, not about education and good manners" and that "it is a story about valour, not a story about intelligence and much less about morals."
Popular culture
In the 1920s, Borges and other avant-garde Argentine writers embracing "art for art's sake" published a magazine called Martín FierroMartín Fierro (magazine)
Martín Fierro was an Argentine literary magazine which appeared from February 1924 to 1927. It was founded by Evar Méndez , José B. Cairola, Leónidas Campbell, H. Carambat, Luis L. Franco, Oliverio Girondo, Ernesto Palacio, Pablo Rojas Paz, and Gastón O...
; they are often referred to collectively as the grupo Martín Fierro ("Martín Fierro group"), although at the time they were better known as the Florida group
Florida group
The Florida group were a Buenos Aires-based avant-garde literary group in the 1920s, known for their embrace of "art for art's sake"...
.
In 1952 director Jacques Tourneur made Way of a Gaucho
Way of a Gaucho
Way of a Gaucho ia a 1952 20th Century Fox western set in Argentina. It stars Gene Tierney and Rory Calhoun....
in Argentina for 20th Century Fox. The story about an orphan gaucho called Martín Peñalosa, who has deserted from the army and becomes the leader of a rebel group, follows the legend of Martín Fierro in many ways, although the film is based upon a book by Herbert Childs and a screenplay by Philip Dunne. In 2009 the film classic was finally released first time on dvd, but at the moment only in Spain, where the title of the film is Martín, el Gaucho.
Martín Fierro Awards
Martín Fierro Awards
Martín Fierro is the name of the most prominent awards for Argentine radio and television, granted by APTRA, the Association of Argentine Television and Radio Journalists. The awards were first given in 1959, limited to television. The next year, the awards adopted its current name, after José...
are the most prominent awards for Argentine radio and television. It is granted by APTRA, the Association of Argentine Television and Radio Journalists.
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson , also known as Leo Towers and as Babsy, was an Argentine film director, producer and screenwriter....
's classic Argentine film Martín Fierro
Martín Fierro (film)
Martín Fierro is a 1968 film based upon José Hernández's poem Martín Fierro, widely considered Argentina's national poem. The story centers on the life of a renegade gaucho....
(1968) is based on the poem. Fernando Solanas' 1972 Los Hijos de Fierro
Los Hijos de Fierro
Los Hijos de Fierro is a 1972 Argentine film directed by Fernando Pino Solanas....
(The Sons of Martín Fierro) is another Argentine classic film.
In Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's novel Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
, a group of Argentine anarchists led by Francisco Squalidozzi collaborate with a sinister German filmmaker, Gerhardt von Göll, to create a film version of Martín Fierro.
Songs named after the poem have been released by the Argentine singer/songwriter Juana Molina
Juana Molina
Juana Molina is a singer-songwriter and an actress.-Biography:Following the 1976 Argentine coup d'état, her mother fled the country and lived in exile in Paris for five years...
on her album "Segundo" and by the German band the Magic I.D. on their album "till my breath gives out".