The Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo: When Poetry is Not Enough

by Hernan Fontanet

Overview

The Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo: When Poetry is Not Enough is a comprehensive, well-written, documented, and carefully developed study of the literary work and life of Francisco Urondo, an Argentine poet, intellectual, activist, cultural promoter, revolutionary, and clandestine guerilla member who died in 1976 fighting for a cause in which he believed, against the oppressive Argentine Military Junta.

This methodical but never mechanistic work shows how life events, cultural milieu, political movements, and world circumstances interacted and impacted Urondo’s temperament to produce his poetic voice, his prose, and his theatrical works. By studying the man, we get closer to his poetry. With his poetry, the author makes a compelling case for understanding the man.

Francisco Urondo’s life, work, and praxis were varied, agonizing at times, and always marked by imperatives. This book fills a significant lacuna in the scholarship on the work of this worthy, yet neglected and under-studied, writer. Readers of this book will come away with not only a deepened understanding of the man and his writings but also of a key period in recent Argentine political, social, and intellectual history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761864578
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	10/24/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	435 KB

About the Author

Hernan Fontanet is an Argentinian-American literary author, who has published seven books on postcolonial political poetry in Europe, the United States, and South America. He has taught Latin American literature at Yale, Buenos Aires, Rider, Almeria, Fayetteville, and Belgrano Universities. He earned his PhD in Latin American Literature and two Masters of Arts degrees, one from Spain in European studies and the other from Argentina in Hispanic studies. Fontanet has been a lecturer and keynote speaker in Europe, Japan, USA, South America, and China.

Table of Contents

Preface by Osvaldo Bayer
Introduction
Chapter I: Childhood: The 1930s and 1940s
Chapter II: From Elegiac Introspection to Colloquial Poetry: The 1950s
Chapter III: In Search of the Right Word: The 1960s
Chapter VI: “If You Allow It, I’d Rather Go on Living”: The 1970s
Conclusions
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

What Fontanet succeeds in doing in this monograph, is to show, with detailed analysis of the texts, how Urondo’s poetry developed along a trajectory in order to fulfill this belief. In a methodical way, Fontanet takes us through the stages of Francisco Urondo’s life and poetry, all the while showing us how each one is reflected in the other.

Sheldon Penn

Fontanet’s literary work is a complete study of all Paco’s difficult life, difficult in love and in war. Paco knew how to live and he knew how to die. He had the blood of a poet and of a hero of a people.

'svaldo Bayer

Among the strengths of Hernán Fontanet’s book are the manner in which he presents the main events in Urondo’s life, tying them simultaneously to the evolution of his poetry and to world events; his lucid analysis of the trajectory of Urondo’s poetic production; and his judicious incorporation of a wealth of sources that fill in the picture of Urondo’s life and artistic production.

Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz

As we have mentioned, in these pages written by Fontanet we find Paco’s complete legacy: his life, as a model, in giving it for his people; his poetry, a poetic exploration on thought, and the importance of his texts, his prose and his theatrical works. It is a handbook of the life of a poet and fighter. What two titles to have! In the face of a bureaucracy and political and military personalities created by our society. He was a pure being, attentive to all.

Osvaldo Bayer