Dantés — Poemas
No one has yet discovered who signed the name Dantés in Santa Barbara’s Spanish-language newspaper La Gaceta, but the poems left behind are anything but anonymous in feeling. Between 1879 and 1881, this writer moved easily from intimate love lyrics to satire, elegy, cemetery meditation, Catholic devotion, and an ambitious patriotic vision. Luis A. Torres argues in the introduction to The World of Early Chicano Poetry, 1846–1910 that this newspaper verse was “remarkable for its poetic quality and versatility”; Dantés’s sixteen surviving poems bear out that claim. This bilingual edition presents each Spanish original immediately before its English translation, preserving stanza shapes and internal divisions while making visible the strange, compelling outline of a literary life that history has otherwise erased.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Dantés. “A Patriot’s Dream and Vision.” La Gaceta, 24 July 1880.
———. “On the Death of the Child Pablo de la Guerra.” La Gaceta, 11 Dec. 1880.
———. Sixteen poems. La Gaceta, 1879–1881.