100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Venezuela
June, 2018********With fragments of letters that oblivion
failed to lay beneath the soil, he has built
a muse, of intimate agonies,
****************the innocent idyll
of a love that died a tragic death
like most loves tend to, like most loves must.
Andrés Mata (1870-1931) is considered the initiator of the Modernist movement in Venezuela. His early writing was influenced by Victor Hugo, Nuñez de Arce, and Diaz Mirón, as well as his contemporaries Chocano and Lugones. Julio Planchart, writing in Antología de La Poesia Hispanoamericana (1965), asserted that Mata “belonged very much to his time in his continuous effort to find in his verses a fine and external musicality” and a “vague and internal sentiment which would echo that musicality.” This, Planchart concluded, showed that Mata truly embodied the Modernist movement.
Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. earned MFAs in creative nonfiction writing and literary translation from The University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous Press and Don’t Come Back from Mad River Books, as well as editor, with Sarah Viren, of the forthcoming anthology Essaying the Americas. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation work has been featured in journals including Bellingham Review, Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers, and The Sunday Rumpus, among others. She won Best of the Net and Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices Award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus, Ohio to Richmond, Virginia, where she works as an assistant professor for Virginia Commonwealth University. Visit www.linawritesessays.com.
English translation copyright (c) Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., 2018.