Roberto Villanueva

Roberto Villanueva (born March 17, 1804 , † December 26, 1848 ) was a Spanish-speaking poet from Paraguay .

Among the few poets who worked in Paraguay at the time of Latin American Romanticism, Villanueva stands out. He remained loyal to his fatherland, but escaped provincialism through extensive correspondence with the writers in Hispanic centers such as Santiago de Chile , Buenos Aires and, of course, Madrid . The Spanish romantic Antonio García Gutiérrez (1813-1884), whom he never met personally, he called "estrella de mi corazón" (star of my heart). With a few soulmates, Villanueva founded the artist group “Los pocos de la Cascada” in 1822 (The few from la Cascada - their favorite bar in Asunción ). In 1833 he married the actress Francisca Arreteguía , whom he had hired for the "Teatro de la Cascada", which he founded in 1831, the first theater in Paraguay. In 1848 he died of pneumonia.

Villanueva's work includes samples from all literary genres. His drama "Los ángeles de la llanura" (The Angels of the Plain), which he began when he was still at school, is an attempt at a religiously inflated national epic of the still young state. It was never performed. Later V. distanced himself from the immature work and turned to poetry in addition to writing articles and reports for newspapers and magazines. Here, too, the sounds of home dominated, albeit at a higher level. His “Canciones de los pájaros de mi patria” (songs of the birds of my homeland) became school reading in Paraguay. Pablo Neruda appreciated the lyric miniatures and was inspired by them to write his own bird poems. A novel, on the other hand, begun shortly before his death, which dealt with the oppressed farm workers in an early form of naturalism, remained a fragment.

expenditure

• Los ángeles de la llanura, Buenos Aires 1913
• Canciones de los pájaros de mi patria, Asunción 1829, 12th edition Asunción 1999.

literature

• Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá: Historia de la literatura paraguaya . Mexico 1970.
• Angela Bautista Erinzaga: Roberto Villanueva. Poeta de transición . Diss. Bonn 2001.