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Martín Fierro #2
La vuelta de Martín Fierro
La vuelta de Martín Fierro was published in 1879 in Argentina and continues El gaucho Martín Fierro, concluding the saga of Martín Fierro.
136 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 30, 1879
34 people are currently reading
161 people want to read
About the author
José Hernández
154 books55 followersJosé Hernández (born José Rafael Hernández y Pueyrredón) (November 10, 1834 – October 21, 1886) was an Argentine journalist, poet, and politician best known as the author of the epic poem Martín Fierro.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Hernández, whose ancestry was a mix of Spanish, Irish, and French, was born on a farm near San Martín (Buenos Aires Province). His father was a butler or foreman of a series of cattle ranches. His career was to be an alternation between stints on the Federal side in the civil wars of Argentina and Uruguay and life as a newspaperman, a short stint as an employee of a commercial firm, and a period as stenographer to the legislature of the Confederation.
Hernández founded the newspaper El Río de la Plata, which advocated local autonomy, abolition of the conscripted "frontier contingents", and election of justices of the peace, military commanders, and school boards. He opposed immigration, because he believed it undermined the pastoral foundation of the region's wealth. He envisioned a federal republic based in pastoralism, but also featuring a strong system of education and a literate population.
Although a federalist opposed to the centralizing, modernizing, and Europeanizing tendencies of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento, Hernández was no apologist for General Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he characterized as a tyrant and a despot.
Hernández is known today almost exclusively for his masterpiece Martín Fierro, the epic poem that stands as the pinnacle of gauchesque literature. The poem was apparently begun during a period of exile in Brazil following the defeat at Ñaembé (1870) and was published in two parts (in 1872 and 1879).
Hernández died of heart disease October 21, 1886, in Belgrano, which was at that time a separate suburb, currently a neighborhood of the Buenos Aires city. He was buried in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Hernández, whose ancestry was a mix of Spanish, Irish, and French, was born on a farm near San Martín (Buenos Aires Province). His father was a butler or foreman of a series of cattle ranches. His career was to be an alternation between stints on the Federal side in the civil wars of Argentina and Uruguay and life as a newspaperman, a short stint as an employee of a commercial firm, and a period as stenographer to the legislature of the Confederation.
Hernández founded the newspaper El Río de la Plata, which advocated local autonomy, abolition of the conscripted "frontier contingents", and election of justices of the peace, military commanders, and school boards. He opposed immigration, because he believed it undermined the pastoral foundation of the region's wealth. He envisioned a federal republic based in pastoralism, but also featuring a strong system of education and a literate population.
Although a federalist opposed to the centralizing, modernizing, and Europeanizing tendencies of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento, Hernández was no apologist for General Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he characterized as a tyrant and a despot.
Hernández is known today almost exclusively for his masterpiece Martín Fierro, the epic poem that stands as the pinnacle of gauchesque literature. The poem was apparently begun during a period of exile in Brazil following the defeat at Ñaembé (1870) and was published in two parts (in 1872 and 1879).
Hernández died of heart disease October 21, 1886, in Belgrano, which was at that time a separate suburb, currently a neighborhood of the Buenos Aires city. He was buried in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
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May 27, 2020I read this as background to The Adventures of China Iron (2017) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, a feminist riff on Martín Fierro, which was was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize in its English translation; this post makes a lot of comparisons between the books. I read part 1 of Martín Fierro (1872) in the 1974 translation by Frank G. Carrino, Alberto J. Carlos and Norman Mangouni, which has a demotic, relaxed tone that was easy to read and seemed to suit the poem well. That team hadn't translated part 2 (1879), so I read it in the more formal translation available free online, a version of a 1967 translation by Catherine Ward, revised by her daughter and hosted on their family's website.
Part 2 begins with Fierro and his companion Cruz approaching Indian territory; as a note to the text says, "fugitives from justice often went over the frontier to the Indians". (Fierro has deserted the army, into which he'd been pressganged, and he later killed a man in a bar fight. When an attempt was made to arrest him, Cruz, who'd been pressganged into the police, also deserted and joined forces with Fierro, and the two men became fast friends.) The Indians in China Iron are more or less mirror images, opposites in almost every way, of the Indians in Fierro 2, and appear mostly in the final third of the book. To the reader who read China Iron first, Fierro 2 goes some way to explaining why the Indians are as they are in the 2017 book: idealised in a way that seems more reminiscent of 1970s hippie culture (100 years after the original poem) than of 2010s intersectionality.
Fierro and Cruz approach Native territory with trepidation; the feeling is mutual:
we arrived at an unlucky time.
They were holding a council making plans for a raid…
A tremendous uproar started when they saw us coming…
they took us for spies from the frontier guard
As another note says, "the indians were extremely suspicious of any contact with 'christians'. Mansilla's Excursion to the Ranquele shows the dangers of even a peaceable embassy". (Their female and/or queer counterparts in China Iron are quickly welcomed by the Indians.) Unsurprisingly for a 19th century text by and for European settlers, the Indians in Fierro 2 are shown as brutal, bloodthirsty and untrustworthy (and are not given individual names):
The indian's opinion is that it's always right to kill -
since whenever he's not drinking blood he likes watching it run out…
The indians just spend their life either stealing, or stretched out flat.
The law of the spear's point is the only one they'll respect -
and what they're lacking in knowledge they make up with suspiciousness.
An indian with a kind heart would be a thing to put in a frame to stare at.
They're cruel with their captives and treat them horribly;
they're sharp-witted and resentful, they're bold and vindictive
It's not as if they had good reasons to trust settlers. Rather than explaining this, China Iron creates a lush, fantastical world where China (Fierro's estranged wife now living as a boy named Jo) and companions stay - perhaps for the rest of their lives - in a polyamorous paradise with the indigenous people, and they move seemingly to take refuge from "the government's campaign to exterminate the indians … carried through in 1879-83", as mentioned in a note to Fierro 2. Among the few things that the two sets of fictional Indians have in common is that they don't wear many clothes, and have a relaxed lifestyle:
Indians are great ones for sleeping, though and they sleep very soundly too.
No one can beat them for snoring -- and their life's so unconcerned
they'd snore stretched out at their ease if the world turned upside down.
says the poem. Cabezón Cámara's novel makes it clear this is because the abundance of wild food means there is no need for long hours of work.
Paradoxically, it is the original poem that contains identifiable parallels with known archaeology and anthropology, in particular from Chile.
"And they're barbarous, as well, in the way they bring up their own.
I'd never seen such a thing -- they bind them to a board
and rear them that way, so they make the back of their head grow flat."
It is now thought this didn't do significant harm, though it would produce an appearance that would be strange and alien to the settlers - but the same would have been the case if they had been able to time-travel back to the first millennium CE and see the European peoples who practised similar head-binding customs.
There was a gringo boy captive -- always talking about his ship
and they drowned him in a pond for being the cause of the plague ...
His eyes were pale blue like a wall-eyed foal.
It was one of the old hags who ordered them to kill him that way
This sounds somewhat similar to the human sacrifice of a local indigenous boy in a remote area of Chile during the 1960 Valdivia earthquake (the strongest ever officially recorded earthquake in the world). The 19th century poem is almost entirely negative about Indians but in the case of this particular text, that also seems to have meant it didn't shy away from material rooted in reality which is inconvenient for those wanting to produce an entirely rosy picture of Southern Cone traditional native culture palatable to westernised readers.
The problem with Fierro is rather that it has almost nothing positive to say about Indians (except that they are fantastically skilled and gentle with horses - echoed, incidentally, in a mestizo character in China Iron) and doesn't understand their viewpoints and why it was entirely reasonable for them to fight and distrust the Europeans. They were not respected as people defending their country in the same way as if one European state had invaded another. (Powers who produced a higher body count than Indian warriors - because of their weapons and more complex societies - but familiar and therefore usually less frightening to themselves.)
It can seem as if China Iron seeks to be a weight on the other side of a set of scales with trays marked "demonise" and "idealise": as if it aims to induce balance by being the opposite of Martín Fierro rather than by being the balance itself. This may be an easier position for a ludic, politically radical work of art, than to aim for scholarly accuracy, but it also shows that while it, like Fierro may be partly about Indians, it isn't *by* them. Fierro has the status of Argentina's national epic poem; indigenous people are citizens and it does them a disservice in misrepresenting and misunderstanding them. Yet China Iron also does those things, albeit via positive rather than negative stereotyping.
And obviously, being a queer feminist retelling, the other subjects whose representation China Iron is addressing and remoulding are women, gender and sexuality.
There is no shortage of negative allusions to women throughout both parts of Martín Fierro. Martín misses his family, in an abstract sense, as a source of comfort - apparently more than as individuals and personalities - through much of the first poem. The view of women in Fierro part 2 seems largely to be that they are not to be trusted:
it's a hard job to keep a woman that others have a fancy to.
"A woman's a kind of animal that I won't start describing here.
She'll always like a strong man, but watch out how you choose --
because she's got a heart that's slippery as the belly of a toad."
(Advice given by to one of Fierro's sons by his guardian.)
But poor gaucho women are also victims of more powerful sections of society, as their male counterparts are:
It means nothing that there's a mother lamenting or in despair,
or that a man has to leave his wife completely destitute –
they have to keep quiet, or it's clear they'll be smashed once and for all.
Because they’ll start getting into debt to one neighbour or another,
and as it's true of the male sex that if they don't walk, they fly –
I can imagine, poor women, they must have to go carefully.
Perhaps The Adventures of China Iron deliberately responds to this:
If you give up your heart to some woman that you love,
don't act in any way that does the woman wrong –
a woman who's been treated badly will always ruin you in the end.
A book that shows up what's wrong with Martín Fierro as a national epic, and which eventually transforms its hero into a gay crossdresser, would have horrified most 19th-century nation-builders, and was undoubtedly written with that in mind. In part 2 of the original, Fierro's wife is fridged, as the comics and SFF world would say, and Cabezón Cámara makes her the star and narrator of her response. (Whilst there is no sign of her having been won in a card game by Fierro as a 12 year old - as the novel says she was - there are plenty of other allusions to cards in the poem.)
As with the US cowboy, violence reads like an integral part of gaucho masculinity in Martín Fierro. (There is an additional component of aversion to most settled work, or even non-herding agriculture such as ploughing.) However, except in a few didactic verses near the end, lawlessness itself, and occasional incidents of senseless violence, are celebrated more than in US westerns: but this is a poem for a working-class audience who remembered gaucho culture, some of whom were still, in a way, a part of it - a very different product from a Hollywood western made half a century later once the West was won by Europeans. The gauchos are more emotional and demonstrative than the typical image of the cowboy, as would be expected given the differences between North and South American culture and their Anglo and Spanish counterparts in Europe.
because one man cheers another, and talking consoles your grief
The whole poem is a recounting of hardships in the first person: look how much he's been through and how much he has suffered.
But alongside that there is a clear valorisation of stoicism as manly (and the opposite of women):
- The business of hugging and crying, and kissing
is best left to women, that's their kind of game –
men understand that everyone feels things in the same way,
so they'll dance and sing in public but cry and embrace privately.
- "Don' t you forget, Fierro, that a man should never trust
in the tears of a woman nor in a dog that limps.
You've no call to get upset even though the world falls apart.
Fierro's strongest relationships in the poem are with Cruz, and with his teenage sons once he is reunited with them after ten years of wandering. (The boys, who each tell their own stories at some length, take after their father, in and out of trouble - though one of them was assigned a guardian who was a petty criminal himself, so he had little chance of being otherwise.) I have reservations about the way Cabezón Cámara made Fierro and Cruz a gay couple and Fierro a genderqueer mother figure - whilst I appreciate the fun and mischief in queering a very masculine, hetero and traditional national epic, it does seem to reinforce the idea (perhaps more prevalent in Anglo cultures) that if men express affection for each other it inevitably means they are gay or not male in some way. A tricky tightrope to walk with something like this. The queer characters who change their names seem to be a direct retort to an unforgiving line in the poem: it always is the case
that anyone who changes his name has got something guilty to hide. And of course many in the 1870s would have seen these gender and sexuality variants as something to feel guilty about.
José Hernández, author of Martín Fierro appears as a character in China Iron, a General and representative of colonial rule resident at an outpost where characters stop on their journey. Considering how much the 1870s poem seems to celebrate gaucho men and their outlaw lifestyle on their own terms, the novel's caricature of Hernández doesn't quite chime with it: it is only in the final stanza where the poem is frequently didactic. It is almost contradictory to the rest:
No one whose job is to obey has an easy time of it,
but if he's proud he only increases the hardships he has to bear –
if you're the one to obey, then obey, so the one who's boss can act well.
the greatest wisdom a man can have is to know how to control himself…
it's always drink that's the worst enemy…
a man who does wrong when he's drunk deserves twice the punishment.
The society was stacked against gauchos and it's far from clear whether Fierro would have had a better quality of life if he had been as obedient and sober as suggested. He would have certainly avoided some trouble by not picking drunken fights, but these were not even his main problems: those were pressganging and communities being cleared off the land. Many gauchos had already lost their rural communities by 1879; one could argue that Hernández is simply being realistic in saying they should have houses and churches, rather than making a case for giving them back the land they'd lived on for several generations (and from which they had displaced Indians.)
because no one makes it their business to stand up for his kind --
but the gauchos ought to have houses and a school and a church and their rights…
If a poor man's the least bit careless they crack down on him with the whip;
but I understand the way things are and the conclusion I've reached is this:
the gauchos are the thin leather that gives the best thongs to make rope
That last line sounds like the Hernández of China Iron.
Although the didactic ending of Fierro was highlighted in the novel (and of course I have no idea what the poem feels like to Argentines who grow up with it as a set text and as part of popular culture), I felt that most of the poem was a bluesy lament and protest song about the lives of poor gaucho men on the margins of society: they may be criminal but they also suffer unjust punishments; they have been turfed out by authorities from the only way of life they knew and valued. Corruption in elections and the forces is part of Martín's story: it's about a rotten system as well as about its characters' struggles through life.
(Read March 2020, reviewed May 2020.)
Part 2 begins with Fierro and his companion Cruz approaching Indian territory; as a note to the text says, "fugitives from justice often went over the frontier to the Indians". (Fierro has deserted the army, into which he'd been pressganged, and he later killed a man in a bar fight. When an attempt was made to arrest him, Cruz, who'd been pressganged into the police, also deserted and joined forces with Fierro, and the two men became fast friends.) The Indians in China Iron are more or less mirror images, opposites in almost every way, of the Indians in Fierro 2, and appear mostly in the final third of the book. To the reader who read China Iron first, Fierro 2 goes some way to explaining why the Indians are as they are in the 2017 book: idealised in a way that seems more reminiscent of 1970s hippie culture (100 years after the original poem) than of 2010s intersectionality.
Fierro and Cruz approach Native territory with trepidation; the feeling is mutual:
we arrived at an unlucky time.
They were holding a council making plans for a raid…
A tremendous uproar started when they saw us coming…
they took us for spies from the frontier guard
As another note says, "the indians were extremely suspicious of any contact with 'christians'. Mansilla's Excursion to the Ranquele shows the dangers of even a peaceable embassy". (Their female and/or queer counterparts in China Iron are quickly welcomed by the Indians.) Unsurprisingly for a 19th century text by and for European settlers, the Indians in Fierro 2 are shown as brutal, bloodthirsty and untrustworthy (and are not given individual names):
The indian's opinion is that it's always right to kill -
since whenever he's not drinking blood he likes watching it run out…
The indians just spend their life either stealing, or stretched out flat.
The law of the spear's point is the only one they'll respect -
and what they're lacking in knowledge they make up with suspiciousness.
An indian with a kind heart would be a thing to put in a frame to stare at.
They're cruel with their captives and treat them horribly;
they're sharp-witted and resentful, they're bold and vindictive
It's not as if they had good reasons to trust settlers. Rather than explaining this, China Iron creates a lush, fantastical world where China (Fierro's estranged wife now living as a boy named Jo) and companions stay - perhaps for the rest of their lives - in a polyamorous paradise with the indigenous people, and they move seemingly to take refuge from "the government's campaign to exterminate the indians … carried through in 1879-83", as mentioned in a note to Fierro 2. Among the few things that the two sets of fictional Indians have in common is that they don't wear many clothes, and have a relaxed lifestyle:
Indians are great ones for sleeping, though and they sleep very soundly too.
No one can beat them for snoring -- and their life's so unconcerned
they'd snore stretched out at their ease if the world turned upside down.
says the poem. Cabezón Cámara's novel makes it clear this is because the abundance of wild food means there is no need for long hours of work.
Paradoxically, it is the original poem that contains identifiable parallels with known archaeology and anthropology, in particular from Chile.
"And they're barbarous, as well, in the way they bring up their own.
I'd never seen such a thing -- they bind them to a board
and rear them that way, so they make the back of their head grow flat."
It is now thought this didn't do significant harm, though it would produce an appearance that would be strange and alien to the settlers - but the same would have been the case if they had been able to time-travel back to the first millennium CE and see the European peoples who practised similar head-binding customs.
There was a gringo boy captive -- always talking about his ship
and they drowned him in a pond for being the cause of the plague ...
His eyes were pale blue like a wall-eyed foal.
It was one of the old hags who ordered them to kill him that way
This sounds somewhat similar to the human sacrifice of a local indigenous boy in a remote area of Chile during the 1960 Valdivia earthquake (the strongest ever officially recorded earthquake in the world). The 19th century poem is almost entirely negative about Indians but in the case of this particular text, that also seems to have meant it didn't shy away from material rooted in reality which is inconvenient for those wanting to produce an entirely rosy picture of Southern Cone traditional native culture palatable to westernised readers.
The problem with Fierro is rather that it has almost nothing positive to say about Indians (except that they are fantastically skilled and gentle with horses - echoed, incidentally, in a mestizo character in China Iron) and doesn't understand their viewpoints and why it was entirely reasonable for them to fight and distrust the Europeans. They were not respected as people defending their country in the same way as if one European state had invaded another. (Powers who produced a higher body count than Indian warriors - because of their weapons and more complex societies - but familiar and therefore usually less frightening to themselves.)
It can seem as if China Iron seeks to be a weight on the other side of a set of scales with trays marked "demonise" and "idealise": as if it aims to induce balance by being the opposite of Martín Fierro rather than by being the balance itself. This may be an easier position for a ludic, politically radical work of art, than to aim for scholarly accuracy, but it also shows that while it, like Fierro may be partly about Indians, it isn't *by* them. Fierro has the status of Argentina's national epic poem; indigenous people are citizens and it does them a disservice in misrepresenting and misunderstanding them. Yet China Iron also does those things, albeit via positive rather than negative stereotyping.
And obviously, being a queer feminist retelling, the other subjects whose representation China Iron is addressing and remoulding are women, gender and sexuality.
There is no shortage of negative allusions to women throughout both parts of Martín Fierro. Martín misses his family, in an abstract sense, as a source of comfort - apparently more than as individuals and personalities - through much of the first poem. The view of women in Fierro part 2 seems largely to be that they are not to be trusted:
it's a hard job to keep a woman that others have a fancy to.
"A woman's a kind of animal that I won't start describing here.
She'll always like a strong man, but watch out how you choose --
because she's got a heart that's slippery as the belly of a toad."
(Advice given by to one of Fierro's sons by his guardian.)
But poor gaucho women are also victims of more powerful sections of society, as their male counterparts are:
It means nothing that there's a mother lamenting or in despair,
or that a man has to leave his wife completely destitute –
they have to keep quiet, or it's clear they'll be smashed once and for all.
Because they’ll start getting into debt to one neighbour or another,
and as it's true of the male sex that if they don't walk, they fly –
I can imagine, poor women, they must have to go carefully.
Perhaps The Adventures of China Iron deliberately responds to this:
If you give up your heart to some woman that you love,
don't act in any way that does the woman wrong –
a woman who's been treated badly will always ruin you in the end.
A book that shows up what's wrong with Martín Fierro as a national epic, and which eventually transforms its hero into a gay crossdresser, would have horrified most 19th-century nation-builders, and was undoubtedly written with that in mind. In part 2 of the original, Fierro's wife is fridged, as the comics and SFF world would say, and Cabezón Cámara makes her the star and narrator of her response. (Whilst there is no sign of her having been won in a card game by Fierro as a 12 year old - as the novel says she was - there are plenty of other allusions to cards in the poem.)
As with the US cowboy, violence reads like an integral part of gaucho masculinity in Martín Fierro. (There is an additional component of aversion to most settled work, or even non-herding agriculture such as ploughing.) However, except in a few didactic verses near the end, lawlessness itself, and occasional incidents of senseless violence, are celebrated more than in US westerns: but this is a poem for a working-class audience who remembered gaucho culture, some of whom were still, in a way, a part of it - a very different product from a Hollywood western made half a century later once the West was won by Europeans. The gauchos are more emotional and demonstrative than the typical image of the cowboy, as would be expected given the differences between North and South American culture and their Anglo and Spanish counterparts in Europe.
because one man cheers another, and talking consoles your grief
The whole poem is a recounting of hardships in the first person: look how much he's been through and how much he has suffered.
But alongside that there is a clear valorisation of stoicism as manly (and the opposite of women):
- The business of hugging and crying, and kissing
is best left to women, that's their kind of game –
men understand that everyone feels things in the same way,
so they'll dance and sing in public but cry and embrace privately.
- "Don' t you forget, Fierro, that a man should never trust
in the tears of a woman nor in a dog that limps.
You've no call to get upset even though the world falls apart.
Fierro's strongest relationships in the poem are with Cruz, and with his teenage sons once he is reunited with them after ten years of wandering. (The boys, who each tell their own stories at some length, take after their father, in and out of trouble - though one of them was assigned a guardian who was a petty criminal himself, so he had little chance of being otherwise.) I have reservations about the way Cabezón Cámara made Fierro and Cruz a gay couple and Fierro a genderqueer mother figure - whilst I appreciate the fun and mischief in queering a very masculine, hetero and traditional national epic, it does seem to reinforce the idea (perhaps more prevalent in Anglo cultures) that if men express affection for each other it inevitably means they are gay or not male in some way. A tricky tightrope to walk with something like this. The queer characters who change their names seem to be a direct retort to an unforgiving line in the poem: it always is the case
that anyone who changes his name has got something guilty to hide. And of course many in the 1870s would have seen these gender and sexuality variants as something to feel guilty about.
José Hernández, author of Martín Fierro appears as a character in China Iron, a General and representative of colonial rule resident at an outpost where characters stop on their journey. Considering how much the 1870s poem seems to celebrate gaucho men and their outlaw lifestyle on their own terms, the novel's caricature of Hernández doesn't quite chime with it: it is only in the final stanza where the poem is frequently didactic. It is almost contradictory to the rest:
No one whose job is to obey has an easy time of it,
but if he's proud he only increases the hardships he has to bear –
if you're the one to obey, then obey, so the one who's boss can act well.
the greatest wisdom a man can have is to know how to control himself…
it's always drink that's the worst enemy…
a man who does wrong when he's drunk deserves twice the punishment.
The society was stacked against gauchos and it's far from clear whether Fierro would have had a better quality of life if he had been as obedient and sober as suggested. He would have certainly avoided some trouble by not picking drunken fights, but these were not even his main problems: those were pressganging and communities being cleared off the land. Many gauchos had already lost their rural communities by 1879; one could argue that Hernández is simply being realistic in saying they should have houses and churches, rather than making a case for giving them back the land they'd lived on for several generations (and from which they had displaced Indians.)
because no one makes it their business to stand up for his kind --
but the gauchos ought to have houses and a school and a church and their rights…
If a poor man's the least bit careless they crack down on him with the whip;
but I understand the way things are and the conclusion I've reached is this:
the gauchos are the thin leather that gives the best thongs to make rope
That last line sounds like the Hernández of China Iron.
Although the didactic ending of Fierro was highlighted in the novel (and of course I have no idea what the poem feels like to Argentines who grow up with it as a set text and as part of popular culture), I felt that most of the poem was a bluesy lament and protest song about the lives of poor gaucho men on the margins of society: they may be criminal but they also suffer unjust punishments; they have been turfed out by authorities from the only way of life they knew and valued. Corruption in elections and the forces is part of Martín's story: it's about a rotten system as well as about its characters' struggles through life.
(Read March 2020, reviewed May 2020.)
May 26, 2015
Zzzzz
September 5, 2019
Más extensa y espectacular que la primera. Con escenas más hardcore, nos enteramos lo que le pasó al protagonista a su regreso del desierto y además escuchamos nuevos narradores: las voces de sus dos hijos, de Picardía y el casi duelo de rap entre Martín Fierro y el negro en el que se da la mejor parte, mejor incluso que los consejos finales.
December 18, 2021
me aburrí leyendo esto, espero que naides me diga nada por eso
October 20, 2019
في الجزء الثاني من الملحمة نلاحظ التغير الذي طرأ على شخوص الملحمة و على رأسهم مارتين فيرو .. حيث ظهر بصورة شخص أقرب إلى الحكمة و عدم الإندفاع .. على عكس الجزء الأول ..
يعود مارتين فيرو ليبحث عن أبناءه و يعلمهم حكمته التي تعلمها خلال سنين حياته .. أكثر ما أعجبني في هذا الجزء الأناشيد الأخيرة من الملحمة و خصوصا مناظرة مارتين فيرو مع العبد الأسود ..
يعود مارتين فيرو ليبحث عن أبناءه و يعلمهم حكمته التي تعلمها خلال سنين حياته .. أكثر ما أعجبني في هذا الجزء الأناشيد الأخيرة من الملحمة و خصوصا مناظرة مارتين فيرو مع العبد الأسود ..
October 30, 2020
أفضل وأكثر ثراءا من الجزء الأول
March 24, 2020
Es un libro muy bueno para acercarse a la literatura gauchesca. Cómo se describen determinados pasajes, la honda desesperación ante una vida que parece irremediable, la presencia femenina... Todo está maravillosamente escrito.
Con todo, me ha dejado algo triste la resolución de los diversos conflictos. Creo que el cambio en la ideología del autor ocasiona que se pierda parte del encanto y de lo característico del gaucho.
Con todo, me ha dejado algo triste la resolución de los diversos conflictos. Creo que el cambio en la ideología del autor ocasiona que se pierda parte del encanto y de lo característico del gaucho.
April 7, 2021
Me hicieron leer el primero para la facu y me gustó más de lo que creía que me iba a gustar, así que dije "Bueno, leo el segundo por ocio". No fue taaan malo, pero me parece muy loco que ya en el siglo XIX se cumplía la maldición de las secuelas.
PD: LO QUE TARDÉ EN LEERLO, DIOS.
PD: LO QUE TARDÉ EN LEERLO, DIOS.
May 9, 2018
الوطن هو الام التي لا تدافع عن ابناءها.
القانون يوضع للجميع، لكنه فقط يطبق على الفقراء.
حياة الجاوتشيين التعيسة، بشكل أو بآخر، هي حياة المصريين! ملحمة مبهره ونبيلة.
القانون يوضع للجميع، لكنه فقط يطبق على الفقراء.
حياة الجاوتشيين التعيسة، بشكل أو بآخر، هي حياة المصريين! ملحمة مبهره ونبيلة.
February 2, 2025
tampoco entendí
September 7, 2025
Un libro destinado a despertar la inteligencia y el amor a la lectura en una población casi primitiva, a servir de provechoso recreo, después de las fatigosas tareas, a millares de personas que jamás han leído, debe ajustarse estrictamente a los usos y costumbres de esos mismos lectores, rendir sus ideas e interpretar sus sentimientos en su mismo lenguaje, en sus frases más usuales, en su forma más general, aunque sea incorrecta; con sus imágenes de mayor relieve, y con sus giros más característicos, a fin de que el libro se identifique con ellos de una manera tan estrecha e íntima, que su lectura no sea sino una continuación natural de su existencia.
Los personajes colocados en escena deberían hablar en su lenguaje peculiar y propio, con su originalidad, sus gracias y sus defectos naturales, porque despojados de ese ropaje, lo serían igualmente de su carácter típico, que es lo único que los hace simpáticos, conservando la imitación y la verosimilitud en el fondo y en la forma.
Y aceptando esos defectos como un elemento, se idealiza también, se piensa, se inclina a los demás a que piensen igualmente y se agrupan, se preparan y conservan pequeños monumentos de arte, para los que han de estudiarlo mañana y levantar el grande monumento de la historia de nuestra civilización.
El gaucho no aprende a cantar. Su único maestro es la espléndida naturaleza que en variados y majestuosos panoramas se extiende delante de sus ojos.
Canta porque hay en él cierto impulso moral, algo de métrico, de rítmico que domina en su organización, y que lo lleva hasta el extraordinario extremo de que todos sus refranes, sus dichos agudos, sus proverbios comunes, son expresados en dos versos octosílabos perfectamente medidos, acentuados con inflexible regularidad, llenos de armonía, de sentimiento y de profunda intención.
Qué singular es, y qué digno de observación, el oír a nuestros paisanos más incultos expresar en dos versos claros y sencillos, máximas y pensamientos morales que las naciones más antiguas, la India y la Persia, conservaban como el tesoro inestimable de su sabiduría proverbial; que los griegos escuchaban con veneración de boca de sus sabios más profundos, de Sócrates, fundador de la moral, de Platón y de Aristóteles; que entre los latinos difundió gloriosamente el afamado Séneca; que los hombres del Norte les dieron lugar preferente en su robusta y enérgica literatura; que la civilización moderna repite por medio de sus moralistas más esclarecidos, y que se hallan consagrados fundamentalmente en los códigos religiosos de todos los grandes reformadores de la humanidad.
Indudablemente, que hay cierta semejanza íntima, cierta identidad misteriosa entre todas las razas del globo que sólo estudian en el gran libro de la naturaleza; pues que de él deducen, y vienen deduciendo desde hace más de tres mil años, la misma enseñanza, las mismas virtudes naturales, expresadas en prosa por todos los hombres del globo, y en verso por los gauchos que habitan las vastas y fértiles comarcas que se extienden a las dos márgenes del Plata. El corazón humano y la moral son los mismos en todos los siglos.
Que su lectura no sea sino una continuación natural de su existencia. No pensé en otra cosa más que en estos párrafos del prólogo de Hernández desde que empecé a leer el libro.
Gracias le doy a la Virgen,
gracias le doy al Señor,
porque entre tanto rigor
y habiendo perdido tanto,
no perdí mi amor al canto
ni mi voz como cantor.
Pura emoción leyendo los versos que Calamaro recita en Estadio Azteca. Es curioso que el segundo libro, que es un poco menos gustado no sé por qué, haya sido el que contenga la mayoría de frases de nuestro saber popular Argentino. Con los consejos de Fierro al final vemos clara la intención de Hernández de escribir el segundo libro con un fin pedagógico y educativo para esta población que defendió y respetó desde su lugar, siendo ahora ya diputado y no solo periodista.
Tengo que confesar que sí tuve pequeñas complicaciones de lectura esta vez. Con la introducción de nuevos personajes, cambios de narrador y sumado al pasaje entre el yo poético y el yo lírico del autor sí me mareé un par de veces pensando que todos eran Fierro, pero no es nada que un par de relecturas atentas no solucionen.
El hijo mayor heredó completas las coplas del padre, sus palabras en la cárcel me infundieron la pena y el desconsuelo que deben sentir las personas estando privadas de su libertad. Picardía me hizo reír mucho y es explicable que su nombre sea ese por haber perdido la inocencia desde chico. Y después el negro, la payada de contrapunto es el momento más épico de todo el poema. Debates filosóficos sí los hay. La de versos y contestaciones que se tiran, las batallas de rap se inventaron acá.
Me pone contento haber leído solo pequeños fragmentos del Martín Fierro en la escuela. Permitirme leerlo de adulto teniendo más experiencia en literatura y no siendo un adolescente con la cabeza en otras cosas. Lo siento mucho por los que fueron obligados y lo sufrieron, dios quiera, puedan darle otra chance que a fin de cuentas este es nuestro libro y esta es nuestra historia.
Debe el gaucho tener casa, escuela, iglesia y derechos.
Y si la vida me falta,
tenganló todos por cierto,
que el gaucho, hasta en el desierto,
sentirá en tal ocasión
tristeza en el corazón
al saher que yo estoy muerto.
Pues son mis dichas desdichas
las de todos mis hermanos;
ellos guardarán ufanos
en su corazón mi historia;
me tendrán en su memoria
para siempre mis paisanos.
Es la memoria un gran don,
calidá muy meritoria;
y aquellos que en esta historia
sospechen que les doy palo,
sepan que olvidar lo malo
también es tener memoria.
Mas naides se crea ofendido,
pues a ninguno incomodo;
y si cauto de este modo
por encontrarlo oportuno,
NO ES PARA MAL DE NINGUNO
SINO PARA BIEN DE TODOS.
No sé por qué esperé a ver la película para escribir esta reseña, soy un salame.
July 11, 2021
Es interesante observar el cambio que parecetener el protagonista de la obra, donde revaloriza una sociedad en transformación y muestra haber superado su rebeldía rupturista y orientarse más hacia el futuro de sus hijos.
Las actitudes de los personajes, la descripción de los comportamientos, las diferencias entre los estratos sociales y la manera en la cual se tratan temas como la civilización y la barbarie son de profundo interés analítico.
Me resultó sorprendente contar con las descripción de los indígenas y con las vivencias de los hijos del gaucho protagonista durante estos 10 años en los cuales no ha estado presente su padre.
La narración en verso facilita mucho la lectura mientras que la voz narrativa hace que sea un acto dinámico y entretenido para el lector.
Las actitudes de los personajes, la descripción de los comportamientos, las diferencias entre los estratos sociales y la manera en la cual se tratan temas como la civilización y la barbarie son de profundo interés analítico.
Me resultó sorprendente contar con las descripción de los indígenas y con las vivencias de los hijos del gaucho protagonista durante estos 10 años en los cuales no ha estado presente su padre.
La narración en verso facilita mucho la lectura mientras que la voz narrativa hace que sea un acto dinámico y entretenido para el lector.
December 31, 2017
En La vuelta de Martín Fierro, el gaucho payador relata cómo él y Cruz, luego de atravesar el desierto, llegaron a territorio de indígenas. Allí fueron hechos prisioneros y durante cinco años llevaron una vida de penurias junto a los indios.
Las costumbres salvajes de éstos empavorecieron a los dos gauchos. Martín Fierro también describe los bailes, fiestas y malones de los indios. Más tarde, Cruz muere a causa de una epidemia de viruela entre los nativos.
Las costumbres salvajes de éstos empavorecieron a los dos gauchos. Martín Fierro también describe los bailes, fiestas y malones de los indios. Más tarde, Cruz muere a causa de una epidemia de viruela entre los nativos.
February 27, 2019
Es un poco obvio que la obra de Hernández no fue una lectura de elección propia.
En el retorno de este gaucho y sus desventuras encontramos una narración (en verso) un poco más..."entretenida". Empezamos con las aventuras de Fierro y Cruz, algunas muertes, personajes nuevos que cuentan/cantan sus historias, muchos más enfrentamientos con los indios...
Una historia mucho más larga que ahonda las desventuras de varios personajes.
En el retorno de este gaucho y sus desventuras encontramos una narración (en verso) un poco más..."entretenida". Empezamos con las aventuras de Fierro y Cruz, algunas muertes, personajes nuevos que cuentan/cantan sus historias, muchos más enfrentamientos con los indios...
Una historia mucho más larga que ahonda las desventuras de varios personajes.
October 20, 2020
Es el pobre en su orfandá
de la fortuna el deshecho.
Porque naides toma a pechos
el defender a su raza;
debe el gaucho tener casa,
escuela, iglesia y derechos.
Me terminó gustando más este. Es más humano. Muy bueno.
Es interesante ver cómo dentro de la barbarie sarmientina hay todavía divisiones, y el gaucho acusa al indio de bárbaro.
Fin
de la fortuna el deshecho.
Porque naides toma a pechos
el defender a su raza;
debe el gaucho tener casa,
escuela, iglesia y derechos.
Me terminó gustando más este. Es más humano. Muy bueno.
Es interesante ver cómo dentro de la barbarie sarmientina hay todavía divisiones, y el gaucho acusa al indio de bárbaro.
Fin
March 20, 2024
Sin palabras. Un libro indispensable para cualquiera que quiera sentir una parte de la historia de nuestro país. Tanto por lo poético y el relato como por el mensaje que deja. Por los derechos que pide y se consiguieron y por los que faltan. Realmente una de las o la verdadera obra maestra de la literatura argentina. Me deja el corazón lleno de sentimientos
🇦🇷❤️🏇
🇦🇷❤️🏇
October 15, 2024
Me encantó, no sé si tanto como el primero, pero me gustó mucho. Hay frases para enmarcar, pero no las populares. La ida tiene más acción, pasan más cosas, acá hay más relato del pasado. La parte de Picardía fue malísima. Pero en general muy bueno!
July 3, 2019
Aquí mi reseña de la versión completa de Martín Fierro.
May 9, 2020
La redención del Martín Fierro.
November 27, 2021
Me gusto menos que la ida, mucho relleno.
June 22, 2022
Me pareció muy aburrido, lo leí para el colegio, y ni siquiera lo terminé👍
August 17, 2022
3,5
Este si es más pesado que el anterior.
Este si es más pesado que el anterior.
August 22, 2022
No se puede ni leer de lo aburrido que es. El peor final que he leído.
August 30, 2022
La ida fue mejor
October 2, 2022
zzzzzz
June 12, 2023
r.i.p cruz, hubieras amado a Montiel en el mundial 2022
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 21, 2023
una maravilla x2
October 23, 2023
Tadeo Cruz y Martín Fierro un solo corazón
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