Joaquín Pasos
| Joaquín Pasos | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 14, 1914 Granada, Nicaragua |
| Died | January 20, 1947 (aged 32) Managua, Nicaragua |
| Occupation | Poet, essayist, narrator |
| Nationality | Nicaraguan |
Joaquín Pasos (May 14, 1914—January 20, 1947) was a Nicaraguan poet, narrator, and essayist. He was one of the leading figures of the national Vanguardia literary movement. The poem Pasos is best known for was his Canto de guerra de las cosas (The song of the war of things) poem.
Pasos was born in Granada, Nicaragua and studied at the Universidad Centroamericana. During his puberty and incipient adolescence, he was a literary prodigy. Pasos began to write relentlessly at the age of 14, opening in that way what should later become the first of his two creating phases. The first one of these creating phases would take place between 1928 and 1935.
In this stage he only showed a broad ability to apprehend and digest the style and patterns of some modern literary figures such as Paul Morand, Valery Larbaud, Philippe Soupault, J. J. Van Doren, Rafael Alberti & Gerardo Diego. We can also observe a certain obsession with geographic eccentricities (the poems “Norway”, “Cook Voyages”, “German dream No.5”) and a juvenile fetish for foreign actresses.
After 1935–and until his death–his poetry obtains its own voice. In this phase Pasos reaches his maturity as a writer; the poet has hatched from the avant-garde egg & enters the world each writer secretly creates between his firstly written lines. With an exceptionally rich metaphor; with a lyrical self that pends between love and humor; Pasos began to write some of America’s most original love poems (“Immense poem”, “Invention of a new kiss”, “Construction of your body”, “Big poem about strong love”) and entered the waters of the indigenous side of Nicaraguans’ nicaraguancy (“The blind Indians”, “The old Indians”, “Two cries”, “Indian fallen in the market”).
After the writing of these poems, he wrote his masterpiece, “The song of the war of things”, that, in contrast to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, covered in a much more global manner, the physical and metaphysical position of the man of the 20th century. This is the last stanza of the poem:
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