Homer in Cuernavaca

Abstract

This sequence of thirty sonnets arose from Alfonso Reyes's translation of much of the Iliad into Spanish rhymed verse. Reyes (1889-1959) was brilliant and prolific: his successor Octavio Paz described him as 'a group of writers'. He was a master of criticism and of the essay, that 'most Latin-American of art forms'; some of his essays can be read in English. He knew Hispanic and classical literature, and translated Sterne, Chesterton, Stevenson, Shaw, and Chekhov. He co-founded the (Mexican) Ateneo de la Juventud in 1909; was Minister in France; spent a formative decade in Madrid and was Secretary of the Ateneo there; was Ambassador to Argentina and Brazil; founded the Colegio de Mexico and the Colegio Nacional. Eloquent, urbane, versatile, Reyes described writing as 'the richest means of expressing human feeling', and spoke of 'double redemption by the word: first through the concord of bloods; second through the shaping of the personality, in its relation to others as well as in its inner growth'. As a poet, he 'strayed from subject to subject and mood to mood, combining great learning with a certain naive charm and sampling all the literary styles available to him'. Samuel Beckett rendered some of his poems into English. Torres Rioseco says of Homer in Cuernavaca: 'the poet who wrote these beautiful pages wanted to create a Hellenic society for the man of Mexico'. Equally, Reyes and Mexico had lived through tumultuous times: his father General Reyes 'got himself killed in the Revolution' (as Reyes said to Borges) while advancing on the presidential palace. In these pages Reyes transmutes the suffering into art.