Luso-Hispanic Recordings at the Library of Congress

Abstract

The Library of Congress began to gather contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian literature recorded on magnetic tape, when the Uruguayan poet Emilio Oribe passed through Washington in 1942. He recorded a then recently written poem entitled “Oda al cielo de la nueva Atlántida” dedicated to Archibald MacLeish, the poet who was Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944. A year later Andrés Eloy Blanco of Venezuela recorded “Píntame angelitos negros” and six other compositions. Around 1944 the Library set out to formulate a program to record North American poets reading selections from their own works. The Library's Hispanic Foundation (now called the Hispanic Division) decided to assemble a similar Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, heeding the words of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: “Poetry hushed and inert in books fades away and dies. The air not the printed word is its natural home. Recordings serve it well.”