Don Segundo Sombra

Don Segundo Sombra is an Argentine rural novel written by Ricardo Güiraldes and published for the first time in 1926.

Unlike the classic poem "Martín Fierro" by José Hernández, Don Segundo Sombra does not socially vindicate the gaucho, but rather evokes him as a legendary character ("sombra"), in an elegiac tone.

"Second Shadow" seems to suggest a subaltern, although the treatment of Don counterbalances (perhaps without Güiraldes being aware of it) the subalternity, pointing to a gaucho who, in order to maintain his axiology, its principles, is superior to bourgeois axiology. Ricardo Güiraldes learns in a kind of initiatory journey what courage, honor, loyalty is (which from another perspective can be misinterpreted as subalternity), respect for others (all of this, enlivened in the book with descriptions). The novel was published in 1926, it is written narratively in the first person.

The author

Ricardo Güiraldes

Son of a rich Buenos Aires family, he was born in San Antonio de Areco in 1886 and died in 1927. In 1887 his parents took him to Paris where he lived his early years and acquired his first literary contact with French and German authors. He spent most of his adolescence in his father's ranch, "La Porteña", in which area he placed his literary characters. In the city of Buenos Aires he began two university degrees (architecture and law) that he could not finish. In 1910 he returned to Paris, where he began writing stories and poems. Among these early works is the novel "Raucho", named after its main character who, like its author, divides his life between the countryside and Paris until it ends with his return to the ranch where he feels that "his fluke, only detached from the sash, he had become debased in the dust of foreign roads.

This dilemma between country life and intellectual life, developed in urban settings, must also be shown in "Don Segundo Sombra." Fabio Cáceres, the small herdsman at the beginning, like the protagonist of Raucho, must transform, at the end of the novel, into a cultivated man who, at no time will try to hide the deep and heartfelt satisfaction that he continues to find in rural life..

Ricardo Güiraldes was considered an outstanding emerging writer who emerged from a group of writers that was known as the Florida Group, named so because the magazine in which they published was located near said street in Buenos Aires, and they met in the Confitería Richmond, which included writers such as Victoria Ocampo, Leopoldo Marechal, Oliverio Girondo among other very prominent Argentine writers, in literary dialectical contrast with the remembered Boedo Group, which published at Editorial Claridad and met at the Café El Japonés, with long roots. more humble, with members like Roberto Arlt, among others.

The work

Analysis of «Don Segundo Sombra»

This novel, published in San Antonio de Areco in 1926, represents the most outstanding attempt by its author in the purpose of renewal of gaucho literature, and constitutes, at the same time, one of the most prominent examples of the national novel. of the XX century. Let us highlight that the main character was taken by the author from a real countryman, named Segundo Ramírez. The description he makes of Don Segundo coincides completely with the photo that is preserved of the namesake Ramírez. «His chest was vast, his joints were bony like those of a colt, his feet were short with a biscuit-like instep, his hands were thick and leathery like a furry shell. His Indian complexion, his eyes slightly raised towards the temples and small. To better converse, he had pushed back his short-brimmed hat, revealing a fringe cut like a mane at the level of his eyebrows.

Time in the novel

Towards the end, Fabio Cáceres remembers the last three years in which from a simple gaucho herdsman he became the patron of unexpectedly inherited goods. He finds himself facing a lagoon and suspects that the saddest moment of his life is approaching, that of the definitive departure of his "godfather" from him. Near the water he recalls the thread of synthesis of previous times...

«It is clear that in my life water is like a mirror in which images of the past parade. On the banks of a stream I once summarized my childhood. Watering my horse at the edge of a river, I reviewed five years of gaucho adventures. Finally, sitting on the small ravine of a lagoon, in my possessions, I mentally consulted my skipper's diary.

Such periods to which Fabio refers can be distributed and synthesized in the following scheme. First, the memories of the fourteen-year-old orphan. Then, the days of learning herding and dressage tasks, with the help of Don Segundo. Moments of life fought in the field under the surveillance of the one who has become his beloved stepfather. And finally, in the evocation, the outcome of the final separation.

The present time joins the past and the reader is imperceptibly immersed in remembrance nostalgia. This accentuates the "elegiac" lyricism that alternates with the happy and carefree moments that shine in the book.

Fabio

There are moments when Fabio evokes the singular days of his childhood, recognizing his transformation into a gaucho; His clothing and possession of his horse are testimony. The metamorphosis is attributed to Don Segundo, who in a period of five years has made him a man. He guided him in the knowledge of rural tasks, as a herdsman, baquiano and tamer. But learning does not end in the material. It is amplified morally and spiritually in the formation of a character and a clear conduct towards life. Reaching him "resistance and fortitude in the fight", "fatalism in accepting what happened without grumbling", "moral strength in the face of sentimental adventures", "distrust of women and drink", alertness and "prudence among strangers"...and "faith in friends."

Thus we see how the formation of a useful and profitable man and the formation of a morally sound personality are superimposed in a moving ensemble. And it is clear that this prodigious conjunction must not falter when Fabio, ineluctably tied to goods which he has inherited, and having already resolved to be a cultured man, he has a heartbreaking feeling that he will not be able to keep his teacher at his side, who, as the student knows well, is "an anarchic and solitary spirit."

Don Segundo Sombra, an enigma

From the first meeting Fabio paints him as a ghost or elusive "shadow." "It seemed to me that I had seen a ghost, a shadow, something that passes and is more an idea than a being..." That unconditional admiration from the first meeting will be accentuated when Fabio's life begins to move alongside that of the gaucho.

Don Segundo's last name gives a key to locating him in Fabio's mind. And also in that of Ricardo Güiraldes. We are faced with an idealized gaucho, the sum of all the virtues of the rural man in his "essentiality." Although we must point out that the literary critics of the Argentine left will not hesitate to say, with sociological opinions worthy of analysis, that Don Segundo is the nostalgic and elegiac vision of the oligarchic landowners, separated, both in reality and in gaucho literature., of a combative, fighting, vindictive character, like Martín Fierro. Before the work sanctified by Lugones, Borges himself has always maintained an attitude of ambivalent personal significance. From not considering the poem as the greatest national work, to the ironic statement of its paradox that, after all, Fierro is a gaucho deserter and "homicide."

A contribution worthy of esteem in the order of these ideological controversies is provided by Ernesto Sabato. He says, in relation to Marxist criticism: «A leftist critic, who seeks to use Marx as a teacher, maintains that Güiraldes' Don Segundo Sombra does not exist, that it is just the vision that a rancher has. of the old gaucho of the province of Buenos Aires; which is more or less like accusing Homer of being a forger, because exhaustive searches carried out in the Calabrian and Sicilian mountains have not found a single Cyclops.

The language

The novel is written in plain language and often, especially in the dialogues, uses gaucho regionalisms from the Argentine plain. The vocabulary is loaded with frequent words in Argentina, and, above all, in peasant life in the province of Buenos Aires. A good edition of this work, as happens in much of gaucho literature, makes a glossary indispensable.

The voice of the poet Ricardo Güiraldes is heard with findings of literary resources that lyrically nuance the pages. Let's see: "In the pampas the impressions are quick, spasmodic, and then they are erased in the breadth of the environment, without leaving a trace." There are relevant findings in certain comparisons: "Sleep fell on me like a heap on a chingolo." In some synesthesia: "The waters became cold to my eyes." The very expressive comparisons in moving moments: "I left, like someone who bleeds." Images and metaphors for the landscape: "A fresh light dripped with gold over the field." Or...: "All around, the grasslands were reborn in silence, sparkling with dew."

Argentinianisms are frequent. "For the houses"...Or the diminutives that are very frequently used in our urban or rural environment: "after a while", "it was nothing but a little glow"...

In this way, the author's strictly literary training, which first ventured into poetry, and the gaucho tone of the rancher who loves the things of his land come together. In his style all the reticences of the countryman are well captured, in ironies, in jokes, in mischievous suggestions, in comparisons that animate beings and things.

Conclusion

The work is a painting of the Argentine countryside. The herdsman or herdsman, here and in all the great plains of the planet, has been replaced by mechanized transport-cages, just as once the very archaic single-plough plow pulled by oxen, by a tractor, and the hacienda transport by trucks and trains. The poncho that protected the storms is part of a perhaps decorative outfit.

Just as in "Martín Fierro" the friendship between Sergeant Cruz and the protagonist is an emblematic symbol of the cult of this shared Argentine feeling, according to Borges, in "Don Segundo Sombra" the The thematic center must be the virile bond between an intelligent, serious, quiet gaucho, and a "Gaucho" boy hungry for fatherhood... Fabio Cáceres: the son not recognized by his father and abandoned in the care of "some aunts."

This work brings to a brilliant close, in the XX century, the cycle of gaucho literature that began in the XIX. Facundo, by Sarmiento, perhaps the best prose of the last hundred years or, why not, of all Argentine literature - such is Borges' opinion - will paint the conflict between civilization and barbarism. Meanwhile, Martín Fierro will design the unfortunate figure of the gaucho of the period after Juan Manuel de Rosas, persecuted, forgotten and often looked down upon. Knowing Hernández and his limitations, one cannot help but appreciate - as Leopoldo Lugones lucidly discovered - a work of genius in our supreme gaucho poem. These great works, those of Güiraldes, Sarmiento, Hernández, are touched by a special inspiring muse.

Ángel Mazzei, in a preliminary study to an edition of «Don Segundo Sombra», has said: «...it is, above all, a work where the success of the conception is united, fully, to that of execution. There are creations where the realization of the form seems superior to its material; others demonstrate an irreparable mismatch between purpose and achievement; Güiraldes achieved the maximum approximation between his novel project and the novel itself. (Preliminary study of «Don Segundo Sombra», by Ricardo Güiraldes, Editorial Kapelusz, Buenos Aires, 1978)

The city of Buenos Aires has few monuments and tributes to Güiraldes. Only a modest passage of two blocks, in Villa Lugano, between Zuviría and Santander, is called Ricardo Güiraldes. There is also the “Don Segundo Sombra” plaza in the Flores neighborhood, located on Santander Street, surrounded by Nepper, Carlos Ortiz, Alonso Rodríguez, Juan Del Castillo and Aroma streets.

Editions

An important edition of «Don Segundo Sombra» appeared in 1988, with an almost immediate reissue in 1989. Archives Collection, under the auspices of UNESCO, Mexico.

This critical edition was led by coordinator Paul Verdevoye. It contains the complete work, countless notes, a brief and preliminary study by Ernesto Sabato and a much longer one by Verdevoye himself. A philological one by Élida Lois. At the end of the text there are a plurality of critical essays based on exhaustive bibliographies. And towards the end, along with a glossary, are two groups of letters. In the most important part of this «dossier» are those that crossed between Güiraldes and Valery Larbaud.

Adaptations

In Argentine cinema it was adapted in a film written and directed by Manuel Antín and starring Adolfo Güiraldes. It was premiered in Buenos Aires on August 14, 1969 and won the Silver Condor for Best Film in 1970. It was also nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival.

In 1981, El herrero y la muerte, a play by Mercedes Rein and Jorge Curi, based on chapter 21 of Don Segundo Sombra, premiered in Uruguay. It featured stellar performances by Walter Reyno and Rosita Baffico. This work was re-released thirty years later, in 2011.