SOURCE: Litvak, Lily. “José Asunción Silva (1865-1896).” In Latin American Writers, Vol. 1, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu, pp. 377-85. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989.

[In the following essay, Litvak praises Silva's accomplishments as a Modernist poet, claiming that his skill in evoking the subtleties of the Spanish language was superb.]

The author Miguel de Unamuno, in his prologue to the 1908 edition of Poesías by José Asunción Silva, commented,

How is it possible to reduce to ideas a pure poetry, one in which the words taper, thin, and fade to the point of becoming cloudlike, whirled about by the wind of sentiment and forced to kneel before the sun, which at its height whitens them and in its setting covers them in its golden aura? … To comment on Silva is like explaining the movements of Beethoven's symphonies to an audience while the notes fall upon their ears. Each individual will find in them his own sorrows, desires, and feelings.

The words of Unamuno aptly characterize the writer Silva, one of the most accomplished modernist poets and one who, more than any other poet before him, sought the most quintessential form of poetry. Silva was one of the greatest craftsmen of the Spanish language, providing it with a previously unknown scale of subtle suggestion. He was, at the same time, as his friend Baldomero Sanín Cano expressed, “analytical and coldly scrutinizing.” Because of those qualities, Silva was able to reveal his entire self within his works.

According to his birth certificate, José Asunción Silva was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on 26 November 1865. The oldest of five brothers, he came from a rich and aristocratic family. His parents were Ricardo Silva and Vicenta Gómez. Among his forefathers, descendants of noble Spanish lineage, were adventurers, soldiers, scholars, nuns, and preachers.

The boy was intellectually precocious, affected by an innate sadness and a special love for all that was beautiful. A withdrawn child, he spent long hours reading in the silent, lonely house in Bogotá. He studied in various private schools, first in the institute headed by Luis M. Cuervo and later in the one directed by the celebrated costumbristic writer Ricardo Carrasquilla. At age sixteen, he left his academic work and joined his father in the administration of the family store.

Bogotá was at that time a fairly self-contained city of some seventy thousand inhabitants. It was a pure-blooded town, gray, and far from the sea and the commercial shipping lanes. Silva himself described it in the following manner: “In Bogotá, everyone knows everyone else. The primary preoccupations are religion, the vices of a neighbor, and the arrival of mail from Europe” (Alberto Miramón, José Asunción Silva, 2nd ed., p. 42). The city, patriarchal and isolated, might also have been considered prudish and hypocritical. Between 1880 and 1900 the echoes of Nietzscheanism, positivism, and symbolism began to be felt in the poet's environment, both in his father's store and in the Silvas' home, a gathering place for discussions about literature, politics, and news from abroad.

The house of Don Ricardo provided the city of those years with a singular element of elegance and refinement. It was, as Alberto Miramón, Silva's biographer, tells us, “noteworthy not only for its social status and the unquestionable culture and beauty of the people who frequented it, but also for its almost exaggerated luxury and refinement, or, more aptly put, for its excessive pomp. There, the furniture, the tableware, everything was unusual and unique” (p. 45).

Silva was a cultured youth. He was self-taught and possessed startling powers of assimilation, which he dedicated almost fanatically to reading. Between the ages of ten and eighteen, the boy composed his first poems. He wrote some in the albums of the girls he courted and read others to his parents and colleagues.

These adolescent verses can be placed under the sign of the Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, whose influence was always to be felt in the work of Silva. From Bécquer, Silva adopted vagueness, subtlety, and musical words, pregnant with suggestion, although Silva was never as sentimental or colorist as Bécquer.

Yet even in those early years, Silva wrote poems that display his originality. In “Crisálidas” (“Cocoons”) and “La voz de las cosas” (“The Voice of Things”), the future author of “Vejeces” (“Old Things”), “Los maderos de San Juan” (“The Ships of San Juan”), and the poem that he named simply “Nocturno” (“Nocturne”) is already apparent. The latter poem, which begins “Una noche …” (“One night …”), is considered by some to be the poet's finest achievement. Silva's early material reveals the infinite yearning, the love for the past, and the obsession with death that clearly haunt his later writings.

At the age of eighteen, nourished with romantic literature from France and Spain, Silva realized one of his great dreams: to visit Europe and, above all, Paris. He visited the City of Light with his heart deeply longing for beauty and perfection. He remained in Europe for two years, a Europe that was filled with uncertainties and doubts, with political and religious rumblings. During his stay Silva became even more familiar with literature, developing his taste for Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred de Musset, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and the brothers Grimm. He began studies in the positivist theories of Hippolyte Taine, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer. Friedrich Nietzsche and Gabriele D'Annunzio gave him a longing for the heroic, Paul Verlaine the love of soft music, and Pierre Loti the taste for the exotic and the bizarre. Arthur Schopenhauer intensified his sadness and dejection, and Marie Bashkirstev his yearning for the world beyond.

Silva returned to Colombia submerged in a deep melancholy. He had become a dandy, refined and delicate, with an extraordinary sensibility. The perfect aristocratic creole, alienated and unadapted to his world, he felt repelled by its sordid and vulgar materialism and nauseated by the growing bourgeoisie. Using a word from his contemporary society, he was a decadent. Silva possessed great physical beauty: an oval face, black hair, a sharp nose, thin lips, and long hands that were nervous and expressive. He dressed with extreme elegance, his fashion characterizing him as timid and distinguished. There are some who suppose that Silva suffered from psychological or sexual problems. It was said at times, in Bogotá, that he was crazy.

Upon Silva's return from Europe, the literary gatherings were resumed. Guests gathered in the Silvas' comfortable and luxuriously decorated library, drinking and talking while smoking Turkish cigarettes and discussing popular authors, all in an atmosphere of great refinement. Silva's dandyism continued throughout his life. Later, when he lived in Caracas, even in the midst of economic difficulty he would write, “You know that I am repulsed by cheap pleasures. So, not being able to live in grand seigneur, I live without pleasures” (Eduardo Camacho Guizado, La poesía de José Asunción Silva, pp. 16-17). In his last days he placed this order: “I ask you to buy the following and send it to me—in postal packages and wooden boxes or metal containers—twelve pounds of black tea, of the finest quality sold by the United Kingdom Tea Co.” (pp. 16-17).

His aestheticism is evident in his poetry and in his novel De sobremesa (Dinner Conversation, 1925), which display both extravagance and luxury. His works present domestic interiors covered with fine rugs (“Crepúsculo” [“Twilight”]), walls covered with tapestries (“Nocturno” that begins “Poeta, di paso …” [“Poet, in flight …”]), a candle placed in a crafted goblet (“El alma de la rosa” [“The Soul of the Rose”]). His poems, such as “Taller moderno” (“A Modern Workshop”), contain an abundance of artistic and exotic objects: “un busto del Dante … Del arabesco azul de un jarrón chino … una armadura … un viejo retablo” (“a bust of Dante … a blue arabesque on a Chinese jar … a suit of armor … an old altar piece”). Silva did not employ an abundance of metaphors and comparisons, but of those that he did use, the great majority derive from luxury, wealth, refinement, gold, opal, satin, silk, lace, and the like.

His contemptuous attitude concerning the bourgeoisie can be seen in a series of satiric poems in which he attacks with cynicism the middle-class ethic and, in some compositions, religion. He rejects materialism, which, according to him, opposes idealism. In some poems he expresses social protest. With contempt for things “vulgar,” he shows the contrast between the world of the “dreamer” or poet, which is delicate, sensible, elegant, and beautiful, and the world of the bourgeoisie, which is vulgar and senseless.

Another important aspect of Silva's personality was his rejection of religion. Many critics believe that his lack of religious beliefs was a decisive factor in his premature demise. His lack of faith did not, however, preclude a preoccupation with the other world. In his eagerness to obtain absolutes, Silva tried to resolve his inner conflicts through studies in the occult and esoteric beliefs, clearly manifested in his poetry, above all in the “Nocturno” that begins “Una noche …”

In 1887, after his father died, Silva made an effort to manage the family business. It was useless, as he was not temperamentally suited to such work and as his father had left overwhelming debts; soon the situation became unbearable. In 1891 his sister Elvira died suddenly from angina pectoris. Her death was the heaviest blow the poet had ever experienced, and he became even more melancholy and withdrawn from life. In the painful solitude to which he banished himself, Silva found the genesis for his poem “Nocturno” which immortalized him and his sister.

In 1894 Silva was named secretary of the Colombian legation to Caracas. In the Venezuelan capital, he became an important and influential figure for the young editors of Cosmópolis magazine, the initiator of modernism. Between 1885 and 1894 he wrote his finest poetry. Juan Ramón Jiménez, when referring to the poem “Nocturno,” affirms that “this nocturne, the seed of so many others, is without a doubt the most representative of the latest romanticism, and of the first modernism that was written, that lived, and that died in Spanish America” (Sur [Revista Sur] 10/79:14 [1941]). Silva was not, as so many claim, a precursor of modernism, but a real, conscious modernist, not only in his art but also in his life.

Silva returned to his homeland in 1895 on a French vessel, L'Amérique, which was shipwrecked on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, losing with it the best part of the poet's work. Back in Bogotá, he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a high-ranking diplomatic post. Suffering from an incurable melancholy, Silva attempted to establish a business in polychromatic cement tiles. The venture was a failure, and the poet sank into a decline. Bothered by insomnia, he consulted a doctor on 23 May 1896, and on some pretext requested that he indicate the exact location of the human heart. The doctor obliged, mapping out the pectoral region on Silva's chest and marking the location of the heart with a cross. That same day Silva's friends met in his house and spent the usual three or four hours in discussions. Rueda Vargas, one of those in attendance, relates: “It was close to midnight when, one by one, the ten who had gathered began to leave, while José lighted the path with a lamp in his hand” (Betty T. Osiek, José Asunción Silva, Twayne ed., pp. 46-47). The following day the poet was discovered dead in his room. He had put a bullet straight through his heart. No one heard the revolver discharge, since he had carefully closed the doors and windows. He left not even a note to explain the reasons for his suicide. The laws of Colombia did not allow the burial of Silva's body in the Catholic cemetery.

Silva's literary opus is of a reduced size since, like the protagonist of his novel De sobremesa, he preferred to read his compositions to friends rather than publish them, and only a small portion of his work was published. “Los cuentos negros” (“Black Stories”) was lost in the shipwreck of L'Amérique. “Los poemas de la carne” (“Poems of Flesh”) and the sonnets that he considered naming “Las almas muertas” (“Dead Souls”) suffered the same fate. Of those works that have been published, only a fraction appeared in newspapers and magazines during the author's lifetime. The majority of his work was published posthumously. His work consists of a book organized by the author, another containing poems that were partially reconstructed by his friends, a series of loose poems, a novel, and some prose essays that deal primarily with literary issues. There are several poems whose authorship is doubtful.

The first book, El libro de versos (The Book of Verses, 1928), according to the author was written between 1891 and 1896, although it did contain some poetry written as early as 1883. The book consists of some thirty compositions and constitutes a biographical unity, from the evocation of Silva's childhood to the anticipated confrontation with the funereal world beyond. Silva never intended to publish the second group of poems, entitled “Gotas amargas” (“Bitter Drops”). Some of the compositions appeared in newspapers and magazines in reconstructed form, published by the poet's friends several years after his death. The third group consists of poems published, usually singly in magazines and newspapers, during the author's lifetime; in collections of Silva's work, they carry the title “Versos varios” (“Various Verses”). De sobremesa, Silva's last work, is a novel written over a span of years, some portions dating from 1892 and others from 1895. A group of nonpoetic items published in newspapers and magazines is entitled “Prosas breves” (“Short Prose”).

In his first stage of writing, Silva adopted the rounded, sonorous verses of the Spanish romantic style and toiled to clarify the ideas, to make them transparent. Later he developed a liking for French poetry with light, flexible, suggestive verses and musically orchestrated words.

The fundamental theme of Silva's work is the turmoil caused by his present reality. Life and the place where he lives it are repugnant; conversely, the past and the world beyond this life are mysterious and attractive. The desire to transcend this existence carries him to the gates of a world beyond the immediate and the real. He is a poet whose vision is directed toward the past, yet who is condemned to a coarse, rough, mediocre present, an existence that leaves him with a pessimistic, negative view of the future. He sees a past that is historic, sentimental, and, above all, aesthetic, a past that permits childhood mentalities and fantasies. The novel De sobremesa, which documents that flight from contemporary reality, is permeated with strangeness; the protagonist lives in an aesthetic world completely divorced from the American reality that surrounds him.

Another essential theme in Silva's work is death, the primary character in his poetic universe, the decomposing factor of all that might be perfect. The “Nocturno” that begins “Poet, in flight …,” one of the most beautiful poems, consists of three strophes, each based on the memory of the woman loved; the poem ends with her death in the final strophe. In the work of Silva, death becomes an obsession, sometimes revealed in its most fleshless and naked form (“El recluta” [“The Recruit”], and “Psicopatía” [“Mental Disorder”]). At other times it is adorned with morose beauty (“Notas perdidas” [“Lost Notes”]). Death prevents the enjoyment of life and love, and its wounding proximity causes anguish (“Sonetos negros” [“Black Sonnets”]). A corollary of this theme is a contempt for life. In the poem “Lázaro” (“Lazarus”), the resurrected begins to curse his new life after only a short while. At times, the weariness that Silva feels for life precipitates his willing approach to the gates of death (“Día de difuntos” [“All Souls' Day”]).

Like other modernists, Silva decorates reality with luxury. This decoration occurs on one level through the metaphors derived from precious and magnificent materials, such as gold, silver, jewels, and fine cloths: “El contacto furtivo de tus labios de seda” (“The furtive touch of your silken lips”) in the “Nocturno” that begins “Poet, in flight …”; “mis sueños color de armiño” (“my ermine-colored dreams”) in “A tí” (“To You”). The author also achieves these effects through the exaltation of sensory refinement:

Vemos tras de la neblina,
Como al través de un encaje

(“Poesía viva”)

We gaze beyond the mist
as if through lace

(“Live Poetry”)

Sobre las teclas vuela tu mano blanca,
Como una mariposa sobre una lila

(“Nocturno” that begins “A veces cuando en alta noche …”)

over the keys your white hand flies
like the butterfly over the lilac

(“Nocturno” that begins “At times when at the height of night …”)

… rara historia
que tiene oscuridad de telerañas
Són de laúd y suavidad de raso.

(“Vejeces”)

… a strange history
with the opacity of a spider web,
a tune of lute and silk.

Silva's poetic style can be characterized by his unrealistic attitude. In his world, reality appears illuminated by a dim light through which only a faint, distant glimpse may be obtained. It is shadowy poetry, as Unamuno aptly stated. “Silva sings like a bird, but a sad bird, one that feels death approaching with the setting of the sun.” In “La voz de las cosas” he presents the elements of his poetic world—“frágiles cosas” (“frail things”), “pálido lirio que te deshojas” (“you, a pallid lily shedding its petals”), “rayo de luna” (“a moon-ray”), “pálidas cosas” (“pallid things”), “fantasmas grises” (“gray ghosts”), “sueños confusos” (“confusing dreams”), “ósculo triste” (“sad kiss”)—that is, things that are fragile, evanescent, thin, vague, subtle, and opposed to the immutable, permanent, solid, and strong.

With this heightened poetic sensibility, Silva strives to apprehend an exterior, physical world characterized by vagueness and imprecision. The passages are delineated in dim shadows, in the twilight, beneath the moon's rays (the “Nocturno” that begins “At times when at the height of night …,” “Paisaje tropical” [“Tropical Landscape”], “Al pie de la estatua” [“At the Foot of the Statue”], “Muertos” [“The Dead”], and “Poesía viva”). One poem in particular, “Día de difuntos,” reveals this obsession with darkness and shadows. The shadow that invades the physical world has symbolic connotations, alluding to the past and to death (“Los maderos de San Juan,” “Vejeces”) and establishing a clear relationship between the physical, exterior world, and the interior world of the poet.

Silva's poetic vision is also rendered through the other senses. Whispers occupy a position of primary importance: statements are made in hushed voices and sighs, through vague sobs; the poetic universe is “llenos de murmullos” (“full of whispers”), mysterious and vague. The sense of smell is perceived with delicacy and imprecision, associated in the poem “Vejeces” with a revival of the past. A similar imprecision is used to express feelings: love and nostalgia are softly and vaguely felt (“Crepúsculo,” “Luz de la luna” [“Moonlight”]).

In order to create the sensation of imprecision and vagueness, Silva employs several lexical and syntactic methods. One is the use of the adjective medio (“half”) with an adjective or another verb.

Del arabesco azul de un jarrón chino,
Medio oculta el dibujo complicado.

(“Taller moderno”)

A blue arabesque on a Chinese jar
half-hides the intricate drawing
mirar allí, sombría,
medio perdida en la rizada gola

(“La ventana”)

to see there, somber
half-lost in the wavy molding

(“The Window”)

La divisa latina, presuntuosa,
Medio borrada por el líquen verde

(“Vejeces”)

The presumptuous Latin emblem
half-erased by the green lichen.

Another technique is the use of adverbial phrases, in which objects, events, and sensations are compared and related by means of the word como (“as” or “like”).

Mi oído fatigado por vigilias y excesos
Sintío como a distancia los monótonos rezos!

(“Nocturno” that begins “Poeta, dipaso …”)

excess and vigilant, my fatigued hearing
sensed, as at a distance, monotonous prayers.

He makes comparisons, but without precision, and with the intention of being more precise, leaves one of the terms in vagueness in order to make a more attenuated comparison: “… cruza por su espíritu como un temor extraño” (“… crossing through his spirit like a strange fear”), for example, in “Los maderos de San Juan.”

Another theme in Silva's poetry is that of unreality, of fantasy and mystery. Not only is reality unraveled; it becomes totally denied. The poet abandons mundane life to enter a fantastic world. At times, a single word proves sufficient to transfer the verse from normality to unreality:

Por el aire tenebroso ignorada mano arroja
Un oscuro velo opaco de letal melancolía.

(“Día de difuntos”)

Through the gloomy air, an unknown hand throws
an obscure, opaque veil of lethal melancholy.

It is the word ignotas (“unknown”) that places the verse in the realm of unusual suggestion.

En unas distancias enormes e ignotas
Que por los rincones oscuros suscita …

(“Crepúsculo”)

In unknown, enormous distances
Which rise up in dark corners …

Extraños (“unusual”), ignotas (“unknown”), oscuros (“dark”)—such words force us to depart from our daily sphere of reality.

In order to achieve this transposition, a necessary secret communication is established between the poet and things, through which the poet is able to discover the world that lies beyond appearances. Things speak to the poet with strange voices (“Vejeces”). The new, unreal world opens great panoramas normally only permitted in the realm of fantasy and the unconscious.

In his excellent essay on Silva, Andrés Holguín offers the following explanation:

Perhaps the feeling of mystery in Silva is the result of some frustrated, transcendent desire. It is the sensation of the skeptic who, unable to resolve his religious feelings, falls into the abyss of nothingness. I said before that anguish is the final result of logical failure. This is especially evident in Silva. Silva is profoundly learned, intellectually curious in terms of philosophy, religion, science, and art. But nothing offers him an explanation of the world. In that is his agony born. And there, where his speculative search ends, where his reason is broken, there the night is opened into the unknown and mysterious.

(Revista de las Indias 28/90:354 [1946])

Of the seventy-five poems that Silva wrote, not counting those of questionable origin, twenty-nine are based on a single metrical form: six in verses of eleven syllables, six in verses of eight syllables, five in alejandrinos (alexandrines), five in verses of nine syllables, four in verses of twelve syllables, two in verses of eight syllables, and one in verses of ten syllables. In other words, he used the traditional Spanish metrical forms. Thirty-two poems are composed using two or three metrical forms, based entirely on verses of eight and nine syllables.

In only three poems—“Luz de luna,” “Dia de difuntos” and the “Nocturno” that begins “Una noche”—does the poet experiment with metrical novelties. In each one there is an internal rhythm that provides a constant base, yet each is composed using different meters of verse. In these works the author employs changes in meter and accent that break with the traditional rigid metrical forms, using combinations of eight, sixteen, fourteen, eleven, nine, twelve, six, and seven syllables. In these compositions Silva's stylistic restlessness may be detected; at times, the poet seems to be approaching free verse. The use of a single metrical form proved much too rigid in Silva's search for something more vague and undetermined.

Silva's vocabulary contains an abundance of verbs, most often used in the present tense to express palpitant emotion and action in progress. He also uses gerunds and participles to denote action in progress:

Va tornando en pavesas
Tronos, imperios, pueblos y ciudades

(“Al pie de la estatua”)

Burning into cinders
Thrones, empires, towns and cities

Likewise: “Dándole al aire aromado aliento” (“Giving to the air aromatic breath”) in the poem “Psicopatía,” and “Y mirando dos rayos de la luna” (“And looking at the moonlight”) in “Luz de la luna.” He frequently employs the preterit to denote a completed action.

The poet often uses adjectives in groups of two, one before and one after the noun: “la divisa latina presuntuosa” (“the presumptuous Latin inscription”), “viejas cartas de amor, ya desteñidas” (“old love letters faded”), “un oscuro velo opaco” (“a dark opaque veil”). The three words are read as an isolated unit, without a respiratory pause, forming an intense image.

Multiple adjectives are sometimes linked by the conjunction y (“and”): “sugestiones místicas y raras” (“mystical and strange suggestions”) in “Vejeces,” “ramilletes negros y marchitos” (“black and withered bouquets”) in “Muertos,” and “fragua negra y encendida” (“black and red forge”) in “Psicopatía.” These condensed images eliminate the need for lengthy descriptions. Silva's adjectives often serve to displace the natural, syntactic progression of an idea, as in “y la luz de la luna limpia brilla” (“and the light of the moon shines pure”) and “de barrotes de hierro colosales” (“of colossal iron bars”) from “La ventana” or “colores de anticuada miniatura” (“colors of antiquated miniature”) from “Vejeces.” In this way the author creates an original and surprising expression of his idea.

Silva's poetry is also characterized by the repetition of sounds, words, verses, and even strophes, reinforcing through this technique the impressions that he wishes to provoke. In “Los maderos de San Juan,” for example, repetition is used in two ways: at the beginning of the poem in the children's poetry, with its play of repeated sounds, and later in the verses distributed among the three strophes. The accumulation of repetitions and alliterations of sounds causes the poem to move slowly, to unfold with a sad, melancholy moroseness.

Silva frequently overlaps verses. The pauses that normally would fall at the end of a verse are eliminated by the syntax of the phrase. As a result, the syntactic pause is not enforced by the rhythm, as in “… adivina / El porvenir de luchas y horrores” (“… guess / the future of fights and horrors”) in “Al pie de la estatua” or “… iluminaba / El paso de la audaz locomotora” (“… illuminating / the passage of the daring locomotive”) in “Obra humana” (“Human Work”).

Possibly Silva's most significant work is his poem “Nocturno.” The crowning jewel of this opus, it is a poem constructed as a concert in vowels, with accents that enhance the words and sounds they touch, as in the line “Por los cielos azulosos, infinitos y profundos esparcía su luz blanca” (“Through the infinite, and profound azure skies, its white light spreading”). The line begins with the predominance of the o sound, followed by a section in i that alternates with u, and finishes with the final double a.

Alliterations abound: “Una noche toda llena de perfumes de murmullos y de músicas de alas” (“A night wholly filled with sounds, perfumes, and music of wings”). Most important is the placement of accents, which often produces special effects, as in the following verse, in which three grouped words are accented on the antepenult: “en que ardían en la sombra nupcial y húmeda, las luciérnagas fantásticas” (“in which fantastic fireflies burn in the nuptial and humid shadow”). The effect of the accents is a seeming desire to be identified with the flashing of the insects.

A particular effect is achieved by those verses that are linked by a peculiar rhythmic phenomenon. At the end of each verse, points of suspense are placed to maintain a vagueness that prevents rapid reading. One critic has called it an ideal overlapping reached through diverse techniques. Some of these are syntactic; the verses are full of parenthesis, making them appear static. The words of the first verse, “una noche …” (“one night …”) are repeated at the beginning of the second and the third. In the second a verse is begun that does not continue; its progress is halted by means of parenthetical phrases and appositions.

The punctuation of the poem consists entirely of commas; there are no periods. At the end of each verse, one expects the continuation of the idea. The effect is that no single verse ends in itself but continues on into the next. Also contributing to this effect is the tetrasyllabic accentual base of the poem, in spite of the fact that the meter is arbitrary. The accenting produces for the ear an ideal regularity, one that foreshadows rhythmic development. The arbitrary variation of the verse's length clashes with this ideal rhythm, creating tension. Phonetic elements contribute to the development of sensations. The assonance of a sounds echoes in the even verses, as the sound is repeated.

Exceptional poetic possibilities are achieved through images of mysterious sounds, perfumes, and the music of wings, illuminated by intermittent fireflies and the moon's pallid light. In this unreal situation, the central action of the poem takes place: two shadows projected by the moon unite in a nuptial embrace. It is not a closeness of actual bodies, but rather of shadows, thin and evanescent, that in their embrace open this world to the world beyond.

The novel De sobremesa has been, until now, unjustly ignored by the critics. A characteristic modernist novel, it almost completely lacks a plot and centers exclusively on the thoughts of the protagonist, an anguished aesthete and a model of the modernist hero. José Fernández is neurotic, languid, superrefined, the classic decadent of the turn of the century.

The subject of the novel is simple. A wealthy Latin American writer gathers together in his luxurious and exotic home a group of his friends, requesting that they review the manuscript of his new work, one in which he has solved the mysteries of life. There exist in De sobremesa several incidents: the death of the writer's grandmother, a scene in which he stabs his lover, and his encounter with a mysterious young woman with a pre-Raphaelite face, with whom he falls passionately in love. The desperate search for this ideal lover completes the thematic development.

What stands out in the novel is the intensity of emotion provoked by the external events. One sees in these pages the typical modernist use of unusual adjectives, the association of discontinuous sensations, and the perception of what is hidden and how the hidden is linked with the visible. In this novel there are images, scenes, pictures, indicators of stationary and temporal suspense. To these impressions, the protagonist operates as actor, introspective and excessively sensitive.

De sobremesa is a lyric novel that subordinates action to the intensity of an instant's emotion. There is evident in this work the disintegration of the realistic protagonist. The protagonist of these pages loses his corporal nature, but not his humanity. Silva explores the intimate reactions of the hero in minute detail, paying greater attention to the effected impression than to the affecting action. The style is analytical in its observation of various states of being and in its description of objects, placing things observed on the same level as the contemplator.

Silva is essentially a poet of modern times. Principally with the “Nocturno” he delves into irrationalism and the mystery of the world beyond. He restored the use of the eleven-syllable verse favored by later modernist poets and gave it new cadences. He introduced a flexibility in the alexandrine line and created combinations of meters and verses of different measurements. He liberated traditional verse, redefining it as a musical totality with its own laws of rhythm and its own images. Silva, more than any other modernist poet, forged the Spanish language into a tool of powerful suggestiveness and delicate sounds, without falling, as even Rubén Darío did, into excessive adornment and color, never exploiting what would later become the tinsel of modernism.

Selected Bibliography

Editions

Individual Works

De sobremesa. Bogotá, 1925.

Intimidades. With an introduction by Germán Arciniegas. Edited and with a preliminary study and notes by Hector H. Orjuela. Bogotá, 1977.

El libro de versos, 1883-1896. Bogotá, 1928.

El libro de versos. Fascimile edition. Bogotá, 1945.

———. Bogotá, 1946.

Collected Works

Los mejores poemas de José Asunción Silva. With a commentary by Manuel Toussaint. Mexico City, 1917.

Obra completa. Bogotá, 1955.

———. With a prologue by Eduardo Camacho Guizado. Edited and with notes and chronology by Eduardo Camacho Guizado and Gustavo Mejia. Sucre, Venezuela, 1977.

Obras completas. With a prologue by Héctor H. Orjuela. 2 vols. Buenos Aires, 1968.

Poesías. With a prologue by Miguel de Unamuno. Barcelona, 1908.

Poesías. Edicion definitiva. With a prologue by Miguel de Unamuno and notes by Baldomero Sanín Cano. Paris, 1923.

———. With a study by Baldomero Sanín Cano. Santiago, Chile, 1923.

Poesías. Edited by Franco Meregalli. Milan, 1950.

———. Edited and with notes and an introduction by Héctor H. Orjuela. Bogotá, 1973.

———. Critical edition by Héctor H. Orjuela. Bogotá, 1979.

Poesías completas. Buenos Aires, 1941.

Poesías completas, seguidas de prosas selectas. Madrid, 1951.

Prosas y versos. With an introduction, selection, and notes by Carlos García Prada. Mexico City, 1942.

Sus mejores poesías. Edited by Fermín Gutiérrez. Barcelona, 1955.

Biographical and Critical Studies

Argüello, Santiago. “El anunciador José Asunción Silva.” In Modernismo y modernistas 1. Guatemala City, 1934. Pp. 137-183.

Botero, Ebel. Cinco poetas colombianos. Manizales, Colombia, 1964. Pp. 15-40.

Camacho Guizado, Eduardo. La poesía de José Asunción Silva. Bogotá, 1968.

Capdevila, Arturo. “José Asunción Silva, el arístocrata.” Prologue in Poesias completas y sus mejores páginas en prosa, by José Asunción Silva. Buenos Aires, 1944. Pp. 9-22.

Carrier, Warren. “Baudelaire y Silva.” Revista iberoamericana 7/13:39-48 (1943).

Cuervo Márquez, Emilio. José Asunción Silva: Su vida y su obra. Amsterdam, 1935.

Fogelquist, Donald F. “José Asunción Silva y Heinrich Heine.” Revista hispanica moderna 20/4:282-294 (1954).

Gicovate, Bernardo. “Estructura y significado en la poesía de José Asunción Silva.” Revista iberoamericana 24/48:327-331 (1959).

Holguín, Andrés. “El sentido del misterio en Silva.” Revista de las Indias 28/90:351-365 (1946).

Ingwersen, Sonya A. Light and Longing: Silva and Darío. Modernism and Religious Heterody. New York, 1986.

Jiménez, Juan Ramón. “José Asunción Silva” in “Españoles de tres mundos.” Sur 10/79:12-14 (1941).

Lievano, Roberto. En torno a Silva: Selección de estudios e investigaciones sobre la obra y la vida íntima del poeta. Bogotá, 1946.

Loveluck, Juan. “De sobremesa: Novela desconocida del modernismo.” Revista iberoamericana 31/59:17-32 (1965).

Miramón, Alberto. José Asunción Silva: Ensayo biográfico con documentos inéditos. Bogotá, 1937. 2nd ed. 1957.

Osiek, Betty T. José Asunción Silva: Estudio estilístico de su poesia. Mexico City, 1968.

———. José Asunción Silva. Twayne's World Authors Series no. 505. Boston, 1978.

Rico, Edmundo. La depresión melancólica en la vida, en la obra y en la muerte de José Asunción Silva. Tunja, Colombia, 1964.