Elvio Romero

Early life

Elvio Romero was born in Yegros, Paraguay in 1926. At a very young age he joined the promotion of Hérib Campos Cervera, Josefina Plá, Augusto Roa Bastos, who would renovate Paraguayan literature.

He was the most important, brilliant and talented Paraguayan poet in the twentieth century. The Brazilian critic Walter Wey wrote in 1951:

“the star of the young poet is manly and strong and his rough and low vibration style helps him for the tragic themes of violent death and hunger…we are sure that his message once mature will show us something amazing.”

Career

A Communist militant, who after the end of Paraguayan Civil War in 1947 was forced at the age of twenty to abandon along many others the country that he called “nuestra profunda tierra”. He lived in exile in Argentina, and never forgot his homeland or his people. He returned to Paraguay after General Alfredo Stroessner fell from power, and worked in numerous diplomatic posts, such as in the Paraguayan embassy in Buenos Aires.

He has performed editorial work and gave recitals and conferences in various cultural centres of America and Europe.

The great Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nobel prize winner in literature in 1967, of the presentation of the book of Romero "El sol bajo las raíces” (1956), leaves a wonderful message about him and his play

“what characterizes Elvio Romero’s poetry is his flavour of earth, wood, water and sun and the rigor with which he deals with these themes in no way detracts from his ease of verse and the desire to interpret the drama of his country’s joyous nature and sadness of existence as in many of our countries. Few American voices so deep and faithful to the man and his problems, therefore, universal. Invalid poetry, I call this poetry. Invalid poetry for life, for the life’s game and fire. But not the life seen by the European, always lacking compared to our magic and wonderful world but as we see it. Elvio Romero, as all the authentic poets in América, hasn’t got to live in an empty world with his imagination, that world already exists."

Interpret it is his roll, the real is the poetic in America, not the imaginary or fake. That’s why we are left with so much geography dispersed in flowers, rocks, and birds when we read the poems of this great Paraguayan poet. As he sings, the pain of people escapes, the protest, but also hope and faith. But these feelings and thoughts borne in the view becomes lucid and in moments oppressed, are broken by the poet that names them. Braking the charm by naming them is the art of Elvio Romero, the natural charm, which are put in his poems in the accomplishment of other charm, the poetry one, the supernatural. Over nature goes his verse dragging roots of live blood, of vertigo, contrast and metamorphosis. For the poets the formal doesn’t matter much, in which what is said expands and when it expands it creates of the new world its authentic vibration.

Rafael Alberti, notable exponent of the poetic generation of 27 in the Spanish literature sings to him, in the lightened verses of his poem “Elvio Romero, Paraguayan poet” : “The wings yes, yes, lthe wings,/against the life./Sing, cry the poet/flying between the bullets./ For the signs of the day,/you are pointing as well:/taken clavel/and sword of agony./ almost just born,/strong and mature fire,/you know more about death/maybe more than life./ and your smelly name/smells more than romero,/body full of blood./ The prisoned nation/is holding hurt/without a dream it holds /the unburied soul./ And while it cries/without Light the enemy goes,/freedom with you/will come back singing”.

Gabriela Mistral, Chilean Nobel prize, writes : Only a few times I felt like the earth was laying like a book .

Life in exile

Exile, GEY , and other expressions of live itself, are permanently present in Romero’s piece. Romero say to us: “During the long exile I had to go through, my people, my friends and some strangers too, came to my house, my exile house, bringing the fragrance of the things that are far, recon fronting my retirement.

I shared the fight of my people for their freedom, I lived paying attention to the fight protagonized by the thousands of combatants that cautiously prepared the for coming of the nation. And my singing was forming like this, between vibrant and melancholic exaltations of those lights and shadows that, alternatively, sadden the soul. I don’t know if soon, or late, I understood that I should pick up in my poetry all the states of mood that came from that sadness and revelry. So I opened all windows for all the winds in the world to get in, and that’s how I could collect all the leaves of the decay of a combative fire. All of my feelings, all of them, mixed, and that’s where a gold pigeon came out flying to the warm of my passions and imaginations.

Distinctions

As a reherserer he is the author of “Miguel Hernández, destiny and poetry” and of “El poeta y sus encrucijadas” (1991), piece by which he won the National Prize of Literature in his first edition.

He collaborated with the newspaper “Ultima Hora”, of Asunción, and various cultural publications in Argentina.

Living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he performed diplomatic shows in the Cultural Aggregate of the Paraguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires, he died in May 2004.