One of Mexico’s greatest 19^th century poets, Agustín F. Cuenca (1850-1884) was born in Mexico City. In 1868 he founded the Netzahualcoyotl Literary Society (named after the legendary Aztec philosopher king), together with other intellectuals like Manuel Acuña. As a journalist he contributed to the major Mexican publications of his day. He was a writer who was politically associated with the progressive liberal movement of his time, as is reflected not only in his writings as a journalist but also in his literary works. In 1881 he wrote the play “La Cadena de Hierro”, which was staged several times at the Teatro Nacional de México, and is now considered one of the greatest works of Mexican drama. Today Cuenca is considered a poet of the transition from the Romantic to the Modernist period, with a style that was both multi-faceted and experimental.

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Martin Boyd

So here you are, sloughing off the cold in the warmth of this sidewalk cafe where great bar radiators blaze like fires from on high, in each upper corner, the heat raging, insane, flushing the stiff flesh of your face red, and your fingers, too stiff to clasp onto anything, as if millions of years of evolution have been undone, and here you are, Neanderthal Man, or something earlier, some creature without opposable thumbs, without the ability to grasp, prodding awkwardly at the coins in the palm of your hand…

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María Enriqueta Camarillo was a Mexican poet, short story writer, novelist and Translator who became one of the most important figures of Spanish-American modernism. In the years after the Mexican Revolution, her children’s books became extremely important as school text books in the context of the educational reforms of José Vasconcelos, and her importance in Mexican culture is reflected in the various libraries and schools that bear her name. She was also recognized outside Mexico, as in 1923 her novel El secreto (“The Secret”) won the Academie Francaise literary prize for best Hispanic female novel.

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Martin Boyd

Today marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), whose masterpiece, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605), is recognized as the first modern novel in Spanish, and a kind of bridge between the medieval and the modern in the evolution of the language. In a recent interview with the journalist Virginia Bautista, the prominent Mexican author Ignacio Padilla, himself a specialist in Cervantes’s work, describes Don Quixote as “the catalyst for the birth of modern Spanish.”

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Mexican poet Manuel Acuña was born in Coahuila on August 27, 1849 and died in Mexico City on December 6, 1873. He was an important exponent of Mexico’s Romantic movement, and member of a literary circle that included important figures of Mexican literature like Ignacio Manuel Altamirano and Agustín F. Cuenca. Although he took his life at 24, he had an extremely productive literary life and is recognized as a major Mexican literary figure. One of his most outstanding works is “Nocturno”, translated below, which he dedicated to Rosario de la Peña, with whom he had fallen in love and who is believed to be one of the reasons for his suicide.

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Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, born in Seville in 1902, was one of the main figures in the so-called “Generation of ’27”, the movement of Spanish poets that also included his friend Federico García Lorca. After Lorca’s murder in 1936 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Cernuda began the exile from which he would never return, first in the United Kingdom, then the United States, and finally, Mexico, where he died in 1963. His work is characterized by a style described by many as neo-Romantic, with a focus on the themes of solitude, desire and his personal experience of exile.

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Delma Gil Wilson was born in Álamos, Mexico in 1980. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Literatures at Universidad de Sonora en México, and a Master’s in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Alberta. She has written for newspapers and magazines in both Mexico and Canada, including Cambio Sonora, Correo Canadiense, El Hispano and The Apostles Review. She has worked as both a translator and proofreader and currently teaches Spanish at the University of Alberta.

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