From the Paraguay of the Centenary to Classical Antiquity. Overlap of Temporalities in Eloy Fariña Núñez’s Canto secular (1911)

Abstract

In 1911, Eloy Fariña Núñez published in Buenos Aires the long poem Canto secular to commemorate the centenary of Paraguay’s independence. The work displays a modernist stamp, but it also involves some features of Arielism, a Latin American political philosophy that brought youth to the fore and recognized a double American and Greco-Latin cultural ancestry. This article proposes an intertextual and interdiscursive approach to Canto secular, in order to discover in the poem a literary operation of foundation of an enunciative locus where two spatiotemporal coordinates, both literary recreated, overlap: the peasant Paraguay in the transition towards urbanity, and classical antiquity synthesized in some legal values and models.