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Bartolomé Hidalgo (Montevideo, 1788 - Morón, Buenos Aires Province, 1822) is the first poet to capture in Spanish language the special hues and nuances of the gaucho language.
His writings, comprising a series of lyrical, narrative and dialogic texts about current political concerns of the second and third decades of the 19th century in both margins of the Río de la Plata, have been recognized by the most respected literary critics of the region —Sarmiento, Mitre, Leguizamón, Rojas, Falcao Espalter, Borges— as the initiation of this most original genre, and Hidalgo, consequently, the first gauchesco poet.
Hidalgo's works are still filled with unknowns for the modern reader, since they were almost always published anonymously and thus present a double layer of attribution difficulty: a) discerning what Hidalgo did and did not write himself, and b) deciding who might have written the texts generally believed not to be his.
This critical edition of the Complete Poetic Works of Bartolome Hidalgo, assembled and edited by the Argentinian scholar Olga Fernández Latour de Botas, takes into account, for the first time in River Plate bibliography, the historical-cultural circumstances and context within which these varied and complex texts were written.
The extensive annotations are based on two sources that provide in-depth information: the works of the Uruguayan scholar Fernando O. Assunçao (1932-2006) and the studies of Professor Fernandez Latour de Botas, both of which analyze the most relevant aspects of the historical-political circumstances in the River Plate area from 1811 to 1822, which constitute the background for Bartolomé Hidalgo's writing. Also analyzed here -with detailed description of songs and dances, especially of the Cielito- is the cultural medium from which, in Hidalgo's poems, the gaucho prototype emerges, that will begin to appear in his better known texts after the poet's move to Buenos Aires in 1818.
This edition includes a great deal of information that is incorporated for the first time into a study of gauchesco poetry, as well as new theoretical connections developed both by Professor Fernández Latour and by other distinguished contemporary critics who have studied Hidalgo's works.
The texts included here are based primarily on the Biblioteca Artigas edition published in 1986 by the Uruguayan scholar Antonio Praderio, because it is the most complete anthology to date, and the one which has included the most reliable sources. The texts that continue the gauchesco cycle begun by Hidalgo are included in the Appendix.
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