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What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomás Eloy Martínez's Purgatorio
Author(s) -
KRISTAL EFRAÍN
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
bulletin of latin american research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1470-9856
pISSN - 0261-3050
DOI - 10.1111/j.1470-9856.2012.00740.x
Subject(s) - poetry , purgatory , german literature , craft , art , art history , humanities , literature , literary criticism , visual arts
Tomás Eloy Martínez's last novel, Purgatorio , is a meditation on the effects of violence and repression under 1970s Argentine dictatorial regimes. Like its antecedent, El Infierno (1981) by Carlos Martínez Moreno, Tomás Eloy Martínez's work draws on the Divine Comedy through creative distortion, an approach to Dante as old as Esteban Echeverría's foundational Argentine poem La cautiva (1832). El Infierno and Purgatorio complement each other, yet Tomás Eloy Martínez draws on Dante's Purgatorio in specific ways to craft a notion of ‘purgatory’ better suited than Dante's to address the loss and longing of a fractured generation.