Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo

The Unfinished Song of Francisco Urondo: When Poetry is Not Enough is a comprehensive, well-written, documented, and carefully developed study of the literary work and life of Francisco Urondo, an Argentine poet, intellectual, activist, cultural promoter, revolutionary, and clandestine guerilla member who died in 1976 fighting for a cause in which he believed, against the oppressive Argentine Military Junta.This methodical but never mechanistic work shows how life events, cultural milieu, political movements, and world circumstances interacted and impacted Urondo’s temperament to produce his poetic voice, his prose, and his theatrical works. By studying the man, we get closer to his poetry. With his poetry, the author makes a compelling case for understanding the man.Francisco Urondo’s life, work, and praxis were varied, agonizing at times, and always marked by imperatives. This book fills a significant lacuna in the scholarship on the work of this worthy, yet neglected and under-studied, writer. Readers of this book will come away with not only a deepened understanding of the man and his writings but also of a key period in recent Argentine political, social, and intellectual history.

What Fontanet succeeds in doing in this monograph, is to show, with detailed analysis of the texts, how Urondo’s poetry developed along a trajectory in order to fulfill this belief. In a methodical way, Fontanet takes us through the stages of Francisco Urondo’s life and poetry, all the while showing us how each one is reflected in the other., Fontanet lays clear in his analyses how Urondo, in finding his own poetic voice, was also establishing an urgency to explore existential questions and, more concretely still, the identity of his then home, Buenos Aires as well as that of the nation. Urondo’s life is not without controversy., Fontanet skillfully manages to show us levels of complexity without taking up an overtly ideological position on the knotted question of Peronism. I believe this stance is well judged because it gets us closer to the truly enigmatic nature of both Urondo and his poetry. By approaching Urondo via his poetry, Fontanet’s study succeeds in revealing the ambiguity at the core of a person, whose chosen path of a comprometido, armed activist, would seem to suggest, on the contrary, a single-minded certainty., Scholarly and analytical, yet accessible and entertaining, Fontanet’s study is a welcome contribution to the field. It is of great value to researchers and students of Argentine and Latin American poetry but also to the general reader who wants to learn more about this important cultural and political activist and writer. For making the study so accessible, Hernán Fontanet is to be highly praised because, in so doing, he perfectly matches the spirit of Urondo’s life and work., Among the strengths of Hernán Fontanet’s book are the manner in which he presents the main events in Urondo’s life, tying them simultaneously to the evolution of his poetry and to world events; his lucid analysis of the trajectory of Urondo’s poetic production; and his judicious incorporation of a wealth of sources that fill in the picture of Urondo’s life and artistic production.

Hernan Fontanet is an Argentinian-American literary author, who has published seven books on postcolonial political poetry in Europe, the United States, and South America. He has taught Latin American literature at Yale, Buenos Aires, Rider, Almeria, Fayetteville, and Belgrano Universities. He earned his PhD in Latin American Literature and two Masters of Arts degrees, one from Spain in European studies and the other from Argentina in Hispanic studies. Fontanet has been a lecturer and keynote speaker in Europe, Japan, USA, South America, and China.