‘Letras Terribles’: Mourning and Reparation in Two Poems by Augusto Roa Bastos

Abstract

This essay is intended to open new lines of inquiry in the work of one of Latin America’s most important writers, Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, 1917–2005). To begin, I address–respectfully, but explicitly–the inconsistencies in Roa Bastos’s personal and professional record, a matter that has been something of an open secret among the Paraguayan intelligentsia for many years. Keeping this knowledge at bay, however necessary or expedient it may have been during the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989) and its aftermath, has prevented scholars from addressing what is arguably one of the most personal and pressing issues in Roa Bastos’s work: his tireless efforts to intervene in Paraguay’s cumulative history of trauma, which stretches back at least as far as the Triple Alliance War of 1864–1870. This article uses Melanie Klein’s theories of mourning and projective identification to examine these efforts in two little-known poems from the 1940s and ’50s: ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ and ‘Cerro Corá’.