Elvio Romero

Elvio Romero was born in Yegros, Paraguay in 1926. At a very young age he joined the promotion of Hérib Campos Cervera, Josefina Plá, Augusto Roa Bastos, who would renovate Paraguayan literature.

He is considered an important twentieth century Paraguayan poet. Brazilian critic Walter Wey wrote in 1951:

“the star of the young poet is manly and strong and his rough and low vibration style helps him for the tragic themes of violent death and hunger…we are sure that his message once mature will show us something amazing.”

A Communist militant, who after the end of Paraguayan Civil War in 1947 was forced at the age of twenty to abandon along many others the country that he called “nuestra profunda tierra”. He lived in exile in Argentina, and never forgot his homeland or his people. He returned to Paraguay after General Alfredo Stroessner fell from power, and worked in numerous diplomatic posts, such as in the Paraguayan embassy in Buenos Aires.

He has performed editorial work and gave recitals and conferences in various cultural centres of America and Europe.

The Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nobel prize winner in literature in 1967, in the introduction of the book "El sol bajo las raices," wrote about the work:'

“what characterizes Elvio Romero’s poetry is his flavour of earth, wood, water and sun and the rigor with which he deals with these themes in no way detracts from his ease of verse and the desire to interpret the drama of his country’s joyous nature and sadness of existence as in many of our countries. Few American voices so deep and faithful to the man and his problems, therefore, universal. Invalid poetry, I call this poetry. Invalid poetry for life, for the life’s game and fire. But not the life seen by the European, always lacking compared to our magic and wonderful world but as we see it. Elvio Romero, as all the authentic poets in América, hasn’t got to live in an empty world with his imagination, that world already exists."[1]

Exile, GEY , and other expressions of live itself, are present in Romero’s work. Romero writes: “During the long exile I had to go through, my people, my friends and some strangers too, came to my house, my exile house, bringing the fragrance of the things that are far, reconfronting my retirement.

I shared the fight of my people for their freedom, I lived paying attention to the fight protagonized by the thousands of combatants that cautiously prepared the for coming of the nation. And my singing was forming like this, between vibrant and melancholic exaltations of those lights and shadows that, alternatively, sadden the soul. I don’t know if soon, or late, I understood that I should pick up in my poetry all the states of mood that came from that sadness and revelry. So I opened all windows for all the winds in the world to get in, and that’s how I could collect all the leaves of the decay of a combative fire. All of my feelings, all of them, mixed, and that’s where a gold pigeon came out flying to the warm of my passions and imaginations"

As an essayist, he is the author of “Miguel Hernández, destiny and poetry” and of “El poeta y sus encrucijadas” (1991), piece by which he won the National Prize of Literature in his first edition.

He collaborated with the newspaper “Ultima Hora”, of Asunción, and various cultural publications in Argentina.

Living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he performed diplomatic shows in the Cultural Aggregate of the Paraguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires, he died in May 2004.

• Centro Cultural de la República El Cabildo (in Spanish)
• Diccionario Biográfico Forjadores del Paraguay, Primera Edición Enero de 2000. Distribuidora Quevedo de Ediciones. Buenos Aires, Argentina. (in Spanish)

• sololiteratura.com Literatura Hispanoamericana
• Epdlp