Campo, Estanislao Del (1834–1880)

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Campo, Estanislao Del (1834–1880)

Estanislao Del Campo (b. 7 February 1834; d. 6 November 1880), Argentine poet, legislator, journalist, civil servant, and officer of the Civic Guard. His admiration for Hilario Ascasubi and the Gauchesca literature prompted him to write poetry in this style. He even adopted the pseudonym of Anastasio el Pollo (Anastasio the Chicken) as a sign of respect for Ascasubi's Aniceto el Gallo (Aniceto the Rooster). In 1866 del Campo wrote the gauchesca poem Fausto, in which one gaucho, chatting with another, tells the plot of the Gounod opera that he happened to see in Buenos Aires's Teatro Colón. The novelty of this text is that del Campo injected an urban, highly cultured subject into gauchesca literature. He erased the disparity between the popular language and the cult subject of the Faustian legend by reducing it to the concrete reality and perceptions of the gaucho. In spite of the hilarity of the text, the gaucho-narrator and his friend are never ridiculed. On the contrary, their deep friendship is emphasized. The poem is also famous for its romantic descriptions, without parallel in gauchesca literature.

Committed to the party of General Bartolmé Mitre, del Campo fought at the battles of Cepeda (1859) and Pavón (1861) for a Buenos Aires state separate from the Argentine Confederation. In the late 1860s del Campo was elected to the House of Representatives of the province of Buenos Aires as a member of the Liberal Party. In 1874 he was made lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard. Del Campo took part in the Mitre revolution against Nicolás Avellaneda. He retired from public life in April 1880 and died six months later in Buenos Aires.

See alsoGauchesca Literature .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuel Mújica Láinez, Vidas del Gallo y el Pollo (1966).

Enrique Anderson Imbert, Análisis de "Fausto" (1968).

Teresa Salas and Henry Richards, "La función del marco y la armonía simétrica en el Fausto de Estanislao del Campo," in Kentucky Romance Quarterly 17 (1970): 55-66.

Ollie Olympo Oviedo, "The Reception of the Faust Motif in Latin American Literature: Archetypal Transformations in Works by Estanislao del Campo, Alberto Gerchunoff, João Guimaraes Rosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Jaime Torres Bodet" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978).