Madrigales ideográficos are two poems by the poet, journalist, and Mexican diplomat,
José Juan Tablada
José Juan de Aguilar Acuña Tablada (April 3, 1871 – August 2, 1945) was a Mexican poet, art critic and, for a brief period, diplomat. A pioneer of oriental studies, and champion of Mexican art, he spent a good portion of his life living abroad ...
, published in 1920 in
Caracas
Caracas ( , ), officially Santiago de León de Caracas (CCS), is the capital and largest city of Venezuela, and the center of the Metropolitan Region of Caracas (or Greater Caracas). Caracas is located along the Guaire River in the northern p ...
,
Venezuela
Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It com ...
, in his slim volume of poetry ''
Li Po and other poems.'' This book of poems was edited by Eduardo Nuñez Coll, and printed by the
Bolívar Press on January 6, 1920. A game to arrange lines of traditional poetry to form pictures with them, ''Li Po and other poems'' is a book of these drawings crafted entirely out of poetic verse. The drawings produced by this action create a poetic space that Mexican poet
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a ...
christened "topoemas". The poems "El Puñal"(The Dagger) and "El Talón Rouge"(The Rouge Heel) are prepared in the image of a dagger and in the image of a heeled shoe. Each image represents the subject of its respective poem.
Although presented as a drawing, the poems are read as if they were written in traditional stanzas. Both poems are organized into four verses that contain 7 to 11 syllables, and use the AB-AB rhyme scheme.
El Puñal
The first poem, "El Puñal"(The Dagger), concerns itself with the "first look of passion" that is driven "like a dagger into the heart" of the speaker of the poem. The poem takes the form of a dagger to emphasize the idea of the game behind the volume of poems.
El Talón Rouge
The subject of "El Talón Rouge"(The Rouge Heel) is a heeled shoe that reminds the poem's speaker of the love that causes him suffering. The inclusion of the word "Rouge" in the title and the mention of the color crimson in the poem imagines the blood coming from the speaker's heart, and alludes to two classic models of passionate love: the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and the other model from the French opera by Bizet, ''
Carmen
''Carmen'' () is an opera in four acts by the French composer Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. The opera was first performed by the O ...
''.
References
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Poems
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