El payaso de las bofetadas y el pescador de caña

El payaso de las bofetadas y el pescador de caña, in the words of León Felipe, “is a poem born of old blood; of the eternal and recent blood of Spain”, Written in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, it is a poem whose verses reflect the drama of the poet´s homeland: the triumph of illegality, injustice and oppression. The central character of the poem is Don Quixote, a Promethean poet who possesses that essential human ability to suggest the transition from a mean world to a noble one. In this work, León Felipe intends to show how a poet like the Caballero de la Triste Figura, who writes “not with the tip of the pen, but with the tip of the lance,” takes a poetic metaphor and merges it with the greater social metaphor.

Emiliano Gironella Parra appropriates some of the ideas expressed by the Spanish poet and forcefully expresses them in 13 monotypes unified by scarlet red, the color of blood, and 12 dry point engravings.

To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of La Casa de España in Mexico, its successor, El Colegio de México, reissues the first book published by that institution in 1938: El payaso de las bofetadas y el pescador de caña by León Felipe, in a new edition beautifully illustrated by Emiliano Gironella Parra.