Lorenzo Ramos

Appears in: Poets


Of Ramos, oral poet/singer and craftsman, we only know that Carlo Martínez Gamba, the Argentine author, met him in the city of Puerto Rico (Misiones, Argentina) in 1976 in order to have Ramos dictate this and other poems to him, as sung in the sacred tradition of the Mbyá. Extremely protective and secretive, the Mbyá, who now live in Brazil, Paraguay, and the northeast of Argentina, kept their poetic traditions hidden from missionaries until the twentieth century, when León Cadogan, Kurt Nimuendaju, and Pierre Clastres finally learned about them and made them known to the world. Augusto Roa Bastos has said that they are without parallel in the Western world in their mystical vision and poetic language. Nevertheless, as this poem attests, the Mbyá of Misiones are rapidly losing their tropical rainforest and are facing a silent extinction, even as they resist the worldview and value system of the invaders.

PRINCIPAL WORKS; As an oral poet, most of his works were not recorded.