Mir, Pedro (1913–2000)

Pedro Mir (b. 3 June 1913; d. 11 July 2000), Dominican poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and teacher. The popular and critically acclaimed dean of contemporary Dominican poets, Mir was born in San Pedro de Macoris, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father. He earned a law degree from the University of Santo Domingo in 1941. Mir's radical opposition to the Rafael Leónidas Trujillo dictatorship led, in 1947, to long years of exile. Effectively assuming a collective voice and condition, the intimate, politically charged poetry of Hay un país en el mundo (1949; There Is in the World a Country), Contracanto a Walt Whitman: Canto a nosotros mismos (1952; Countersong to Walt Whitman: Song to Ourselves), Seís momentos de esperanza (1953; Six Moments of Hope), Amén de mariposas (1969; Amen to Butterflies), and Viaje a la muchedumbre (1971; Journey to the Multitude) offer lyrically powerful testimony to the patriotic constancy of that exile and the years of crisis and struggle immediately after. Mir's vigorous denunciation of the cruel realities of the Trujillato and a U.S. imperial presence throughout the hemisphere includes contrapuntal emphasis on the epic historical journey of the common people in a Latin America where the conceit and miscarried promise of the Whitmanesque "I" "is no longer / … / the word fulfilled / the touchstone word to start the world anew. / … / [where] now the word is / us" (Viaje a la muchedumbre, p. 62). Mir returned to the Dominican Republic for two years in 1963, and he reestablished himself there definitively in 1968. In 1974 the secretary of education of the Dominican Republic recognized his essay, "Las raíces dominicanas de la Doctrina Monroe" (The Dominican Roots of the Monroe Doctrine), with an Annual History Award. In 1978, his only novel, Cuando amaban las tierras comuneras (When They Loved the Communal Land), was published to acclaim in Mexico. In 1984 the Dominican Congress named him national Poet Laureate. In 1991 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Hunter College in New York City. Two years later he received the Dominican National Literature Award in recognition of his lifetime of contributions. Mir also held a faculty and research appointment at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. He died on 11 July 2000.

A poet of great complexity, technical skill, and intellectual authority, his work combines an elegiac mood with a prophetic vision of hope. An exacting stylist and multifacetic chronicler of his country's social and cultural history, his writings include two other books of verse; a poetic historicist novel, Cuando amaban las tierras comuneras (1978); and the elegant narratives of La gran hazaña Limber y después otoño (1977); and ¡Buen viaje, Pancho Valentín! (1981). His works of historical interpretation, aesthetic philosophy, and art criticism include the two-volume La noción de período en la historia dominicana (1981–1983), Tres leyendas de colores: Ensayo de interpretación de las tres primeras revoluciones del nuevo mundo (1969), Las raíces dominicanas de la doctrina Monroe (1974), Apertura a la estética (1974), Fundamentos de teoría y crítica de arte (1979), and La estética del soldadito (1991).

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America; Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónidas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Víctor Fernández-Fragoso, "De la noche a la muchedumbre: Los cantos épicos de Pedro Mir" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Connecticut, 1978).

Manuel Matos Moquete, "Poética política en la poesía de Pedro Mir," Revista Iberoamericana 53, no. 142 (1988): 199-211.

Silvio Torres-Saillant, "Caribbean Poetics: Aesthetics of Marginality in West Indian Literature" (Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1991).

Pedro Mir, Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems, translated by Jonathan Cohen and Donald D. Walsh (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Beiro Alvarez, Luis. Pedro Mir en familia. [Dominican Republic]: Fundación Espacios Culturales, 2001.

Mir, Pedro. Homenaje a Pedro Mir y José P.H. Hernández. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994–1995.

Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

                                     Roberto MÁrquez