Talavera, Natalício (1839–1867)

Natalício Talavera (b. 1839; d. 14 October 1867), Paraguayan poet and journalist. Born in Villarrica, Talavera became independent Paraguay's first published poet. He studied in his native town and in Asunción, where he came to the attention of Ildefonso Bermejo, a Spanish publicist who had been contracted by the Carlos Antonio López government to launch a new state newspaper and other cultural projects. Under Bermejo's tutelage, Talavera became a first-rate writer. He contributed poems and literary essays to Asunción's cultural journal, La Aurora, and translated Lamartine's poem Graciela from the French.

It was in the field of journalism, however, that Talavera most distinguished himself, regularly producing articles and essays for the state newspaper, El Semanario de Avisos y Conocimientos Utiles. More important, after the beginning of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), Talavera was chosen to edit Cabichuí, a satirical newspaper written mostly in the Guaraní Indian language. His own contributions to this periodical included biting accounts of Allied cowardice as well as clever ditties attacking the character of Emperor Dom Pedro II and his consort. Paraguayan soldiers, it was said, set these verses to music and sang them in the trenches to taunt the enemy, who lay just beyond gunshot range.

Talavera wrote a series of chronicles from the battlefield that were serialized in El Semanario and much later published as a book, La guerra del Paraguay. He himself did not survive the war, becoming ill with what was probably pneumonia as a result of hard campaigning, and died at the Paraguayan army camp of Paso Pucu.

See alsoJournalism; Literature: Spanish America; Paraguay: The Nineteenth Century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Natalício Talavera, La guerra del Paraguay (1958).

Carlos Zubizarreta, Cien vidas paraguayas, 2nd ed. (1985), pp. 179-181.

Additional Bibliography

Kraay, Hendrik, and Thomas Whigham, eds. I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Whigham, Thomas. The Paraguayan War. Volume 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

                                 Thomas L. Whigham