In the Library
Martín Fierro
José Hernández, 1872
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by The Daily Canon (2026)
- Original
- Original es
- Chapters
- Chapters 48
- Length
- Length 44k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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Here I sit down to sing / to the beat of my guitar.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Facundo
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Facundo does the same thing, staring hard at Argentina's violent frontier, but damns the gaucho world as barbarism instead of singing it into a wronged hero's epic.
£1.99
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself does the same thing, building a nation's epic from one common voice chanting itself into being, but for the American everyman instead of the gaucho.
£1.99
About the book
He sits down to sing, tunes his guitar, and what follows is a whole vanishing world defending itself in the only voice it has. Martín Fierro is a gaucho, a horseman of the Argentine pampas, and this is his life sung in his own rough tongue: dragged from his ranch to serve at a frontier fort, worked and beaten and cheated of his pay, then deserting only to ride home and find the house gone, the cattle gone, his wife and sons scattered to who knows where. What raises the hair on your neck is that José Hernández did not write about the gaucho, he let the gaucho open his own mouth, in the octosyllabic swing of a fireside ballad, half lament and half accusation flung at the government erasing his kind. Read it and you hear a man singing himself into legend even as the country that made him decides it has no more use for him. Few poems have so fiercely refused to let a whole people disappear quietly.