JUAN DE CASTELLANOS AND WILLIAM OSPINA (FUNCTION AND POLICAL USE OF EPIC POETRY)

Abstract

The Colombian novelist William Ospina published Las auroras de sangre (The Dawn of Blood) in 1999, a book dedicated to commenting on the Renaissance epic poem by Juan de Castellanos Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (Illustrious Men of the Indies Elegies’s), which narrates the conquest of New Granada and which Ospina considers the poetic discovery of the country. This essay raises the extent to which the poem by Juan de Castellanos can be considered a classic text, and questions the reasons that could have led a contemporary author to be interested in the longest poem ever written in Spanish; he believes he finds them in the political and foundational function that the epic has always had and that Ospina updates in the present of Colombia.