Literary Text about Love

Below, you will find some fragments of literary works that address the subject of love, as well as a brief review of their respective authors.

"The loving ones" (fragment)

Author: Jaime Sabines

Gender: poetry

The lovers are silent.

Love is the finest silence,

The most trembling, the most unbearable.

The loving ones seek,

the loving ones are the ones who abandon,

They are the ones who change, the ones who forget.

Your heart tells you that you will never find,

they do not find, they seek.

The lovers go crazy

because they are alone, alone, alone,

giving himself, giving himself all the time,

crying because they don't save love.

They care about love. The loving ones

they live from day to day, they can't do more, they don't know.

They are always leaving

always, somewhere.

Are waiting,

they don't expect anything, but they wait.

(…)

About the fragment and the author

Jaime Sabines (1926-1999) was a Mexican poet and politician, known as "the sniper of literature" and considered one of the great Mexican literary creators of the 20th century. He published numerous books of poetry, in which love has a strong presence, although towards the end of his life his work became more political.

Sabines also received numerous prestigious national awards from literature, such as the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize (1973) or the National Prize for Sciences and Arts in the area of ​​Linguistics and Literature (1983).

East poem It is part of one of his last works and is perhaps the best known of the author. Although we have shown only a fragment here, it is possible to see that it is a description poetics of those who are in love, their behaviors and their obsessions, observed by the poet without getting involved, as one who observes a phenomenon of nature.

"Hopscotch" (fragment)

Author: Julio Cortazar

Gender: Novel

I touch your mouth, with a finger I touch the edge of your mouth, I draw it as if it were coming out of my hand, as if for the first time your mouth were ajar, and it is enough for me to close the eyes to undo everything and start over again, every time I give birth to the mouth that I desire, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws on your face, a mouth chosen among all, with sovereign Liberty, chosen by me to draw it with my hand on your face, and that for a random that I do not seek to understand exactly matches your mouth that smiles below the one that my hand draws you.

You look at me, you look at me closely, closer and closer and then we play Cyclops, we look closer and closer and our eyes widen, approach each other, overlap and the Cyclops look at each other, breathing in confusion, their mouths meet and fight warmly, biting their her lips, barely resting her tongue on her teeth, playing in their enclosures where the heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. So, my hands seek to sink into your hair, slowly caress the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were full of flowers or fish, of lively movements, of fragrance dark. And if we bite ourselves the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a brief and terrible simultaneous suck of breath, that instant death is beautiful. And there is only one saliva and only one taste of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon in water.

(…)

About the fragment and the author

Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) was a writer and translator of Argentine nationality, considered among the greatest Latin American authors of the 20th century. A member of the so-called “Latin American Boom”, his work has been classified as experimental and surrealist, and in it poetic prose predominates, although he was essentially a writer of stories and novels.

The fragment that we have presented belongs to his novel Hopscotch (1963), perhaps the author's best-known work, in which he proposed an entirely new way of reading a novel, offering the reader the possibility to jump between chapters or to find their own order of reading. For this reason it is often called "antinovela" or "contranovela". The plot has to do with the love of the protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, with a Uruguayan woman named Lucía, who is nicknamed "La Maga" throughout the novel.

“The double flame. Love and eroticism ”(fragment)

Author: Octavio Paz

Gender: Test

Love is one of the responses that man has invented to look death in the face. For love we steal from him while he kills us a few hours that we transform sometimes into paradise and other times into hell. In both ways, time is relaxed and is no longer a measure. Beyond happiness or infidelity, even if it is both, love is intensity; He does not give us eternity but liveliness, that minute in which the doors of time and space are ajar: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything tends to be one (…).

About the fragment and the author

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) is one of the great names in Latin American literature. He was a Mexican poet, essayist and diplomat, winner of the 1981 Cervantes Prize and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. His extensive and experimental work is difficult to classify into a single stylistic trend, since as a poet he ventured into different artistic movements. Their essaysOn the other hand, they are highly valued, and they address topics as different as love, the imaginary construction of Latin America or the origin of life. poetry.

In this fragment that we have extracted from his essay The double flame. Love and eroticism (1993), the way he reflects on the nature of love can be seen. It is a book in which he tries to explain the way in which we have thought about love in the West, from ancient times to contemporary times, and does so through a language rich in metaphors and of a clear poetic tinge.

"The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha" (fragment)

Author: Miguel de Cervantes

Gender: Novel

Heaven made me, as you say, beautiful, and in such a way that, without being powerful to anything else, my beauty moves you; and, for the love that you show me, you say, and still want, that I am obliged to love you. I know, with the natural understanding that God has given me, that everything beautiful is kind; but I am unable to achieve that, by reason of being loved, what is loved is bound by beauty to love those who love it. And more, that it could happen that the lover of the beautiful was ugly, and, the ugly being worthy of being hated, it is very wrong to say “Love you for beautiful; make me love even if it's ugly ”. But, in case the beauties run equally, not for that reason should the wishes, that not all beauties fall in love; that some cheer the view and do not give up the will; that if all beauties fell in love and surrendered, it would be a confused and misguided wills walk, without knowing where they would stop; because, the beautiful subjects being infinite, the desires had to be infinite. And, as I have heard, true love is not divided, and must be voluntary, and not forced. This being the case, as I think it is, why do you want me to surrender my will by force, forced no more than you say you love me well?

About the fragment and the author

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) is the greatest author of Hispanic letters. He was a Spanish-born poet, novelist and playwright, the author of what is considered the first modern novel among many works: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha (1605), one of the greatest works of universal literature and the second most translated and published book in the history of mankind, after the Bible.

This fragment that we chose, however, does not show either Don Quixote or his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, but is part of the monologue of the shepherdess Marcela, who refers to love and falling in love in very advanced terms for her time, which undoubtedly constitutes a sample of the genius of Cervantes. Pastor Marcela is almost a precursor of feminism, since she prefers the solitude of the countryside to accept the loving mandates that society imposes on women.

What is a literary text?

A literary text is a type of writing that goes beyond the mere fact of communicating an idea or meaning and that commitment, therefore, to provide the reader with an aesthetic experience, that is, an experience of the beauty. This means that a literary text gives great importance not only to what it says, but to how it says it and the plurality of meanings that it can express through the appropriate words.

Literary texts have been part of the artistic tradition of humanity since ancient times, that is, of the literature, and are organized into large groups known as genres, which have more or less basic features common. At present, literary genres are: poetry, narrative (the story, the novel, the chronicle) and dramaturgy (that is, theatrical texts).

References:

• "Types of texts" in Wikipedia.
• "Jaime Sabines" in Wikipedia.
• "Octavio Paz" in Wikipedia.
• "Julio Cortázar" in Wikipedia.
• "Miguel de Cervantes" in Wikipedia.

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