Colombia P452q 5000 pesos August 2, 2014 UNC

Issued: August 2, 2014

Front:

• Poet and writer José Asunción Silva
• Frog
• Firefly

Back: Nighttime forest with Elvira Silva: José's sister. Two goose feathers symbolizing the poet's writing tool and a pedestal including a fragment of his masterpiece that she inspired: Nocturno III.

Engraver: Juan Cárdenas

José Asunción Silva and Nocturno III — The Night That Never Ends

In the last decades of the 19th century, Bogotá still dreamed in gaslight and velvet shadows. It was a city of balconies and convent bells, of fragile republics and heavier memories. Into that atmosphere stepped poet José Asunción Silva (1865–1896): aristocratic, hypersensitive, modern before modernity had a name in Spanish, and doomed in the way only great poets ever are.

Silva belonged to the first generation of Latin American modernismo, but he was also its most intimate voice. Where Rubén Darío dazzled with swans and marble, Silva listened to footsteps in empty rooms, to the echo of love after love has already left. His language is musical, yes—but it is the music of a piano heard through a closed door at night.

“Nocturno III” is his masterpiece and his confession. Written after the death of his beloved sister Elvira, the poem abandons classical meter and regular rhyme, flowing instead in long, breathing lines that move like shadows across a wall. It is built almost entirely on repetition and atmosphere: una noche… una noche… — one night, and then another, and then the memory of all nights fused into one eternal interior darkness.

Two lovers walk together. Their shadows merge. The world dissolves into silence, perfume, and trembling presence. And then, devastatingly, only one shadow remains.

It is not simply a love poem. It is an elegy for presence itself — for the way intimacy becomes memory, and memory becomes absence. In Spanish literature, it marks the moment when poetry turns fully inward, when rhythm becomes psychological, and when grief learns to speak in music rather than narrative.

Silva would take his own life at thirty, dressing carefully, arranging his papers, placing a volume of his poems beside him. Like so many figures who stand at the threshold between eras, he burned fast and left a long afterglow.

Nocturno III endures because it is not about death.
It is about what lingers after love, after voice, after light.
The shadow that stays on the wall when the candle is gone.

Excerpt from Nocturno III

(Spanish) 
Una noche
una noche toda llena de perfumes, de murmullos y de músicas de alas,
una noche
en que ardían en la sombra nupcial y húmeda
las luciérnagas fantásticas,
a mi lado, lentamente,
contra mí ceñida,
toda,
muda y pálida
como una flor de nardo,
venías…

(English)
One night,
a night wholly filled with perfumes, with murmurs and winged music,
a night
when in the nuptial, humid darkness
fantastic fireflies were burning,
at my side, slowly,
pressed against me,
wholly,
silent and pale
like a tuberose in bloom,
you were coming…