Latin Prose

THE GREEN CONTINENT--An Anthology Selected and Edited by German Arciniegas--Knopf ($3.50).

In this Good-Neighborly decade the U.S. has been abundantly supplied with books about Latin America by U.S. writers. But The Green Continent is the first attempt to give U.S. readers a "comprehensive picture of the lands and people below the Rio Grande" by Latin-American writers. As such it is a notable--and readable --contribution to Pan-American understanding. It is an anthology edited by, a Colombian sociologist (for two years a visiting professor in the U.S.) of 33 selections from Latin-American history and fiction of the past 100 years. It tells about Latin America from the 16th Century to the present, is filled with heroes and villains from Pizarro to Pancho Villa, is set in cities, plains and jungles from the Caribbean to Cape Horn.

The Writers. Although the 32 novelists, biographers, historians and essayists included in the anthology are famed in their own countries, not a single name is familiar to most U.S. readers. They include two presidents, three ambassadors, five consuls, four cabinet ministers, three congressmen, two League of Nations delegates, two university presidents, one Dominican friar.

Common to all is passionate patriotism, romantic imagery, uninhibited hero worship. Samples:

P:Argentine Historian Leopoldo Lugones on onetime President and historian Domingo Faustino Sarmiento ("the Argentine Jefferson"): "Danger was his habit and wrath his beauty; his dimensions became those of a deity, cleaving the air like lightning, riding the tempest with a cloud at his belt and a thunderbolt on his shoulder."

P:President Sarmiento himself described Uruguay's General Jose Fructuoso Rivera; "[He] began [by] making war upon the government as an outlaw; afterwards he waged war upon the outlaws as a government officer; next upon the King [of Portugal] as a patriot; and later upon the patriots as a peasant; upon the Argentines as a Brazilian chieftain; and upon the Brazilians as an Argentine general; upon [Outlaw] Lavalleja as President; upon President Oribe as a proscribed chieftain; and finally upon [Oribe's] ally as a general of Uruguay."

P:Colombia's Poet-Novelist Jose Eustasio Rivera on the jungle: "No cooing nightingales here, no Versaillian gardens or sentimental vistas! Instead the croaking of dropsical frogs ... the aphrodisiac parasite that covers the ground with dead insects, the disgusting blooms that throb with sensual palpitations. . . . Stretched from tree to palm in long, elastic curves, like carelessly hung nets [the lianas catch] falling leaves, branches, and fruits, [hold] them for years until they sag and burst like rotten bags, scattering blind reptiles, rusty salamanders, hairy spiders . . . the comejen grub gnaws at the trees like quick-spreading syphilis . . .; everywhere is the reek of fermentation, steaming shadows, the sopor of death, the enervating process of procreation."

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