AN ELEGY MADE BEFORE ITS TIME
DEVOTO, Daniel J.
Las Elegias de Empalme.
[Buenos Aires], 1940.
Small 8vo, ff. [12]; with a half-title; one of 150 copies printed on Whatman paper; a very clean copy; loose as issued in publisher’s blue printed wrappers with illustrations by Eduardo F. Catalano, glassine wrapper.
First edition, limited to 170 copies, of this small group of poems from early in the career of the Argentinian poet and music historian Daniel J. Devoto (1916–2001).
Printed in April 1940, Las Elegias is dedicated to Eduardo Jorge (Bosco), a writer and a close friend of Devoto’s. The two writers spent time together at the country estate of the Devoto family in Empalme San Vicente, just south of Buenos Aires, after which the book is named. The work unintentionally foreshadows a wave of grief that would ripple through the lives of a generation of Argentinian writers including Devoto, Josefa Emilia Sabor and Alberto Salas, after the apparent suicide of Jorge Bosco in 1943 at the age of thirty-one.
The printer, Francisco A. Colombo (1878–1953), was one of the few producers of fine quality printing in Argentina at the time; he produced most of the publications of the Society of Bibliophiles of Argentina and printed works for Jorge Luis Borges in the 1930s.
