Reading and writing towards poetry: the diary of Rafael Pombo in New York

Abstract

The Colombian writer Rafael Pombo writes a Diary from 3 August 1855 to 5 may, 1856 in New York. When he was twenty-two years old, he travels as a diplomatic attaché as a Secretary of the Colombian Legation in the United States in charge of Pedro Alcántara Herrán. The Diary expresses the necessity of breaking with the preferentiality that represents the society and build the dynamic in which the self- unsatisfied and romantic lives. Thus, the Diary exposes the consolidation of the self into two ways; the public, due to the path it seeks to get in the cultural, literate horizon in favor of 16 others voice identification; and the private, because of the various ways of recognition of their own feelings and emotions. Therefore, this is the main interest of this Pombo’s brief text that is going to be developed in the present article. The representation of how these two acts in tension, leading by the self-writing and the rupture with the reality, allows him to move towards poetry writing.