Tañe Carpentier la voz y la sombra del Almirante

Abstract

Alejo Carpentier reconfigured the enunciative personality of Christopher Columbus in his latest novel "The Harp and the Shadow" (1978), the present essay delves into the chapter "The Hand" and analyzes the recreation of the Admiral's voice, created by the extraordinary Cuban prose writer. This recreation juxtaposes "Diario de a Bordo" (1492) and "El Libro de las Profecías" (1502-1504), by means of a suggestive strategy of intertextual palimpsest, little attended by specialists, in which adaptations and distortions are not scarce, which sharpen precisely, between others, the "neo-romantic" component of the work pointed out by Roberto González Echevarría. In "Journal of on Board" and in "The Book of Prophecies", the construction of a neo-baroque fictional register - that is post-Renaissance - Alejo Carpentier, masterfully contributes to revalue, historical chiaroscuros, foundational mythologies and the episode of ill-fated canonization provoked by transhumance, always controversial and full of discrepancies, of the unfathomable Christopher Columbus.