SOURCE: Kirkpatrick, Gwen. “Cultural Identity, Tradition, and the Legacy of Don Segundo Sombra.” In Ricardo Güiraldes: Don Segundo Sombra, pp. 477-90. Paris, France: Colección Archivos, 1988.

In the following essay, Kirkpatrick relates the importance of Ricardo Güiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra to Argentine literature and the initial climate into which it was published.

Regret, nostalgia, dreams of history and of literature—these are the topics Jorge Luis Borges evoked in his remembrance of Don Segundo Sombra, twenty-six years after its publication in 1926. Borges, so skeptical of nationalistic exaltations of “Americanism” or criollismo in literature, made an exception for Güiraldes's novel of the Argentine pampa: “Don Segundo Sombra presupposes and crowns an earlier cult, a literary mythology of the gaucho; … men of history, a hazy dream, and the vivid dream of literature, all give the work its moving resonance. Güiraldes's great gift, not accessible to other...