Filming Fierro: Aesthetics and politics in film adaptations of national-epic poetry

Adaptations of epics such as Beowulf or the Odyssey generally treat their source material as narrative, relating plot and character at the expense of poetics. José Hernández’s gaucho epic poem ‘Martín Fierro’/‘La vuelta de Martín Fierro’ can now lay claim to half a dozen versions in film and animation. Hernández’s work has proved remarkably adaptable to a range of political and artistic interpretations; the poem has been read as a nostalgic celebration of a rural culture quickly disappearing, as a conservative reaction to modernizing national projects, and as a model of artistic-cultural integration for a new, modern nation. Cinematic versions have offered equally varied approaches to its politics. This article uses the fictional adaptation of Fierro proposed in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow as a starting point for an examination of the poetics of filmic adaptation. What of the poem’s specific prosodic features – the use of a traditional verse form, its rhythm, rhyme and distinctive lexis – are adopted and/or adapted by filmic versions, and what relationship, if any, can be detected between the implicit political standpoints of different versions and the aesthetic approach to the source text? If Pynchon’s fictional adaptation formed part of an anarchist plot, what political plotting can be detected in real-life film adaptations of the poem?