Horacio Quiroga · 1907

El almohadón de pluma

Une jeune mariée pâlit dans une maison froide et silencieuse, et ses médecins ne savent pas dire pourquoi.

Alicia épouse Jordán et s’installe dans une maison blanche et silencieuse où la sévérité de son mari laisse peu de place à la tendresse. Puis elle tombe malade, de symptômes banals et sans cause que les médecins sachent nommer. En quelques pages, Horacio Quiroga fait cohabiter dans une même scène le réalisme domestique et l’horreur.

Première publication
1907
Forme littéraire
Nouvelle
Langue originale
espagnol
Langues des textes publiés
espagnol · vietnamien
Temps de lecture
≈ 5 min de lecture

Aucune traduction publiée dans la langue de cette interface. Vous pouvez lire l’original ou une autre édition disponible.

Lire · Español
Colour magazine cover: a woman in a green polka-dot clown costume holding a pen, ringed by caricatured masks of men, with a giant inkwell and a folded copy of the magazine.
Image associée. Manuel Mayol, cover of Caras y Caretas, Buenos Aires, 19 August 1898 (Año I). This is the weekly in which Quiroga published many stories; the cover does not illustrate this one.Manuel Mayol, cover of Caras y Caretas, 19 August 1898, Hemeroteca Digital Hispánica. Public domain (artist died 1929). Wikimedia Commons. Source

Pourquoi cette œuvre compte

Quiroga’s story begins like a domestic drama: a marriage, a couple, a house. Alicia has married Jordán, whose hard character leaves little room for affection, and the white, silent house presses on her. Then illness arrives, with ordinary symptoms and no cause. The doctor admits he cannot account for her weakness. The story is short and tightly built, and it still unsettles because it never quite decides whether it belongs to medicine or to nightmare. It is one of the best-known pieces in Quiroga’s collection Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (1917), a title that tells you what the book offers: love, madness and death.

Quiroga called Edgar Allan Poe his “first and principal teacher”, and the debt shows in his interest in mental illness and hallucinatory states. Yet he also wrote the Decálogo del perfecto cuentista, a set of rules for young writers that urges economy, precision and few adjectives, and stresses the importance of endings. This story obeys that lesson: clues are laid through the text like pieces of a detective puzzle, and the close arrives with an explanation in a scientific voice that may not fully convince, which is part of the effect. The 1917 collection was a success with readers and critics and is credited with establishing Quiroga as a master of the Latin American short story.

Read the opening pages slowly, because Quiroga hides his hints there: the chill of the house, the husband’s manner, the first small symptoms. Notice that the language of illness is plain and clinical while the details around it are not. Then read the husband and the cause of Alicia’s decline side by side; the Spanish Wikipedia article suggests they work as parallel figures, with Alicia as the victim of both. The story is short enough to read twice, once for the plot and once for the clues. Later writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar are named as having been influenced by Quiroga.

Présentation rédigée pour LitMundi avec l’aide de l’IA et vérifiée d’après les sources ci-dessous.

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Original · source vérifiée

El almohadón de pluma

Español

El almohadón de pluma · Español, Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, 1917

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Bản dịch tiếng Việt bằng AI · đánh giá AI v2

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