Tabaré

Tabaré is an epic poem by Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, published in 1888. It is Uruguay’s national epic. It has 4,736 verses in six cantos and its background is the war between Castilians and Charrúas in Uruguay at the end of the 16th century.
Tabaré, the main character of the poem that bears his name, is Caracé’s son. An “Uruguayan” jungle Indian. Her mother is a Spanish woman who, after arriving with the first conquistadors, is taken captive by the Indians.
The poem relates the idyll of the Indian Tabaré and the Spanish Blanca. It should be added that she is the sister of a Spanish captain, Don Gonzalo de Orgaz, who unjustly kills the unfortunate Indian in the middle of the jungle.
In this poem the poet sings of the honor and pride of the Charrúa Indians and their heroic resistance to the advance of the Spanish conqueror. Therefore, its protagonist is a symbiosis of life forms.
Tabaré also evokes

• racial and cultural miscegenation,
• flora,
• fauna,
• the life and customs of the indigenous people.

The tragic story, in Zorrilla’s magnificent verses, is elevated to an epic of America. It constitutes the primordial impulse that determined the emergence of nativist literature.