El payador

In 1913, Leopoldo Lugones held six conferences at the Odeon theater, a site frequented by the vast majority of politicians and writers of the time. He then traveled to Europe and returned to Argentina at the outbreak of World War I. There, he collected all the material to complete four new chapters and published them under the title El payador on the centenary of Independence. El payador is an essay that portrays the life and customs of the gauchos on the pampas, particularly the minstrel. Lugones establishes a direct relationship between Martín Fierro and works like Homer's Iliad, el Cantar de Mio Cid, even the Divine Comedy, to match the character of the gaucho with the great epic characters in his story. This created some surprise among intellectual circles of the time.