Teresa

Description

The conceit is announced on the title page: these are the rhymes of an unknown poet, brought to light by Unamuno, who explains in a preface how the manuscript reached him. There was no poet and no manuscript. What there is instead is a sequence about a man watching his beloved die of consumption, written in a deliberately plain register that Unamuno never used under his own name, and framed by a commentary in which he argues with his own invention. He maintained the fiction to the end. It remains the most sustained act of literary ventriloquism by a writer who spent his life insisting on sincerity.