Salvador Novo López (Mexico City, 30 July 1904 – 13 January 1974) was a poet, playwright, chronicler and historian. He is considered a founder of the modern temperament in Mexican literature. With an avant-garde, acid and sophisticated style, Novo published more than 20 books during his lifetime, and was openly homosexual despite the social stigma of the time. Together with Xavier Villaurrutia, he founded the magazine and experimental theatre Ulises in 1927, which brought avant-garde theatre to Mexico and brought together the main members of the group Los Contemporáneos, the title of the next magazine Novo and Villaurrutia founded in 1928.
Sátira brings together Salvador Novo’s “secret” poems, partially published in 1955 and published in full in 1970. Sonnets so injurious that they provoked the bile of Octavio Paz himself, who said of Novo: “He had a lot of talent and a lot of poison, few ideas and no morals. Loaded with deadly adjectives and light on scruples, he attacked the weak and flattered the powerful; he did not serve any belief or idea, he wrote not with blood but with poo. His best epigrams are those which, in a moment of torn cynicism and lucidity, he wrote against himself. That saves him.”
“These poems make up one of the most radical projects in 20th-century Spanish-American poetry under the guise of a minor, circumstantial work.” -Luis Felipe Fabre.
