Lunario sentimental

↻ 2026-02-23

• overview
• timeline
• original
• translation
• typesetting
  • body font
  • title font
  • poetry
  • plays
• publication

overview

One of my favorite books, a lecture by Jorge Luis Borges on writing, cites a Leopoldo Lugones work for which I can find no English translation.

“The Argentine poet Lugones, way back in the year 1909, wrote that he thought poets were always using the same metaphors, and that he would try his hand at discovering new metaphors for the moon. And in fact he concocted many hundreds of them. He also said, in the foreword to a book called Lunario sentimental, that every word is a dead metaphor.”

Borges, This Craft of Verse, p. 22 (The Metaphor)

I am intrigued! Let’s get a translation out in the world.

timeline

original

The original work was published in 1909, and has since entered the public domain. You can download it here.

The work contains 37 pieces:

• four plays
• four works of prose
• 29 poems

translation

Spanish to English translation was done by Oskarina Perez. I hired her for her familiarity with the genre and the author.

I did English editing work, in consultation with Oskarina.

The chapter titles are kept in the original Spanish throughout the book, with English translations appearing in the table of contents. I like this convention for translated poetry — the Spanish titles have a sonic quality that English tends to flatten. “Jaculatoria Lunar” is better than “Lunar Ejaculatory Prayer.” The table of contents gives you both, so nobody’s locked out.

43 endnotes cover classical references, obscure vocabulary, foreign phrases, and translation choices. They live in the back of the book to keep the poems clean on the page.

typesetting

I typeset the work in XeLaTeX, to provide modern font support.

body font

EB Garamond was chosen for its wide character support and, well, because it’s beautiful.

Since this stuff matters, here’s how I’ve configured EB Garamond in fontspec:

\setmainfont{EBGaramond}
    [
        UprightFont = EBGaramond-Regular,
        ItalicFont = EBGaramond-Italic,
        BoldFont = EBGaramond-Bold,
        BoldItalicFont = EBGaramond-BoldItalic,
        Ligatures = {Common, Rare},
        StylisticSet = 6,
        Numbers = Proportional,
        Numbers = OldStyle
    ]

I initially held off on Ligatures = Rare because I wasn’t sure I could justify it ergonomically, but I’ve come around. The discretionary ct and st ligatures — where the letters get a connecting swash arc between them — are gorgeous and period-appropriate for a 1909 text. Words like “sentimental,” “architecture,” “distinction” all pick up these elegant old-style joins. It’s subtle enough that most readers won’t consciously notice, but it gives the text a distinctly hand-set, early-20th-century feel.

title font

Six Caps is the title font — an ultra-condensed display face under the SIL Open Font License. I had been using HFF High Tension, which is based on “Bamberg” from a Dover Circus Alphabets book, but the licensing was ambiguous for commercial use. Six Caps has the same dramatic vertical compression and reads almost identically on a shelf, with the benefit of being unambiguously open source.

poetry

The poetry is set using the poetry package. There’s really no trick to this, a poem looks as follows in the code,

\poemlinenumsfalse
\centerpoemoff
\begin{poem}
\textit{Che cotesta córtese opinione} \\
\textit{Ti fian chiavata in mezzo della testa.} \\!
\end{poem}

plays

Plays were a bigger deal. I like the dramatist package a lot, but it doesn’t work inside a book document type in XeLaTeX. So I made my own environment to format the plays, headers, and dramatis personae sections. Here’s what it looks like in the preamble:

% Play environment with acts and scenes
\newenvironment{play}[1]{
    \section*{#1} % Title of the play
    \setlength{\parindent}{0pt} % No indentation
    \setlength{\parskip}{0.6\baselineskip}
    \obeylines
}{
    \setlength{\parindent}{1em} % Restore default indentation
    \setlength{\parskip}{0pt} % Restore default spacing
}

% Commands for structured formatting — consistent across all plays
\newcommand{\act}[1]{%
    \bigskip\bigskip
    \centerline{{\Large\spacedsc{Act #1}}}
    \medskip
}
\newcommand{\scene}[1]{%
    \bigskip
    \centerline{\spacedsc{Scene #1}}
    \medskip
}
\newcommand{\character}[1]{%
    \textbf{#1.---}\hspace{1em} % Bold character names with em dash
}
\newcommand{\stage}[1]{%
    \textit{(#1)} % Italics for stage directions
}

% Dramatis Personae Environment — centered block with small caps heading
\newenvironment{dramatispersonae}{%
    \par\bigskip
    \begin{center}
    \spacedsc{Dramatis Personae}\\[0.75\baselineskip]
    \begin{tabular}{@{}r@{\kern 1em}l@{}}
}{%
    \end{tabular}
    \end{center}
    \bigskip
}

\newcommand{\dpline}[2]{%
    \textit{#1} & #2 \\[3pt]
}

And here’s what a play looks like in code:

\begin{play}{ }

\begin{dramatispersonae}
    \dpline{Dalinda}{23 years old, blonde. Sister of Jacinto.}
    \dpline{Jacinto}{26 years old. Brother of Dalinda.}
    \dpline{Reinaldo}{20 years old. Friend of Jacinto and Dalinda's fiancé.}
\end{dramatispersonae}

\act{I}

\scene{1}

\character{Jacinto} This is an example dialogue line.

\character{Reinaldo} \stage{Turning to Jacinto} This is another example.

This ends up looking as follows when compiled:

publication

TBD

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