Marta Traba

Marta Traba

Marta Traba (born January 25, 1930 in Buenos Aires , † November 27, 1983 in Mejorada del Campo , Spain ) was an Argentine writer and art historian. Since she lived in Colombia for a long time , she is often attributed to the culture of this country.

Life

Marta Traba was born on January 25, 1930 in Buenos Aires to the journalist Francisco Traba and Marta Taín. Her childhood was marked by poverty, restlessness and constant moves, as her father, a bohemian and alcoholic , always owed the rent. She studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires , where she received her diploma in 1950. After studying art history in Rome and at the Sorbonne in Paris (1951 to 1953), she settled in Bogotá , where she lived from 1954 to 1968 and directed cultural programs on Colombian television. As a professor at the Universidad de las Américas and the Universidad de los Andes , she taught art history and Latin American art.

In 1957 she launched the magazine Prisma , and in 1963 she founded the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, which she managed until 1968. From 1966 to 1967 she taught art history and cultural studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia . Shortly thereafter, she divorced her first husband, journalist Alberto Zalamea , with whom she had two children, Gustavo and Fernando. In 1968 she was expelled from the country by the Colombian government under Carlos Lleras Restrepo as an undesirable foreigner because she had protested against the occupation of her university by the military. She was only given 24 hours to leave the country; from then on she lived in permanent exile .

Marta Traba received a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to Montevideo ( Uruguay ), where she met her second husband, the literary critic Ángel Rama . From 1970 to 1972 she lived in Puerto Rico , where she was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico Piedras .

In 1973, during the week of the Pinochet putsch and the murder of Salvador Allende , she traveled to Chile to visit her son and daughter-in-law; The autobiographical component of her novel Conversación al Sur is based on these traumatic events . From 1973 to 1979 she lived in Caracas ( Venezuela ), where she taught Latin American art history and worked as a researcher at the Universidad Central de Venezuela . After a year in Barcelona (1979), she lived in Washington and lectured at Harvard and Princeton University, among others . In 1980 Marta Traba had to undergo cancer surgery. She died on November 27, 1983 in Mejorada del Campo (Spain) in the accident of Avianca flight 011 , in which her husband, the Mexican writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia and the Peruvian author Manuel Scorza also lost their lives. They were all on their way to a literary congress in Bogotá. A few months before the crash, Marta Traba and her husband had settled in Paris after the US immigration authorities had refused them permanent residence for flimsy reasons . Shortly before her death, she had received Colombian citizenship from Colombian President Belisario Betancur in 1982 .

Works

(Selection)

• Historia natural de la alegría . Buenos Aires: Ed. Losada, 1952 (poetry).
• Las ceremonias del verano . Foreword by Mario Benedetti . La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1966 (2nd edition Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1966; 3rd edition Barcelona: Montesino Editor, 1981; Literature Prize of the Casa de las Américas , Cuba; novel).
• Los laberintos insolados . Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1967 (novel).
• Pasó así . Montevideo: Ed. Arca, 1968 (short stories).
• La jugada del sexto día . Santiago: Edit. Universitaria, 1969 (novel).
• Homérica Latina . Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1979 (Romanepos).
• Conversación al sur . México: Siglo XXI, 1981 (novel; translated into Swedish and Norwegian).
• En cualquier lugar . Bogotá: Siglo XXI, 1984 (novel).
• De la mañana a la noche . Montevideo: Monte Sexto, 1986 (short stories).
• Casa sin fin . Montevideo: Monte Sexto, 1987.

Marta Traba has also published 23 volumes on art criticism and history, as well as numerous articles in newspapers and magazines on the subject.

German translation

• Excerpts from Conversación al sur under the title “Conversation in the South” in: Torturada. Of butchers and sexes. Texts by Latin American authors on torture and political violence. Edited and translated by Erna Pfeiffer . Vienna: Wiener Frauenverlag, 1993. ISBN 3-900399-82-4

English translation

• Art of Latin America, 1900-1980 . Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-940602-73-3
• Mothers and Shadows [ Conversación al sur ]. London: Readers International, 1986. ISBN 978-0-930523-15-2

Web links

• Literature by and about Marta Traba in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Latin Arts Museum (in Spanish, with photo and sources)