Armonia Somers

Armonía Somers (pseudonym of Armonía Liropeya Etchepare Locino ) (born October 7, 1914 in Pando , Uruguay , † March 1, 1994 in Montevideo ) was a Uruguayan writer .

Life

Preliminary remark

Various rumors are circulating about the Uruguayan author's life data, not least because of her own concealment tactics. For example, the information about her date of birth in literary histories and encyclopedias from 1914 to 1930. The self-chosen pseudonym "Armonía Somers" should also help to keep her identity as the author of an erotic novel ( La mujer desnuda , 1950) secret from the public in Montevideo for whom the small ribbon represented a tangible scandal and who therefore attributed it to a male author or a literary avant-garde group . In reality, Armonía Etchepare led a rather inconspicuous bourgeois existence.

biography

Born in the Uruguayan province as the eldest daughter of the anarchist businessman, Pedro Etchepare, and the deeply Catholic mother María Judith Locino, she was the only girl accepted into the private school of a Spanish teacher. In 1927 Armonía finished her primary school education and began to study at the teacher training college in Montevideo, at that time one of the few opportunities for women to complete a postgraduate course. In 1933 she received her diploma, which began her first career as a teacher and educational scientist. A year later she began teaching, which took her to various schools from all social backgrounds . Not least because of these experiences, the author later dealt with problems such as juvenile delinquency in her 'official' identity in her specialist publications . Because alongside the enfant terrible Armonía Somers, there was a long time parallel to the civil existence of Armonía Etchepare, who worked as a recognized teacher and scientist. In 1950, the year La mujer desnuda was published , she was sent as a delegate of the Biblioteca y Museo Pedagógico del Uruguay to the Inter-American Seminar on Primary Education for the Organization of the American States OAS and UNESCO , and a few years later was appointed deputy director of the museum.

In 1971, at the age of 57, she retired and since then has only devoted herself to her writing. It is still not known whether the long pauses that have passed between the publications of her literary works are due to this double burden or other emotional factors. After her stormy debut , Somers soon caused the next scandal, with the equally offensive cover story of her short story El derrumbamiento (1953; The Collapse), in which she symbolically collapsed the old order of bigotry , puritanism and racism . When she brought the manuscript to the printer, she met its director Rodolfo Henestrosa, whom she married two years later. Despite the general outrage caused by the story of a statue of the Virgin Mary being released from her frozen virginity by a black petty criminal, the band received an important literary prize that same year. Most critics, however, at the time of committed social realism did not find access to this hermetic literature, which tended to be fantastic , and took up alleged formal weaknesses (which today could perhaps be read as symptoms of a non- hierarchical , floating female spelling ).

The 1960s became a decade of travel for Armonía Somers in official missions (France, England, Germany, Spain). In 1965, the year her second novel De miedo en miedo (From Fear in Fear) was published, Somers moved into a holiday home on the beach near Montevideo, which later became the legendary Somersville; The rest of the time she spent in seclusion in the also mythical apartment on the 16th floor of a high-rise building in Montevideo. She came out of this voluntary hermitage only a few times on the occasion of public appearances. In 1969 she published another short novel, Un retrato para Dickens (A Portrait for Dickens), for which she received the Premio Intendencia Municipal de Montevideo literary prize. But at the end of the year she fell ill with a puzzling, life-threatening condition, the chylothorax , an accumulation of lymph fluid in the chest cavity; the slowly convalescent was physically and mentally exhausted and could not resume her literary work until she processed this traumatic experience in her monumental novel Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora (1986; Only elephants find mandrake).

In the 1970s, the international reception of the work of Armonía Somers began, which was now often placed in line with the works of the Comte de Lautréamont , who also lived in Uruguay. Translations into English, French and German took place, and in 1978 she published a volume of short stories under the title Muerte por alacrán (Death by Scorpio), in which she combined previously published short stories with new ones; Established literary critics have now expressed their enthusiasm for this collection . In 1982, shortly before his death, her husband Rodolfo Henestrosa made a 'farewell present' in the form of a small booklet, Tríptico Darwiniano (Darwinian Triptych), of which he had 300 copies printed for Christmas; two days before his death he gave it to her. A touching encounter with a young man who was crying for his mother in a cemetery triggered the writing of Viaje al corazón del día (Journey into the Heart of the Day), a historical-romantic love story that occurred during the Franco-Prussian War , in 1984 played from 1870. In 1986 she received a major honor with lectures by renowned domestic and foreign researchers in the National Library of Montevideo - one of her last appearances in public. In 1988 the anthology La rebelión de la flor (Revolt of the Flower), compiled by the author, was published ; In it Somers also told a lot about the real backgrounds of various stories. In March 1994 she died in Montevideo at the age of almost eighty. The small volume El Hacedor de girasoles (Creator of the Sunflowers), a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges , Hieronymus Bosch , Virginia Woolf and Vincent van Gogh, is now actually a posthumous legacy .

plant

The macabre atmosphere of her violent and erotic texts as well as their fragmentary structure and high degree of intertextuality make Somers' work difficult to read that cannot be classified into any of the current trends; consequently, she is often referred to as the “ steppe wolf ” in Uruguayan literature . Her spelling is subversive , innovative , but also contains archetypal elements - allegorical elements such as allusions to the Bible and dreamlike elements.

Novels

• La mujer desnuda . Montevideo 1950
• De miedo en miedo . Montevideo 1965
• Un retrato para Dickens . Montevideo 1969
• Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora . Buenos Aires 1986

Stories; Novellas and short stories

• El derrumbamiento . Montevideo 1953
• La calle del viento Norte y otros cuentos . Montevideo 1963
• Todos los cuentos , 1953-1967. Montevideo 1967 (2 vols.)
• Muerte por alacrán . Buenos Aires 1978
• Tríptico darwiniano . Montevideo 1982
• Viaje al corazón del día . Montevideo 1986
• The rebelion de la flor . Montevideo 1988
• El hacedor de girasoles . Montevideo 1994.

German translations

• The funeral , trans. v. José A. Friedl Zapata, in: Uruguay in short stories by the best contemporary authors . Stuttgart: Horst Erdmann Verlag, 1971.
• Waiting for Polidoro , trans. v. René Strien, in: Strausfeld, Michi (ed.), The red moon. Fantastic stories from the Río de la Plata . Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1989, pp. 251-256 (= Fantastic Library, 213).

Secondary literature

Books

• Cosse, Romulo. (Ed.): Armonía Somers, papeles críticos . Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 1990
• Pfeiffer, Erna: Territory of women: body experience as a cognitive process in texts by contemporary Latin American authors . Frankfurt a. M .: Vervuert, 1998. ISBN 3-89354-098-9
• Rodríguez-Villamil, Ana María: Elementos fantásticos en la narrativa de Armonía Somers , Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental 1990 (= Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 142).

Article (chronological)

• Rama, Ángel: La insólita literatura de Somers: La fascinación del horror . In: Marcha 1118 (1963)
• Fressia, A./García Rey, José Manuel: Maldición y Exorcismo. Veintiuna preguntas a Armonía Somers . In: Sintaxis 2 (1976), pp. 21-28
• Picon Garfield, Evelyn: "Yo soplo desde el páramo". La muerte en los cuentos de Armonia Somers . In: Texto Crítico 3, 6 (1977), pp. 113-125
• García Rey, José Manuel: Armonia Somers: sondeo intuitivo y visceral del mundo . In: Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 415 (1985), pp. 101-104
• Picón Garfield, Evelyn: Armonía Somers . In: dies .: Women's Voices from Latin America. Interviews with Six Contemporary Authors . Detroit 1985, pp. 29-51
• Campodónico, Miguel Ángel: Homenaje a Armonía Somers . In: Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional (Montevideo) 24 (1986), pp. 45-61
• Araújo, Helena (1989), Armonía Somers. El derrumbamiento . In: this., La Scherezada Criolla. Ensayos sobre Escritura Femenina Latinoamericana . Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, pp. 75–81
• Varderi, Alejandro (1991), Armonía Somers: De la mujer y del amor, lo grotesco . In: Monographic Review / Revista Monografica (Odessa, TX), No. 7, pp. 227-35
• Agosín, Marjorie (1992), La mujer desnuda o el viaje decapitado: Un texto de Armonía Somers . In: Revista Interamericana de Bibliografía (Washington), v. 42, no. 4, pp. 585-589
• Biron, RE: Armonia Somers 'El despojo': Masculine Subjectivity and Fantasies of Domination . In: Latin American Literary Review 21, 42 (1993), pp. 7-20
• Zanetti, Susana: La dorada garra de la lectura en 'Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora' de Armonía Somers . In: Latin American Studies: Culturas del Río de la Plata (1973–1995) . Frankfurt am Main, 1995, Vol. 36, pp. 453-464. Pérez de Medina, Elena: Sobre Armonía Somers . In: Noé Jitrik (ed.): Atípicos en la literatura latinoamericana Buenos Aires, Oficina de Publicaciones, Ciclo Básico Común, 1997, pp. 27–35
• Zanetti, Susana: Literatura y enfermedad en 'Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora' de Armonía Somers . In: Noé Jitrik (ed.): Atípicos en la literatura latinoamericana . Buenos Aires, Oficina de Publicaciones, Ciclo Básico Común, 1997 pp. 47-56
• Olivera-Williams, María Rosa: Entre el y ella: JC Onetti y Armonía Somers desde sus cuentos . In: Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana . Lima 1997, Año 23, No. 46, pp. 211-224
• Alejandra M. Mailhe: El cuerpo como espacio de subversión fantástica en 'Solo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora' de Armonía Somers . In: Mora: revista del Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género . Buenos Aires, 2000, No. 6, pp. 120-126
• Montoro Martínez, Noelia: La mujer desnuda: metamorfosis por decapitación . In: Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 34 (2005), pp. 217-234.

Web links

• Article by Montoro Martínez (Spanish, PDF file; 143 kB)
• Some texts by Armonía Somers (Spanish)