Carmen Martín Gaite

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Carmen Martín Gaite at the age of 65. Drawing by Alexandra Pociello

Carmen Martín Gaite (born December 8, 1925 in Salamanca , † July 23, 2000 in Madrid ) was a Spanish writer , translator , screenwriter and journalist.

Life

Carmen Martín Gaite was born as the second child of the notary José Martín and María Gaite. In early childhood she was taught by private teachers and her father himself, as he was against denominational schooling, but Salamanca only had Catholic elementary schools at the time. Because of his liberal attitude, his situation during the Spanish Civil War was not without danger. A maternal uncle, Joaquín Gaite, was shot dead as a socialist in August 1936. She received her secondary education at the Instituto Femenino de Enseñanza Media in Salamanca, an all-girls school, where Rafael Lapesa was one of her teachers; the atmosphere of that time was later to be reflected in Martín Gaite's novel Entre visillos .

In 1943 she began studying philology at the Universidad de Salamanca , where she also met the later writer Ignacio Aldecoa . She worked there on the magazine Trabajos y días and was involved in student theater. In 1946, thanks to a scholarship, she spent a time at the University of Coimbra and visited other cities in Portugal such as Porto and Lisbon . In 1948, after completing her Romance studies , she received a second scholarship to the Summer University of Cannes , where she made the decision to move to Madrid and write her dissertation there on Galician- Portuguese poetry of the 13th century. But there she got to know a group of writers: in addition to Ignacio Aldecoa, also Medardo Fraile , Alfonso Sastre , Jesús Fernández Santos , Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Josefina Aldecoa , and after her first attempts at writing she shelved her dissertation topic. Instead, she published her first stories and articles in various magazines ( Clavileño, Alférez, Blanco y Negro, ABC etc.) and worked for the dictionary of the Real Academia Española for a while . In 1949 she fell ill with typhoid fever ; She also wrote a book about it, El libro de la fiebre , which was only published posthumously . Her family moved to Madrid that year and she began working as a teacher at a girls' school, then as a secretary in her father's office.

In October 1953 she married Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who dedicated his first book, Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí , to her. Together they spent some time in Rome , visiting Naples , Florence and Venice . In 1954 she received the Premio Café Gijón for her novella El balneario . Their first son, Miguel, was born in the same year, but died of meningitis a few months later . Their daughter Marta was born in 1956. A year later she was awarded the Premio Nadal , one of the most prestigious Spanish literary prizes. In the following years she devoted herself to researching the love affairs of the 18th century in Spain; This gave rise to one of her most widely read works, Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España (published 1972), and her dissertation, which she wrote under the supervision of Alonso Zamora Vicente and approved at the University of Madrid in 1972 , dealt with this topic.

In 1970 she separated from her husband by mutual agreement. In 1978 she received the Premio Nacional de Literatura for her novel El cuarto de atrás . From 1976 to 1980 she wrote literary reviews for the daily Diario 16 . She also translated works by Gustave Flaubert , Charles Perrault , Virginia Woolf , Emily Brontë and Natalia Ginzburg into Spanish and wrote several screenplays for Spanish television.

In 1979 she took a trip to New York City . In the following years, she often gave lectures and lectures in the USA , for example at Yale University in 1979. In 1984 her daughter died. In the same year she received the Premio Príncipe de Asturias together with the poet José Ángel Valente . Carmen Martín Gaite died on July 23, 2000 in Madrid.

Prizes and awards

  • Premio Café Gijón 1954 for El balneario .
  • Premio Nadal 1957 for Entre visillos .
  • Ford Foundation Scholarship 1965
  • Premio Nacional de Narrativa 1978 for El cuarto de atrás .
  • Premio Anagrama 1987 for Usos amorosos de la postguerra española .
  • Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras Españolas 1988.
  • Premio Castilla y León de las Letras.
  • Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas 1994.

plant

Novels

  • Entre visillos , 1957, Premio Nadal.
  • Ritmo lento , 1963.
  • Retahílas , 1974.
  • Fragmentos de interior , 1976.
  • El cuarto de atrás , 1978.
  • Nubosidad variable , 1992.
  • La Reina de las Nieves , 1994.
  • Lo raro es vivir , 1996.
  • Irse de casa , 1998.
  • Los parentescos , 2001, posthumously.

Short prose

  • El balneario , 1954.
  • Las ataduras , 1960.
  • Cuentos completos , 1978.

Children's literature

  • El castillo de las tres murallas , 1981.
  • El pastel del diablo , 1985.
  • Caperucita en Manhattan , 1990.

theatre

  • A palo seco , 1957.
  • La hermana pequeña , 1959.

Poetry

  • A rachas , 1976.
  • Poemas Barcelona, ​​Plaza y Janés, 2001.

essay

  • El proceso de Macanaz , 1969.
  • Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España , 1972.
  • La búsqueda de interlocutor y otras búsquedas , 1973.
  • El cuento de nunca acabar , 1983.
  • Usos amorosos de la postguerra española , 1987.
  • Desde la ventana , 1987.
  • Agua pasada , 1992.
  • Cuadernos de todo , Barcelona, ​​Areté, 2002.
  • Pido la palabra . Barcelona, ​​Anagrama, 2002.
  • Visión de Nueva York. Madrid, Siruela, 2005.
  • Tirando del Hilo . Madrid, Siruela, 2006.
  • El libro de la fiebre . Madrid, Catedra, 2007.

German translations

  • The Snow Queen's House: Roman . Translated from Spanish by Catalina Rojas Hauser. Berlin: Ullstein, 1999. ISBN 3-548-24223-5
  • Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan: Novel . Translated from the Spanish by Anne Sorg-Schumacher. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1998. ISBN 3-518-39296-4

literature

  • Doris Gruber: Literary Construction and Gender Figuration: The Narrative Work Carmen Martín Gaites and Juan Goytisolos in the Context of Frankism . Series: Edition Tranvía. Frey , 2003 (Gender Studies Romance Studies, 9) ISBN 3-925867-70-8
  • García, Adrián M .: Silence in the Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite . Peter Lang, Bern 2000 (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages ​​and Literatures, 89) ISBN 0-8204-4501-0
  • Paatz, Annette: Seen from the window? Perspectives of female difference in the narrative work of Carmen Martín Gaite . Vervuert, Frankfurt 1994 ISBN 3-89354-854-8
  • Claudia Jacobi: Proust dixit? Receptions de la Recherche dans l'autofiction de Serge Doubrovsky , Carmen Martín Gaite et Walter Siti . V&R , Göttingen 2016

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ABC July 24, 2000
personal data
SURNAME Martín Gaite, Carmen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish writer, translator, screenwriter and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Salamanca
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 2000
Place of death Madrid