Eduarda Mansilla

Eduarda Mansilla, 1860 (photo from the private archive of her great-grandson, Manuel Rafael García-Mansilla)

Eduarda Damasia Mansilla Ortiz de Rozas de García ( December 11, 1834 - December 20, 1892 ) was an Argentine writer , journalist and composer.

Life

Preliminary remark

The long controversial date of birth (versions from 1834 to 1838 were circulated in various literary histories and secondary works) could be clarified beyond any doubt by María Rosa Lojo in 2007, as documents were made available to her by the writer's descendants showing the birthday of December 11, 1834 clearly evident.

biography

Born as the second child of Agustina Ortiz de Rozas and Lucio Norberto Mansilla , an Argentine general and governor of the Entre Ríos province, Eduarda Mansilla was the maternal niece of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and therefore a member of an extremely privileged class. Her brother, Lucio Victorio Mansilla (1831–1913), would later become famous not only for his military successes against the last remaining indigenous peoples in southern Argentina, but also for his records of this so-called “Campaña del Desierto” (under the Title Una excursión a los indios ranqueles , 1870).

Even as a child, Eduarda was considered a “polyglot girl” because she had a great interest in foreign languages. Allegedly, she was even used as a translator on state visits by her uncle. She was also musically gifted, could sing in four languages ​​and also composed pieces of music (chamber music, songs, e.g. "Une larme" about a poem by Lamartine or a setting by Victor Hugo ).

On January 31, 1855, she married in the Church of San Miguel Arcángel in Buenos Aires, an event which the Argentine press called the "union of Romeo and Juliet", because her husband, Manuel Rafael García Aguirre, came from a " hostile “family: his father was a die-hard Unitarian and foreign minister under the first Argentine president, Bernardino Rivadavia, and as such a bitter enemy of the dictator Rosas. When Rosas died in 1877, at the suggestion of their parents, the children decided to use the surname García-Mansilla with a hyphen as a sign of national reconciliation between the two warring parties.

Manuel García was a diplomat in the USA , France and Austria , which is why Eduarda also traveled the world a lot as the “diplomatic wife traveling with him”: In 1860 the couple went on a trip to the USA (she put her memories of this in Recuerdos de viaje , published more than 20 years later in Buenos Aires, 1882). In 1863 they came to Paris , where Eduarda Mansilla published Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas in French in 1869 as a serial novel in the magazine L'artiste , which aroused great interest from Victor Hugo (1870 from her brother Lucio as Pablo o el hombre de las pampas translated into Spanish). In it she also shows the dark side of the civil war and approaches the problem of the gaucho from an unusual point of view.

She worked in various newspapers, e.g. B. La Flor del Aire (1864), El Alba 1868, El Plata Ilustrado 1871-73, La Ondina del Plata , La Gaceta Musical 1879-1882 and El Nacional . Her husband was transferred to London and later back to Paris. In the end she no longer accompanied him to London, but left him with her six children and returned to Buenos Aires alone in 1879, where she remained until 1884. From then on, Mansilla devoted herself entirely to literature, which society resented her (one suspected a lover behind it). In 1884 she paid a visit to her family in London and later accompanied her son Daniel on his first diplomatic missions while her husband moved to Vienna with their two youngest sons. When her husband died unexpectedly there in 1887, she took the four youngest children with her and returned to Buenos Aires with them in 1890 for good. There she almost fell into silence again and it became quiet around her; her health also left a lot to be desired (she had a heart condition). From then on she devoted herself intensively to her still unmarried children. She died at the age of 57 of heart disease on December 20, 1892 in Buenos Aires; a great funeral and memorial service was held in the Catedral Metropolitana of Buenos Aires.

plant

Together with Juana Manso de Noronha and Juana Manuela Gorriti , Eduarda Mansilla was one of the first important women writers in the newly formed state of Argentina. In addition to writing novels, essays and dramas, she also wrote newspaper articles and music criticism. She published her first novel El médico de San Luis (1860) in Buenos Aires under the pseudonym "Daniel", for fear of compromising the "good name" of her family (later she would call one of her sons that, who in turn would name his works Mother released). In the same year, the historical novel Lucía Miranda appeared about a legendary figure of the conquest and settlement of the Río de la Plata area by the Spaniards in the 16th century, in which Mansilla pays special attention to the intercultural encounter between whites and indigenous people.

Her life was very eventful, and her literary production could be much greater if a chest of manuscripts had not been lost on one of the many trips, as her son Daniel García-Mansilla relates in his memoir Visto, oído y recordado : Dramas in Prose such as María , El testamento , Los Carpani , Ajenas culpas and others.

Style and literary peculiarities

Sometimes Mansilla falls into a baroque style, full of emotional exuberance, but over time, through the routine of journalism, she comes to an independent expression. She is an establishment woman, a cosmopolitan writer, lived in a sophisticated environment and did not share the social unrest of a Rosa Guerra or Juana Manso de Noronha. Her strength is precise observation (especially in her travel memories, where she gives the best of very independent judgments about other cultures, legal systems and forms of government, but also about the relationships between the sexes, and constantly brings them into relation with her own Argentinian background) . As a well-traveled woman, she can also put old dichotomies into perspective, such as the contradiction between “civilization and barbarism” coined by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento . Last but not least, Eduarda Mansilla is the first children's book author in Argentina who wants to introduce typical “Argentine” elements in her fairy tales based on the genre established by German and French romantics, which was also highly praised by Sarmiento. She wrote in a transitional period between Romanticism and Realism and therefore cannot be properly classified in any of the "generations" established in literary history in Argentina (those of 1837 or those of 1880).

Novels

• El médico de San Luis (1860, first published as a serial in La Tribuna ).
• Lucía Miranda (1860). Modern edition: Ed., Introd. y notas de María Rosa Lojo 1st edition, Madrid: Iberoamericana [u. a.], 2007. - 359 pp. (Textos y estudios coloniales y de la Independencia; 14) ISBN 978-84-8489-284-7
• Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas (1869) (Spanish: Pablo o el hombre de las pampas 1870). Modern edition: 1st ed. [Argentina]: Editorial Confluencia, 1999. 185 pages ISBN 987-9362-00-4 Allegedly also translated into German and English at the time.

drama

• Simila similibus (one-act play, comedy, around 1873)
• La marquesa de Altamira. Drama en 3 actos y un prólogo , Buenos Aires: Imprenta de "la Universidad", 1881. Prosadrama
• Ajenas culpas 1883
• Los Carpani (unpublished, first performance 1883, text is considered lost)

Stories, short stories, novellas

• El Ramito de Romero
• Dos cuerpos en un alma
• Un amor (novela) . Buenos Aires, Impr. De "El Diario", 1885

Memories, travel literature

• Recuerdos 1880 (appeared in sequels in La Gaceta Musical ), in book form Recuerdos de viaje , Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Juan A. Alsina, 1882. Modern edition: Ed. JP Spicer-Escalante. 1st ed. Buenos Aires: Stock Cero, 2006. 126 pp. ISBN 987-1136-57-9

Cuentos by Eduarda Mansilla, cover picture of the first edition from 1880 (from the private archive of her great-grandson, Manuel Rafael García-Mansilla)

Children's literature

• Cuentos (fairy tale, Buenos Aires, Imprenta de la República 1880)

Miscellaneous

• Creaciones 1883 (stories and theater)

Compositions

• Cantares 1882 (for voice and piano, based on poems by Adolfo Miter)
• Octobre (Romance, text by François Coppée)
• Brunette (ballad)
• Yo no sé si te quiero (song)
• Se alquila (bolero)

Special features of the reception

The Argentine writer María Rosa Lojo wrote a novel about her in 1999: Una mujer de fin de siglo .

Although Eduarda Mansilla had forbidden to reprint her works in her will, some modern reprints have recently appeared in Argentina.

translation to German

• Pablo, or, Life in the Pampas . Berlin: Otto Janke, [1870]. Edited by Johanna Moellenhoff. (Otto Janke's Foreign Novel Collection). [Copies in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, at the University of Chicago and at Duke University]

literature

• Congreso de Literatura e Historia en tiempos de Eduarda y Lucio V. Mansilla: realizado en Córdoba entre el 1 and 2 de julio de 2005: Sede Asociación de Magistrados y Funcionarios Judiciales de la Provincia de Córdoba . Córdoba (Argentina): Junta Provincial de Historia de Córdoba, 2005. ISBN 987-98850-9-0
• Arambel-Guiñazú, María Cristina / Martin, Claire Emilie (2001): Las mujeres toman la palabra: Escritura femenina del siglo XIX en Hispanoamérica . Vol. I. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert.
• García-Mansilla, Daniel (1950): Visto, oído y recordado. Apuntes de un Diplomático Argentino . Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, 1950 (fourth son's memories of his mother).
• Lojo, María Rosa (1999): Una mujer de fin de siglo . Buenos Aires: Planeta. New edition: Ed. By Malva Filer. Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2007 ISBN 987-1136-66-8 .
• Mizraje, María Gabriela (1999): Argentinas de Rosas a Perón : [Mariquita Sánchez, Juana Manso, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduarda Mansilla, Emma de la Barra, Alfonsina Storni, Norah Lange, Victoria Ocampo, Beatriz Guido, Alejandra Pizarnik, Griselda Gambaro ]. 1st ed. Buenos Aires: Ed. Biblos. 323 pp. (Biblioteca de las mujeres; 9) ISBN 950-786-223-4
• Navarro Viola, Miguel, Eduarda Mansilla de García, Gaspar Núñez de Arce, AH Simonin, Edmondo De Amicis, Joseph Addison, and Alexandre Dumas. 1879. Apuntes sobre esta edición de El médico de San Luis / estudio / por Rafael Pombo. El médico de San Luis: novela americana, corregida ... by Eduardo M. de García. El haz de leña: drama / de Gaspar Nuñes de Arce. As for ideas from Victor Hugo: fragment / de AH Simonin. El amor á los libros ... / de Edmundo de Amicis. La visión de Mirza: leyenda / por José Addison. Juana de Arc: leyenda de Alejandtro Dumas; apendice opiniones. La biblioteca popular de Buenos Aires, v. 17. Buenos Aires: Libr. Editora de Enrique Navarro Viola.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Eduarda Mansilla: Lucía Miranda , Madrid 2007, ed. by MRLojo, p. 12.
2. ↑ The couple had six children in total: Lucio Victorio (* 1831), Eduarda (* 1834), Agustina Martina (* 1836), who died in childhood, Lucio Norberto (* 1838), who committed suicide at a very young age, Agustina (* 1840), also died early, and Carlos (1841), see foreword by María Rosa Lojo in Mansilla 2007, p. 17.
3. ↑ who changed the spelling of his name from -z- to -s-, cf. Mansilla 2007: 86
4. ↑ Eduarda, Manuel José, Rafael, Daniel, Eduardo and Carlos, the two youngest were still very young - she placed them in the care of their oldest, already married daughter Eduarda ("Eda"), cf. Lojo in Mansilla 2007, p. 16.
5. ↑ See Mizraje, p. 141.
6. ↑ See Mizraje, p. 138.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eduarda Mansilla in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Eduarda Mansilla in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Article by Soledad Vallejos in Página / 12 (in Spanish)
• Website of the García-Mansilla family (in Spanish, with photos, scanned covers of the original editions, bibliography and other information)