Elena Garro

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Elena Garro

Elena Garro (born December 11, 1916 , according to other information: 1917 or 1920, in Puebla , Mexico , † August 22, 1998 in Cuernavaca ) was a Mexican writer and playwright .

Life

Elena Garro grew up in Iguala , Mexico, to a Spanish father and a Mexican mother . Although she had not had any formal schooling, but had been raised by private tutors, she began her studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City in 1936 , which was quite unusual for a young woman at the time. Her career as a ballet dancer and choreographer came to an abrupt end in 1937 when she married Octavio Paz , who wanted her to appear before the registry office of legal age (hence the different dates of birth in her documents). She and her husband experienced the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas in Valencia . The couple then spent several years in New York, Paris and Japan. In the 1960s, the divorce from her dominant husband determined the further path of Garros' life, who found that she had also lost her Mexican citizenship with the dissolution of her marriage . From then on, with her daughter Helena Paz, she wandered the legendary mother-child dyad through various countries (USA, France, Spain) and did not return to Mexico until 1991. Again and again she managed to sit between all stools: the conservatives on the 'left' (she was accused, for example, of leading the Mexican student uprising of 1968), the left too conservative, since she confessed to being a monarchist and devout Catholic , she was considered a colorful personality who tried to combine social criticism with a luxurious lifestyle. In the last years of her life she is said to have succumbed to a pathological paranoia , until she finally died, impoverished and lonely in Cuernavaca (Mexico), surrounded only by her numerous cats .

Prizes and awards

plant

Dramas

In the 1950s Garro began their part to absurd , partly to existentialist theater counted one-act plays to attract international attention. Un hogar sólido (first performance 1957; German: Ein Festes Heim , 1966) ironically describes traditional family relationships, since the “permanent home” turns out to be a crypt full of “living dead”. Fairytale-like and magical-mythical elements mix with feminist social criticism, which is only hinted at indirectly and translated into dream-like visions in poetic language. Her three-act act Felipe Ángeles (1979) has one of the failed members of the Mexican Revolution as the title hero shortly before his shooting.

Novels

Elena Garro also became famous for her novels; Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963; German: memories of the future , 1989) is said to have had a strong influence on the young Gabriel García Márquez with its magical elements .

In the later texts (from around 1980), however, the autobiographical element of the paranoia is more and more evident: they all have one (mostly female) main character in common who is threatened and persecuted by uncanny powers, behind which there are also political authorities. Your (anti) heroes are artist types , outsiders, sometimes enigmatic ambivalent women like the title character from Testimonios sobre Mariana (1981; testimonies about Mariana), who is portrayed very differently by three narrators, e. Sometimes inconspicuous existences like Eugenio Yáñez, an inexperienced petty bourgeoisie , who almost 'accidentally' gets caught in a workers' revolution and becomes its martyr ( Y Matarazo no llamó ..., 1991; But Matarazo didn't call). In some works of this late phase, echoes of the detective novel can also be noticed (e.g. in La casa junto al río , 1983; Das Haus am Fluss).

Elena Garro repeatedly experiments with literary form, especially the narrative perspective ; This is how Los recuerdos del porvenir is told from the perspective of a collective self, the small town of Ixtepec. The title already suggests a cyclical understanding of time, which is characteristic of the current of magical realism (García Márquez says he was inspired by the reading and later processed it in Hundred Years of Solitude ). Thematically based on the Cristeros revolution in Mexico in the late 1920s, Garro's novel thrives on the contrast between raw military force and the power of the imagination. The stories of La semana de colores (1964; The Week in Colors), which focus on children or marginalized figures who live in opposition to the rational world of adults, follow the same line .

bibliography

Spanish

drama
  • Un Hogar Sólido y otras piezas . Ilustr. by Juan Soriano. Xalapa: Univ. Veracruzana, 1983.
  • Felipe Ángeles . México 1979.
  • La señora en su balcón . México: Plaza y Valdés, 1994. ISBN 968-856-379-X
  • Sócrates y los gatos . México: Ed. Océano de México, 2003. ISBN 970-651-708-1
novel
  • Los recuerdos del porvenir . México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1963. New edition: 7. reimpr. Mexico: Mortiz, 1987.
  • Testimonios sobre Mariana . México: Grijalbo, 1981.
  • Reencuentro de personajes . México 1982, new edition: México, DF: Grijalbo, 1997.
  • Andamos huyendo Lola . México 1980, new edition: 2nd ed. Col. del Valle: Mortiz [u. a.], 1994. ISBN 968-27-0591-6
  • La casa junto al río . México: Grijalbo, 1983. ISBN 968-419-217-7
  • Y Matarazo no llamó ... México 1991. New edition: 3rd ed. México: Grijalbo, 1993. ISBN 970-05-0040-3
  • Inés . México: Grijalbo, 1995. ISBN 970-05-0616-9
  • Busca mi esquela & Primer amor . 2nd ed. Monterrey: Castillo, 1998. (Colección Más allá; 14) ISBN 968-7415-36-3
  • Un traje rojo para un duelo . Monterrey: Castillo, 1996. ISBN 968-7415-51-7
  • A corazón en un bote de basura . México: Mortiz, 1998. ISBN 968-27-0672-6
  • Mi hermanita Magdalena . Monterrey: Castillo, 1998. ISBN 970-20-0062-9
  • La vida empieza a las tres . Monterrey: Castillo, 1997. ISBN 968-7415-91-6
stories
  • La semana de colores . Xalapa 1964. New edition: México: Grijalbo, 1993. ISBN 968-419-882-5
  • El accidente y otros cuentos inéditos
Autobiographical
report
  • Revolucionarios mexicanos

German

  • A permanent home. Six one-act plays . Vienna: Universal Edition, 1966. Translated from v. Konrad Schrögendorfer
  • Memories of the future . Novel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1989. German by Konrad Schrögendorfer. New edition 2003 by Wagenbach

Secondary literature

  • Callao, Sergio: La doble memoria de la loca . in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana . Lima-Hanover 2001
  • Melgar, Lucía; Gabriela Mora: Elena Garro: lectura múltiple de una personalidad compleja . Puebla: Benemérita Univ. Autónoma de Puebla, 2002. ISBN 968-863-628-2
  • A different reality: Studies on the work of Elena Garro , ed. By Anita K. Stoll. Lewisburg, Pa .: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8387-5166-0
  • Rosas Lopátegui, Patricia: Yo sólo soy memoria: biografía visual de Elena Garro . Mexico: Ed. Castillo, 2000. ISBN 970-20-0088-2
  • Rosas Lopátegui Patricia: "Testimonios sobre Elena Garro". Biografía exclusiva y autorizada de Elena Garro, Monterrey, México, Ediciones Castillo, 2002. ISBN 970-20-0285-0
  • Rosas Lopátegui Patricia: "El asesinato de Elena Garro. Periodismo a través de una perspectiva biográfica", México, Porrúa, 2005. ISBN 970-07-6159-2
  • Winkler, Julie A .: Light into shadow: marginality and alienation in the work of Elena Garro . New York; Vienna: Lang, 2001. (Currents in comparative Romance languages ​​and literatures; 76) ISBN 0-8204-4071-X

Web links