Gonzalo Rojas

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Gonzalo Rojas 2009

Gonzalo Rojas Pizarro (born December 20, 1916 in Lebu , † April 25, 2011 in Santiago de Chile ) was a Chilean poet and university teacher.

Life

Gonzalo Rojas began to write as a child. At the age of 16 to 17 he got to know the works of James Joyce , Vladimir Mayakovsky , Sergei Jessenin and the poet of the Generación del 27 . As a teenager he already had contact with Vicente Huidobro , Pablo Neruda and Pablo de Rokha . The later President of Chile, Eduardo Frei Montalva , then a journalist, published the first texts by Rojas in 1936: essays, among others on Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and Neruda. In 1937 Rojas began studying law, switched to education in 1938 and in the same year founded one of the then numerous avant-garde groups in Chile , the Madrágora, together with other young intellectuals .

In 1942 he went to Santiago, Chile's capital, where he married his first wife María Mackenzie, who gave birth to their son Rodrigo Tomás. In 1944 he got a job in the Ministry of Culture. A year later he started teaching at the German Gymnasium in Valparaíso . In 1946, his first volume of poetry, La Miseria del Hombre ("The Misery of Man") received the Chilean Writers' Union Prize . In 1952, Rojas was offered the chair of Chilean literature and literary theory at the University of Concepción . He traveled to Europe, met André Breton and Benjamin Péret , and in 1958 organized the “First National Writers' Congress” within the “Summer University” in Concepción, which he initiated in 1955 . Study trips took him again to Paris, where he met his second wife, the literary scholar Hilda Ortiz May.

Literature in South America has less the function of a cultural product than that of an instrument for the continent's mental self-discovery, according to a thesis of the “First Congress of Latin American Writers ”, which was deepened in 1962 during a new congress. Participants in this - according to Carlos Fuentes  - milestone in the history of Latin American literature included Linus Pauling , Mario Benedetti , Augusto Roa Bastos , Ernesto Sabato , Pablo Neruda , Alejo Carpentier and Fuentes himself.

Gonzalo, his second son, was born in 1964. Rojas was committed to Salvador Allende . In 1967 young Chilean poets held a celebration on the occasion of his 50th birthday. In 1968 Julio Cortázar welcomed Gonzalo Rojas as the great innovator and savior of poetry, but enemies in Chile spoke up who denounced him as an “anarchist” or “Trotskyist”. His political commitment became more concrete: In 1970 Allende appointed him cultural attaché in the People's Republic of China . But nothing happened in cultural relations. Rojas applied to be transferred to Cuba, where he began working in 1972. Pinochet's military coup put an end to everything.

Rojas had to go into exile. The GDR took him, Hilda and his second son in 1973 and gave him a professorship at the University of Rostock . But the unorthodox socialist was not trusted. He was not allowed to give lectures, remained isolated and noted his desperation in the poem Domizil am Ostsee. In 1975 Gonzalo Rojas left the GDR and accepted a visiting professorship in Caracas . In 1977 he was part of the jury with Juan Goytisolo and Gabriel García Márquez that awarded Carlos Fuentes the Rómulo Gallego Prize. In 1978 he lectured in Chicago and New York, and in 1979 the Pinochet regime allowed him to re-enter Chile. Of course, he did not get his chair back. He settled in Chillán in the Bío-Bío region and earned his living with visiting professorships in the USA.

In 1988 the Mexican government honored Gonzalo Rojas on the occasion of his 70th birthday, and the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin held a colloquium with and about Gonzalo Rojas. 1990 appeared desocupado lector (reader Idle), 1991 Zumbido (sums), Antología de aire (Poems from air) and Las hermosas. Poesías de amor (The Beautiful. Love Poetry), a selection of erotic poems. In 1992 he received the “Reina Sofía” poetry award from the Spanish queen. A year later a small selection of his poems appeared in German translation by the painter Dieter Masuhr, which largely went unnoticed. In 1998 he was awarded the Octavio Paz Prize for poetry and essay writing. On April 15, he was awarded the highest Argentine literary prize, the Premio José Hernández, and in October of the same year the new Chile paid him homage with a congress at the Universidad de Concepción . On April 23, 2004 he received the Cervantes Prize in the auditorium of the University of Alcalá .

His books have been published in various countries in Latin America and in Spain, later also in translations in the USA, France, Russia, Sweden and Italy, among others.

In 2005, the German-language edition of his anthology Das Haus aus Luft was published in Bremen, translated by Reiner Kornberger.

Works

  • La miseria del hombre (1948)
  • Contra la muerte (1964)
  • Oscuro (1977)
  • Transtierro (1979)
  • Del relámpago (1981)
  • 50 poemas (1982)
  • El alumbrado (1986)
  • Antología personal (1988)
  • Materia de testamento (1988)
  • Antología de aire (1991)
  • Desocupado lector (1990)
  • Las hermosas (1991), Zumbido (1991)
  • Río Turbio (1996)
  • America es la casa y otros poemas (1998)
  • Obra selecta (1999)
  • No haya corrupción (2003)
  • Antologia personal (2004)

Publications in German

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.emol.com/noticias/magazine/detalle/detallenoticias.asp?idnoticia=477856
personal data
SURNAME Rojas, Gonzalo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rojas Pizarro, Gonzalo (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean poet and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Lebu
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 2011
Place of death Santiago de Chile