Hilda Hilst

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Hilda Hilst (born April 21, 1930 in Jáu , Brazil ; † February 4, 2004 in Campinas , Brazil) was a Brazilian poet , writer and playwright . She is considered one of the most important voices in contemporary Brazilian literature in the specialist field.

Life

Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst was the only child of the coffee farmer, journalist, poet and essayist Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst and Bedecilda Vaz Cardoso. The paternal family originally came from Alsace-Lorraine and the maternal family from Portugal . The parents separated early after she was born and she moved to Santos with her mother . The father suffered from schizophrenia and spent long stays in institutions for people with mental illnesses until his death. When she was seven, Hilda went to the Colégio Santa Marcelina in São Paulo as a boarding school student . About this time she wrote:

«Quando eu tinha oito anos, minha maior vontade era ser santa. Eu estudava em colégio de freiras, rezava demais, vivia na capela. Sabia de cor a vida das santas. Eu ouvia a história daquela Santa Margarida, que bebia a água dos leprosos, e ficava impressionadíssima. Vomitava todas as vezes que as freiras falavam disso. Elas diziam: 'Não é pra vomitar!' Eu queria demais ser santa. "

“When I was eight years old, my greatest desire was to be a saint. I went to a nuns school, prayed too much, lived in a chapel. I knew the saints by heart. I heard the story of Saint Margaret who drank the water of the lepers and was deeply impressed. I vomited every time the nuns talked about it. They said, 'This is not for throwing up!' I wanted to be a saint. "

- Hilda Hilst : Cadernos de Literatura Brasilieira. P. 30.

At 16 she attended high school at the Instituto Presbiteriano Mackenzie . On her mother's advice, she began studying law at the Universidade de São Paulo in 1948 , which she graduated two years later. After graduation, she worked as a lawyer for a few months, but did not pursue her career as a lawyer. While studying law, she also met her lifelong friend, the writer Lygia Fagundes Telles . In 1950, at the age of twenty, she published her first book, Presságio , which was received with great enthusiasm by the poets Jorge de Lima and Cecília Meireles . In the following years she published works like Balada de Alzira in quick succession . 1951., Balada do Festival. 1955. and Trovas de Muito Amor para um Amado Senhor (1960).

Hilst belonged to the upper class of São Paulo. She aroused great passion in admirers and led a bohemian life until the 1960s. Several trips took her to the USA and Europe. In 1963 she changed her life radically. She turned her back on the fun social life in the big city to devote herself to her literary work. This decision was triggered by reading the book Carta a El Greco by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis . It argues that one has to isolate oneself from the world in order to be able to recognize the true essence of man.

First she retired to her mother's estate and finally settled in the Casa do Sol near Campinas in 1966, which was meticulously built according to her ideas and was designed as a space for artistic inspiration and creativity. Her father died that same year. In 1968 she married the sculptor Dante Casarini, from whom she separated twelve years later. However, both of them stayed on the property of Casa do Sol, along with dozens of dogs, a housekeeper and alternating visits from friends. Hilda Hilst lived in the Casa do Sol until the end of her life.

Hilda Hilst in the Casa do Sol , 1998

In 1967 she combined her previous poems in the volume Poesia (1959/1967) , which at the same time marked a change in her work, from which she turned to new paths. In the following seven years she did not publish any poetry, but devoted herself to fictional storytelling and stage plays. In both, she searched for and found a new, metaphorical, satirical and powerful language. Fluxo-floema , published in 1970, is the result of this new, experimental fictional storytelling. In the same year Hilst began a series of experiments: She recorded radio waves and tried to use them to come into contact with the voices of the deceased. These experiments met with widespread media coverage and dragged on for over ten years. As part of these experiments with the supernatural and the mysterious, Hilst said he had seen UFOs that had flown over the Casa do Sol.

In the following years she also deepened her literary search for the “I” in the face of the other or a cosmic or divine mystery. The literary critic Anatol Rosenfeld wrote about them:

«Há, em Hilda Hilst, uma recusa do outro e, ao mesmo tempo, a vontade de se 'despejar' nele, de nelehabenrar algo de si mesma (...)."

"With Hilda Hilst there is a rejection of the other and at the same time a desire to 'pour out' in him, to find something of himself in him again (...)."

- Anatol Rosenfeld : Foreword Fluxo-floema

In 1982 she ran into financial difficulties and then took part in an artist residency at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas . Between 1992 and 1995 she wrote weekly chronicles for the Correio Popular de Campinas newspaper , which were later published in the book Cascos & Carícias .

Hilda Hilst died on the morning of February 4, 2004 at the age of 73 in Campinas as a result of a fall. After her death, her friend Mora Fuentes founded the Instituto Hilda Hilst (IHH). It has made it its task to spread the work and the memory of Hilda Hilst and to preserve the Casa do Sol with the associated archive, as well as the place as a “safe haven for cultural, innovative and democratic cultural creation”.

effect

Hilda Hilst was an extremely prolific writer who wrote for nearly half a century and published more than forty titles. From the beginning, the mysterious, the real and the imaginary have been the focus of her writing. Your characters are immersed in intensive interrogations about meaning, they try to understand the essence of life. In an interview, she said to the author that her work always essentially tries to depict the difficult relationship between God and people.

Hilda Hilst's literary universe revolves around experience, passion, pain, ecstasy ; Eroticism that oscillates between the sacred and the demonic, the pursuit of purity and transcendence , contradictions and the attraction of the disgusting and vulgar . It addresses intermediate states and shows, as in Com meus olhos de cão , that mathematics and mysticism are close together.

Hilst is in the tradition of a literary avant-garde in Brazil, like next to her u. a. João Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector and is one of the authors who laid the foundation for new literary paths. She created a work that draws its material from the world, which is in chaos, which is accelerated by processes of change and is not able to answer the existential questions about the nature of man, his fragile human condition . As different as their answers may be in their works, they all lead to love as an abysmal feeling through which people - in agony or pure joy - feel reconnected with the world.

In response to the fact that the general public, unlike literary criticism, neither read nor understood it, Hilst gave Amavisse in 1989 . 1989. announced her departure from the fine arts. She decided to change her literary course: no longer to seek the sublime, but to cultivate the obscene . In 1990 she published O caderno rosa de Lory Lamby , the first part of a pornographic trilogy , followed by Contos d'escarnio / Textos grotescos and Cartas de um sedutor . In spite of the deliberate coarseness with which she deconstructs all human sublimity , her great literary talent is present in this trilogy, as in her pornographic poetry in Alcoólicas and Bufólicas .

Fernando Pessoa , Jorge de Lima, Cecília Meireles, João Guimarães Rosa, Friedrich Hölderlin , Rainer Maria Rilke , James Joyce , Simon Beckett , Franz Kafka , Albert Camus , Eugène Ionesco and Nikos Kazantzakis are considered literary influences .

Many of her books were out of print because of a limited edition, in 2001 the Editora Globo acquired the rights and published a revised version of the author's complete works. In 2016 the publishing rights went to Companhia das Letras .

In addition to German, there are translations into Italian, Portuguese (Portugal), French, English (USA, Canada) and Spanish (Argentina).

Composers like Adoniran Barbosa ( Quando te achei ) and Gilberto Mendes ( Trovas ) were inspired by their lyrics.

Awards

During her almost fifty-year creative period, Hilst received the most important literary prizes in Brazil:

  • 1962: Prize of the PEN Club São Paulo for Sete Cantos do Poeta para o Anjo
  • 1969: Prêmio Anchieta for O Verdugo
  • 1977: Award of the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (Prêmio APCA) for Ficções (Best Book of the Year)
  • 1981: Grande Prêmio da Crítica (APCA) for the complete works
  • 1984: Prêmio Jabuti of the Brazilian Book Chamber for Cantares de Perda e Predileção
  • 1985: Prêmio Cassiano Ricardo (Clube de Poesia de São Paulo) for Cantares de Perda e Predileção
  • 1994: Prêmio Jabuti for Rútilo Nada

Works

Poetry

  • Presságio. 1950.
  • Balada de Alzira. 1951.
  • Balada do festival. 1955.
  • Roteiro do silêncio. 1959.
  • Trovas de muito amor para um amado senhor. 1959.
  • Ode fragmentária. 1961.
  • Sete cantos do poeta para o anjo. 1962.
  • Poesia (1959/1967). 1967.
  • Amado Hilst. 1969.
  • Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão. 1974.
  • Poesia (1959/1979). 1980.
  • Da Morte. Odes minimas. 1980.
    • From death. Minimal odes , translated by Curt Meyer-Clason , in Modernismo Brasileiro and the Brazilian poetry of the present. Berlin, 1997.
  • Da Morte. Odes mínimas 1998 (Bilingual edition, French-Portuguese).
  • Cantares de perda e predileção. 1980.
  • Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos. 1984.
  • Sobre a tua grande face. 1986.
  • Amavisse. 1989.
  • Alcoólicas. 1990.
  • Bufólicas. 1992.
  • Do Desejo. 1992.
  • Cantares do Sem Nome e de Partidas. 1995.
  • Do Cupid. 1999.

fiction

  • Fluxo-floema. 1970.
  • Qados. 1973.
  • Ficções. 1977.
  • Do not te moves de ti. 1980.
  • A obscena Senhora D. 1982.
  • Com meus olhos de cão e outras novelas. 1986.
  • O caderno rosa de Lory Lamby. 1990.
  • Contos d'escárnio / Textos grotescos. 1990.
  • Cartas de um sedutor. 1991.
    • Letters of a seducer , translated by Mechthild Blumberg, Stint. Journal of Literature. Bremen, No. 27, pp. 28-30, 2001, ISSN  0933-646X
  • Rútilo nada. 1993.
    • Sparkling nothing , translated by Mechthild Blumberg, Stint. Journal of Literature. Bremen, No. 29, pp. 54-66, 2001.
  • Estar Sendo / Ter Sido. 1997.
  • Cascos & Carícias. 1998.

theatre

  • A possessa. 1967.
  • O rato no muro. 1967.
  • O visitante. 1968.
  • Auto da barca de Camiri. 1968.
  • O novo sistema. 1968.
  • Aves da noite. 1968.
  • O verdugo. 1969.
  • A morte de patriarca. 1969.

literature

  • Nelly Novaes Coelho: Dicionário Crítico de Escritoras Brasileiras. Escrituras, São Paulo 2002, ISBN 85-7531-053-4 , pp. 264-267 (Portuguese).
  • Mechthild Blumberg: Spirituality, passion and obscene provocation: on the dialectic between metaphysics and corporeality in prose and poetry by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-631-50697-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Coelho: Dicionário Crítico de Escritoras Brasileiras. 2002, p. 264.
  2. ↑ a b Arnaldo Nogueira Jr: Hilda Hilst - Biografia. Retrieved March 7, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Hilda Hilst, Fluxo-floema, São Paulo, 1970; angelfire.com
  4. ^ Instituto Hilda Hilst, official website. Retrieved March 6, 2018 (Portuguese).
  5. ^ Adam Sun, Eliane Robert Moraes, Leo Gilson Robeiro et al .: Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira . Ed .: Antonio Fernando De Franceschi. No. 8 . Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo October 1999, p. 6 .
  6. ^ Coelho: Dicionário Crítico de Escritoras Brasileiras . 2002, p. 266 .
personal data
SURNAME Hilst, Hilda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hilst, Hilda de Almeida Prado (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Yes , São Paulo
DATE OF DEATH February 4, 2004
Place of death Campinas , Sao Paulo