Horacio Quiroga

Horacio Quiroga (born December 31, 1878 in Salto , † February 19, 1937 in Buenos Aires ) was a Uruguayan writer. He was born the son of the Argentine vice consul in the Uruguayan border town of Salto. After the early death of his father, he went to Argentina , where he spent his life. But he retained the Uruguayan citizenship. Quiroga died of his own hands on February 19, 1937 in a hospital in Buenos Aires. He wrote stories, short stories, small novels and sketches.

Life

Horacio Quiroga

Horacio Quiroga was born in the small town of Salto in Uruguay in 1878. His father died in a hunting accident a few months later. Horacio lived alone with his mother for twelve years, then had a loving stepfather, who soon fell seriously ill and was almost completely paralyzed after a stroke. Tired of life, the man with difficulty obtained a hunting rifle, placed it on his feet and pulled the trigger with his toes. He shot himself the moment the sixteen-year-old Horacio entered the room.

Quiroga studied chemistry , later history and photography ; he began to write and in 1894 worked for the magazine Revista del Salto , which he also published from 1898. In 1900 he traveled to Paris for a few months to gain access to the literary world - without luck. Quiroga returned to Uruguay disaffected and financially ruined. In 1901 his first book "The Coral Reefs" appeared, in which he made modern language experiments. Later on March 5, 1902, another stroke of fate struck him. He explained how to use a pistol to a friend who was about to duel and accidentally shot him. Quiroga settled in Buenos Aires. In 1903 he accompanied the poet Leopoldo Lugones to the jungle in Misiones in subtropical northern Argentina as a photographer , who made a deep impression on him. In 1905 an expedition to the Argentine part of the " Gran Chaco " followed, it was a complete failure. Quiroga returned to Buenos Aires a broken man, where he worked as a professor of Spanish language and literature. In his work he refrained more and more from modernist experiments and attached importance to authentic details. Often his texts revolve around death and madness, as in the second volume of short stories El crimen del otro (1904).

In 1910 he married Ana María Cires, 15 years his junior, with whom he moved to the jungle of San Ignacio in Misiones . Here he was appointed Juez de Paz , a kind of registrar. However, he carried out this office very negligently. B. marriage or death notes in a cookie jar. This is also where his two children were born, whom he raised strictly and unconventionally. He tried to get her used to life in the jungle and mountains, for example by leaving her alone there overnight. The marriage was broken. After a violent confrontation, his wife poisoned herself with mercury (II) chloride in December 1915 and died in agony for eight days. Quiroga left the two children with his wife's family (their daughter Eglé and son Darío later committed suicide; in 1988, so did his daughter from his second marriage, María Elena, called Pitóca).

In 1917 Quiroga went back to Buenos Aires and was Uruguayan consul there . In 1918 the "Cuentos de la Selva" ("Tales from the Primeval Forest"), which he dedicated to his children, and other collections of short stories appeared. At 50, Quiroga fell in love again with a much younger woman, his daughter's former classmate. He married her in 1927 and moved with her into the wilderness of San Ignacio, where he tried his luck as a schnapps distiller, farmer and charcoal maker. But again the woman did not last long and left the restless and obsessed man seventeen years older, together with the eight-year-old daughter.

Finally, at the age of 59, Horacio Quiroga committed suicide with calcium cyanide in a derelict hospital in Buenos Aires in 1937 after being told that he had advanced prostate cancer.

plant

Like Quiroga's curriculum vitae, his stories and fables are shaped by the hunt and death. Striking and quite contrary to this, however, is the fantasy, cheerfulness and serenity with which he tells of the hunt, the hunted and the hunters. Quiroga's stories with their mixture of reality and fantasy and their deep narrative passion are as exciting as his life and as colorful as the jungle in which he spent many years of his life. Among his numerous stories there are also such fantastic contents; Especially because of El Hombre Artificial (1910, The Artificial Man ), Quiroga is counted among the forerunners of an independent South American science fiction.

Most important works

• Los arrecifes de coral (poems, 1901)
• El crimen del otro (short stories, 1904)
• Los perseguidos (short stories, 1905)
• Historia de un amor turbio (novel, 1908)
• Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (short stories, 1917)
• Cuentos de la selva (short stories, 1918)
• El salvaje (short stories, 1920)
• Los sacrificados (theater, 1920)
• Anaconda (short stories, 1921)
• El desierto (short stories, 1924)
• La gallina degollada y otros cuentos (short stories, 1925)
• Los desterrados (short stories, 1926)
• Pasado amor (novel, 1929)
• Más allá (short stories, 1935)

German editions

• Emigrants. Human fates from the Argentine jungle, Safari-Verlag, Berlin 1931
• The riot of the snakes. Bertelsmann 1958
• Anaconda. Stories from the wilderness of Misiones, Aufbau Verlag 1971
• Stories of love, madness and death. Suhrkamp 1986, ISBN 3-518-01881-7
• The bald parrot. Stories from South America, Hammer 1989, ISBN 3-87294-388-X
• Jungle stories. Book guild Gutenberg 1994, ISBN 3-7632-4342-9
• The war of the caimans. ( La guerra de los yacares ) Hammer 1995, ISBN 3-87294-625-0
• White cardiac arrest. Stories, Suhrkamp Verlag 1995 (Fantastic Library), ISBN 3-518-38893-2
• The Exiles and Other Tales. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2010. ISBN 978-3-89528-798-5
• The wilderness of life. Stories, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2010. ISBN 978-3-10063-102-2

literature

• Roland Berens: Narrative Aesthetics in Horacio Quiroga. Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2002. ISBN 3-89528-368-1

Web links

• Literature by and about Horacio Quiroga in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Ingrid Kreksch: Who is Who in Latin American Science Fiction - an overview. In: Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): Das Science Fiction Jahr 1999 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-453-14984-X , p. 367.