Jorge Enrique Adoum

Jorge Enrique Adoum (born June 29, 1926 in Ambato , † July 3, 2009 in Quito ) was an Ecuadorian writer , politician , essayist and diplomat . His best-known work is the novel Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda , published in 1976 and filmed in 1996 by Camilo Luzuriaga . His oeuvre, in which he always dealt with social issues, was nominated for the Premio Cervantes .

biography

Jorge Enrique Adoum was born in Ambato in 1926. His father was Jorge Elías Adoum , also known as Mago Jefa , intellectual, natural medicine and esoteric Lebanese origin, as his son worked as a writer. Adoum became interested in literature very early on. After taking lessons from a private tutor instead of in a primary school, he attended the Colegio San Gabriel in Quito. During his youth, Adoum read the works of Alexandre Dumas , Jules Verne and Dostoevsky with great enthusiasm . He graduated from high school, the bachillerato , at the Instituto Nacional Mejía , where a literature teacher named Humberto Salvador had introduced him to the world of Joyce , Kafka , Proust and, above all, to Marxism and psychoanalysis .

Jorge Enrique Adoum studied law and philosophy at the Universidad Central del Ecuador . He later moved to Chile for political reasons (to support activities against the dictatorship of Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Río ), where he continued his studies at the Universidad de Santiago .

In Santiago, Adoum also met Pablo Neruda , whose friend and private secretary he subsequently became. He held this post for two years. On October 16, 1952, Neruda told a journalist that the best poet in Latin America was an Ecuadorian. Here he was referring to Adoum, who was only 25 years old at the time.

In 1948 Adoum returned to Ecuador, where he took on various tasks in the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana . In 1949 he published his first book Ecuador amargo , which was commented on by Pablo Neruda and Carlos Drummond de Andrade . In 1952 he received the Premio Nacional de Poesía de Ecuador for the first two parts of his main work Los cuadernos de la tierra .

Adoum was the cultural editor of a daily newspaper in Quito, worked on various Latin American cultural magazines and was a literature professor at various universities. He published other poetic works, including Notas del hijo pródigo (1953) and Relato del extranjero (1955). This was followed by a volume of critical essays (Poesía del siglo XX) , which includes studies on Paul Valéry , Rainer Maria Rilke and César Vallejo . For his work Dios Trajo la sombra (1960), the third part of Cuadernos de la tierra , he was awarded the Premio de Poesía of the Casa de las Américas in Havana . Then the fourth part El dorado y las ocupaciones nocturnas appeared . In November 1961, Adoum was appointed Director Nacional de Cultura , a post he held until 1963. This year Adoum toured Egypt , India , Japan and Israel as part of a UNESCO cultural project .

The writer then settled in Paris , where he first worked as a lecturer for Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan-language literature for the Gallimard publishing house , then as a journalist for radio and television in France and finally as a translator for the UN and the ILO in Geneva was active. There he published his piece El sol bajo las patas de los caballos in 1969 , initially in French, but it was later translated into six other languages ​​and performed in many European and American countries. Then Adoum returned to Paris, where he was a member of the editorial team of the Correo de la UNESCO until 1987 .

In 1973 he published Informe personal sobre la situación in Madrid , and in 1976 in Mexico the novel Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda . In that year he also won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia , which was the first time that it was awarded to a foreign writer. In 1979 the lyric book No son todos los que están was published in Barcelona . In the same year a new piece was published entitled La subida a los infiernos , which first appeared in German and only later in Spanish.

In 1987 Adoum returned to Ecuador. Two years later he received the Premio Nacional de Cultura Eugenio Espejo , the highest cultural award of the Ecuadorian government, for his complete works . In 1994 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic when he had just published De cerca y de memoria, recuerdos de lecturas, autores y lugares . In 1995 he was a finalist in the competition for the Premio Rómulo Gallegos de Venezuela .

In 1996, the film version of Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda was released in Ecuadorian cinemas.

Other publications by Jorge Enrique Adoum were: Sin ambages - textos y contextos (Essays, 1989), El tiempo y las palabras (1992), El amor desenterrado y otros poemas (1993), Ciudad sin ángel (Roman, Mexico 1995), Los amores fugaces , (Quito 1998), Ecuador: Señas particulares (Quito 1998), Guayasamín, el hombre, la obra, la crítica ( Nuremberg 1998) … ni están todos los que son (Quito 1999).

Jorge Enrique Adoum also translated the lyrics by TS Eliot , Langston Hughes , Jacques Prévert , Giannis Ritsos , Vinícius de Moraes , Nazım Hikmet , Fernando Pessoa , Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney into Spanish.

In June 2005 he was awarded the Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos in Venezuela .

Adoum died in Quito in July 2009 and is buried next to Oswaldo Guayasamín under the “Tree of Life” in his “Chapel for Man”.

Political commitment

On January 26, 2006, Jorge Enrique Adoum signed together with other internationally known writers and other public figures such as Gabriel García Márquez , Mario Benedetti , Ernesto Sabato , Thiago de Mello , Eduardo Galeano , Pablo Armando Fernández , Carlos Monsiváis , Luis Rafael Sánchez , Mayra Montero , Ana Lydia Vega and Pablo Milanés made a call for independence for Puerto Rico . This was presented as part of the Congress of the Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean for the Independence of Puerto Rico (Congreso Latinoamericano y Caribeño por la Independencia de Puerto Rico) , which took place from November 17 to 19, 2006 in Panama . The demand supported a resolution that would guarantee the island nation the right to promote independence from the United States . 22 political parties in Latin America signed the resolution.

Trivia

Rumor has it that the Ecuadorian writer's real last name is Adum (without the 'o'). Perhaps Adoum wanted his name to sound more French, as he lived and worked in France for years.

Works

Poetry

• Ecuador Amargo , Quito, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1949
• Carta para Alejandra , Quito, La Andariega, 1952
• Los Cuadernos de La Tierra: I. Los Orígenes , Quito, CCE, 1952
• Los Cuadernos de La Tierra: II. El Enemigo y la Mañana , Quito, CCE, 1952
• Notas del Hijo Pródigo , Quito, Rumiñahui, 1953
• Relato del Extranjero , Quito, Ediciones del Ateneo Ecuatoriano, 1955
• Los Cuadernos de la Tierra: III. Dios Trajo la Sombra , Quito, 1959
• Los Cuadernos de la Tierra: IV. El Dorado y las Ocupaciones Nocturnas , Quito, CCE, 1961
• Yo me fui con tu nombre por la tierra , Quito, Edición Clandestina, 1964
• Informe Personal Sobre la Situación , Madrid, Aguaribay, 1973
• No Son Todos los que están (Poemas,) , Barcelona, ​​Seix Barral, 1979
• Poesía Viva del Ecuador - Siglo XX , Quito, Grialbo Ecuatoriana, 1990
• El tiempo y las palabras (Poemas), Quito, Libresa, 1992
• El amor desenterrado y otros poemas , Quito, El Conejo, 1993
• Postales del trópico con mujeres , Valencia, Ediciones Episteme SL, 1997
• ... ni están todos los que son , Quito, Eskeletra Editorial, 1999
• … Y en el cielo un huequito para mirar a Quito. La ciudad, la poesía, Quito , Archipiélago, 2004

prose

• Entre Marx y Una Mujer Desnuda , México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1976
• Ciudad sin Ángel , México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1995
• Los Amores Fugaces (Memorias imaginarias) , Quito, Seix Barral-Biblioteca Breve, 1997
• Ecuador: Señas Particulares , 1998

drama

• El sol bajo las patas de los caballos , Havana, Casa de las Américas, 1972 (German: The sun beneath the horse's hooves , Borkeim-Merten, Lamu Verlag, 1979)
• La subida a los infiernos , Quito, CCE, 1981 (German: Die Höllenfahrt , Bornheim-Merten, Lamug Verlag, 1979)

Essays

• Poesía del siglo XX , Quito, CCE, 1957
• La gran literatura ecuatoriana del 30 , Quito, El Conejo, 1984
• Sin ambages (Textos y contextos) , Quito, Planeta-Letraviva, 1989
• Ecuador: señas particulares , Quito, Eskeletra Editorial, 1997
• Guayasamín: el hombre, la obra, la crítica / The face of time - Guayasamín , Nuremberg, DA Verlag Das Andere, 1998
• Mirando a todas partes , Quito, Seix Barral-Planeta Ecuador, 1999
• De cerca y de memoria —lecturas, autores, lugares— , Havana, Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2002

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jorge Enrique Adoum by José Luis Díaz-Granados , Latinoamerica-online.info, June 2005; Page no longer available , search in web archives: Reencuentro de Adoum y Carpentier en La Habana by Juan Hadatty Saltos , Jorgeenriqueadoum.cce.org.ec, no date
2. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: El escritor Jorge Enrique Adoum falleció , El Comercio , July 3, 2009 (Spanish).
3. ↑ The name change probably goes back to Adoum's father, see Jorge Elías Adoum by David Suárez ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

• Literature by and about Jorge Enrique Adoum in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Jorge Enrique Adoum in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Jorge Enrique Adoum by José Luis Díaz-Granados on Latinoamerica-online.info (Spanish)