Juan Rulfo

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Juan Rulfo

Juan Rulfo (born May 16, 1917 in Apulco , Sayula District , Jalisco State , † January 7, 1986 in Mexico City ) was a Mexican writer .

Life

Juan Rulfo was born on May 16, 1917 in Apulco, Sayula district. A little later the family moved to San Gabriel, where he spent his childhood. The murder of his father in 1923 and the Mexican civil war, the Guerra Cristera (1926–1929), were decisive events for the boy. The family became impoverished. In 1927 his mother died. Rulfo lived with his grandmother for a short time, then went to the orphanage and became a student at the College of Guadalajara , where he graduated from high school ( bachillerato ) in 1932 . At the end of 1935 he moved to Mexico City . His plan to study literature failed. In 1936 he took a position as a civil servant.

A first literary work appeared in 1940, the fragment of a novel, which he later destroyed. His first short story, La vida no es muy seria en sus cosas , appeared in 1942 , and he began working for the magazine América . In 1946 he returned to Mexico City after six years in Guadalajara and a year later he married Clara Aparicio, with whom he had three children. Until 1954 he worked at Goodrich in the automotive sector as a publicist and salesman.

In 1953 he published his collection of short stories, El Llano en llamas , which earned him a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1955 the short novel Pedro Páramo was published . In 1956 the family moved to Veracruz, where Rulfo worked on an irrigation project. In 1957 he returned to Mexico City and began writing screenplays. In 1959 he worked for the broadcaster Televicentro . In 1960 the film El despojo appeared , for which he had written the script. In 1961 he became an advisor to the Centro de Escritores Mexicanos . In 1962 he returned to Mexico City and worked there at the Instituto Indigenista until he retired . In 1965 another film was released, La fórmula secreta , for which Rulfo again wrote the script. On the side, he was an excellent photographer capturing the social reality and landscapes of Mexico.

In 1982 Rulfo was a guest at the West Berlin festival Horizonte Festival of World Cultures ; Günter Grass read from his work at the time. He died on January 7, 1986 in Mexico City.

Honors

meaning

Rulfo worked full-time as a government official and had no desire to run the writing professionally. His literary work includes little more than the collection of short stories El Llano en llamas (1953, English: The Llano in Flames ) and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955). In these two works he condenses the wretched, harsh and cruel world in the Mexican countryside by means of a concise language reduced to what is literarily necessary.

These two small volumes were enough to make him one of the most important protagonists of contemporary Latin American literature and to advance with Juan José Arreola to one of the most important writers in Mexico. Many Latin American writers who participated in the literary boom in the second half of the 20th century were influenced by these works. The Spaniard Alberto Olmos explicitly names Rulfo his literary role model; the voices of the two protagonists in El estatus are reminiscent of the voices of the dead in Rulfos Pedro Páramo.

Klaus-Dieter Ertler characterized Rulfo's work as follows: "In a nutshell, one could claim that it was the fictionalized Mexicanity that gave Rulfo's narrative texts their high degree of universality, despite their regional roots."

Works

literature

in order of appearance

  • Carlos Blanco Aguinaga: Reality and narrative style in Juan Rulfo. In: Michi Strausfeld (Ed.): Materials on Latin American literature . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-518-06841-5 , pp. 113-137 (2nd edition 1989 under the title Latin American Literature , there pp. 143-166).
  • Reinhold Wolff : Juan Rulfo. In: Wolfgang Eitel (Hrsg.): Latin American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 462). Kröner, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-520-46201-X , pp. 361-383.
  • Hans-Joachim Müller: Machismo as the basis of reception for Juan Rulfo's “Pedro Páramo”. In: José Manuel López de Abiada, Titus Heydenreich (Ed.): Iberoamérica - Homenaje a Gustav Siebenmann . Volume 2, Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-7705-2154-4 , pp. 611-630.
  • Fabio Jurado Valencia: El lugar de Dios en la Narrativa de Rulfo. In: Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Ed.): ¿Agoniza dios? La problemática de dios en la novela latinoamericana (= Documentos CELAM. Volume 98). CELAM, Bogotá 1988, ISBN 958-625-095-4 , pp. 179-188.
  • Silvia Lorente-Murphy: Juan Rulfo. Realidad y mito de la Revolución Mexicana . Editorial Pliegos, Madrid 1988, ISBN 84-86214-35-1 .
  • Ursula Link-Heer: Juan Rulfo: "Pedro Páramo". In: Volker Roloff, Harald Wentzlaff-Eggebert : The Hispanoamerican novel . Volume 1: From the beginning to Carpentier . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1992, ISBN 3-534-11163-X , pp. 266-278.
  • Vittoria Borsò : Mexico beyond loneliness: an attempt at an intercultural analysis. Critical review of the discourses of magical realism . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-89354-855-6 .
  • Harry L. Rosser: La visión fatalista de Juan Rulfo. In: Enrique Pupo-Walker (Ed.): El cuento hispanoamericano . Editorial Castalia, Madrid 1995, pp. 325-346.
  • Reina Roffé: Juan Rulfo. Las mañas del zorro ( Vidas de escritores series ). Espasa Calpe, Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) 2003, ISBN 84-670-1047-9 .
  • Nuria Amat: Juan Rulfo . Omega, Barcelona 2003, ISBN 84-282-1247-3 .
  • Maximino Cacheiro Varela: La Poesía en Pedro Páramo . Huerga y Fierro Editores, Madrid 2004, ISBN 84-8374-489-9 .
  • Ángel Arias: Entre la cruz y la sospecha. Los Cristeros de Revueltas, Yáñez y Rulfo . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-86527-130-8 .
  • Andrew Dempsey: Juan Rulfo Fotógrafo . Consejo Nacional para la cultura y las artes, Mexico City 2005, ISBN 970-35-0936-3 .
  • Vittoria Borsò: Rulfo intermedial: passages entre textos, fotografía y cine. In: Uta Felten, Isabel Maurer Queipo, Alejandra Torres (eds.): Intermediality in Hispanoamerica: Breaks and spaces (= Siegen research on Romance literature and media studies. Volume 19). Stauffenburg Verlag Brigitte Narr, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86057-539-0 , pp. 203-220.
  • Norman Valencia: Retóricas del poder y nombres del padre en la literatura latinoamericana. Paternalismo, política y forma literaria en Graciliano Ramos, Juan Rulfo, João Guimarães Rosa y José Lezama Lima . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3-95487-516-0 ; therein the chapter “No se te olvide el don”: Pedro Paramo, tótem y tabú comalense .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo . Edición de José Carlos González Boixo, Ediciones Cátedra, Madrid 2013, ISBN 978-84-376-0418-3 , pp. 16-17.
  2. ↑ Expertise on Olmos by Sonja Finck . In 2010, Olmos is one of the "Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists" by the renowned British literary magazine Granta
  3. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Ertler: Small history of the Latin American novel: currents - authors - works . Narr, Tübingen 2002, p. 185.
personal data
SURNAME Rulfo, Juan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mexican writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Apulco , Sayula , Jalisco , Mexico
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 1986
Place of death Mexico city