Julio Cortazar

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Julio Cortázar in 1967

Julio Florencio Cortázar (born August 26, 1914 in Brussels , † February 12, 1984 in Paris ) was an Argentine - French writer and intellectual and alongside Jorge Luis Borges one of the most important authors of fantastic literature . Since his texts explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, they are associated with surrealism . According to his own tunnel theory, however, Cortázar only uses homeopathically dosed surrealistic elements in order to break the boundaries of everyday reality.

Life

Julio Cortázar's father was an Argentine and a commercial attaché at the Argentine embassy in Brussels (which was occupied by Germans at the time of his birth). The family moved to Switzerland in 1916 , then to Barcelona, and eventually returned to a suburb of Buenos Aires after the end of World War I when the son was four years old . Cortázar's second wife, Ugnė Karvelis , describes the atmosphere of that time as defining many of Cortázar's stories:

“After returning to Argentina, he grew up in a petty bourgeois suburb of Buenos Aires, surrounded by women. The father has left the family and has not given any more signs of life. The mother has found a small job in an office, the grandmother keeps chickens and rabbits in the garden. None of this is enough to provide Julio and his older sister with the essentials of life. At the end of each month, one wonders whether it is better to pay the pharmacist or the grocer.

The ailing boy takes refuge in the world of fantasy. He devours books, all books. From the family almanacs and Jules Verne - whom he will adore all his life - to Gothic novels, about Edgar Allan Poe , French literature and poetry from around the world. Trying to help his mother, he starts planting spaghetti and is worried because it doesn't grow ... "

Cortázar studied at the Universidad de Buenos Aires , was hired in 1937 as a teacher in a small town in the province of Buenos Aires. In the mid-1940s he became professor of French literature at Cuyo University in Mendoza .

In 1951 Cortázar emigrated to France in opposition to the Juan Perón regime , where he lived until his death. From 1952 he worked as a translator for UNESCO . Among other things, he translated Robinson Crusoe and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe into Spanish , whereby the influence of Poe can also be felt on his original work.

In his later years he changed his political position, became actively involved with left-wing groups in South America and supported the Cuban revolution . In October 1979 he traveled to Nicaragua and supported the Sandinista government. Some of his texts were used in the literacy campaign .

On June 24, 1981, the government of François Mitterrand granted him French citizenship in one of its first decrees .

Cortázar died of leukemia in 1984 , although it was also believed that a blood transfusion prior to HIV AIDS identification may have been the actual cause of death.

Cortázar was married three times: from 1953 to 1967 with the Argentine translator Aurora Bernárdez, from 1967 to 1979 with the Lithuanian writer and translator Ugnė Karvelis (1935-2002), who was a UNESCO representative of Lithuania in the 1990s , and from 1979 to her death with the Canadian Carol Dunlop (1946–1982).

Create

Cortázar is considered to be the author of masterful short stories , especially of the fantastic genre (see for example Bestiario (1951), Axolotl , The Night on the Back , The Occupied House and Final de Juego (1956)). But he also published novels, some of which became very important for Spanish-language literature of the 20th century, such as Rayuela (1963), which was one of the initiators of the Latin American boom, and Libro de Manuel (1973). The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called him a role model and mentor.

He also wrote plays, poems and tangos, but could not achieve comparable success with them.

Cortázar's strengths as an author are his charming and irreverent humor, his impressive technical skills, his poetic and novel use of language and the carefully balanced development of the uncanny in his short stories.

Cortázar himself understood playfulness and humor as a basic motif of his writing:

“The humor and the ludic have been a constant in my texts since I started writing. This undoubtedly seems paradoxical because my stories are never cheerful. They are much more tragic or dramatic. You are closer to night than day. The ludic, however, appears in them in other forms. Even the most dramatic narratives are guided by a musical rhythm, which of course does not mean that they imitate musical rhythms. For me the language has a rhythm, something like a heartbeat. "

In Cortázar's stories, a dynamic develops that does not result from action or a crime story, but rather corresponds to the course of crises that continue to come to a head and draw the reader into this plot.

Cortázar's stories in particular describe situations of modern everyday reality in a very precise and plastic way - but without getting lost in trivialities. On the contrary, Cortázar has been repeatedly accused of an elitist and hermetic writing style. In Cortázar's texts, a “mixture of everyday and literary language emerges, which places us in front of the clockworks of wristwatches, in hotels overcrowded with tourists, and confronts us with what goes through our heads while we are stuck in an eternal traffic jam the Autobahn is up. "

It is a hallmark of Cortázar's texts that the reality of everyday life slides over into the reality of the fantastic, as if everyday conditions were giving in to "a hidden pressure" that "drives them to the wonderful and without letting them collapse completely," floating in a kind of tense, confusing intermediate area in which the real and the fantastic overlap without mixing. ”For Cortázar, the real is not one-dimensional, but“ porous and flexible, ”the fantastic a consequence of the refusal to accept the existing To accept relationships as God-given and unchangeable:

“I was always looking for the extraordinary, for the gaps between two things. When I started to write, it was these spaces that I was talking about. In everything I write there is always the call not to accept things as valid, as inevitable, and that is what gives my literature the character of the fantastic. "

Since 1986 the Spanish publisher Alfaguara has undertaken to publish a complete edition of Cortázar. Previously unpublished works such as El Examen and Divertimento have also been published in the Biblioteca Cortázar .

Works

  • Presencia (collection of poems, under the pseudonym Julio Denis, 1938)
  • Los Reyes (dramatic poem, 1949)
  • Bestiario (German bestiary , stories, 1951)
  • Final de Juego ( end of the game , stories, 1956)
  • Las armas secretas (Eng. The secret weapons , stories, 1959; contains, inter alia, El Perseguidor and Las Babas del Diablo )
  • El perseguidor (Eng. The pursuer , narrative, 1959)
  • Los premios (German the winners , novel, 1960)
  • Historias de cronopios y de famas . Ediciones Minotauro, Buenos Aires 1962. (German stories of cronopias and fames, short stories, 1977)
  • Rayuela (Ger. Rayuela. Heaven and Hell , novel, 1963)
  • Todos los fuegos el fuego ( Eng . The fire of all fires, stories, 1966)
  • La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos ( Eng . Journey around the day in 80 worlds, stories / collage, 1967), reissued 2004 ISBN 3-518-41590-5
  • 62 / modelo para armar (German 62 / model kit, novel, 1968)
  • Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (with photos by Silvia D'Amico and Sara Facio, 1968)
  • Último round (German last round, collage, 1969)
  • La prosa del Observatorio (Eng. The Observatory, with photos by Julio Cortázar in collaboration with Antonio Gálvez, 1972)
  • Libro de Manuel (German album for Manuel, Roman, 1973)
  • Octaedro (German octahedron, stories, 1974)
  • Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (story using comic excerpts, 1975), (German 2009, Fantomas against the multinational vampires, Septime Verlag)
  • Silvalandia (texts inspired by pictures by Julio Silva, 1975)
  • Estrictamente no profesional. Humanario (with photos by Silvia D'Amico and Sara Facio, 1976)
  • Alguien que anda por ahí y otros relatos (German trade winds, stories, 1977)
  • Territorios (various types of text, 1978)
  • Un tal Lucas (German a certain Lukas , 1979)
  • Queremos tanto a Glenda ( Eng . Everyone loves Glenda , stories, 1980)
  • Deshoras (dt. Inopportune times , stories, 1982)
  • Los autonautas de la cosmopista ( Eng . The autonauts on the Cosmobahn. A timeless journey Paris-Marseille , travel description, together with Carol Dunlop, 1983)
  • Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce (English Nicaragua, so violently tender , 1984)
  • Nada a Pehuajó (Eng. Nothing more after Calingasta )
  • Relato con un fondo de agua (German story with deep water , illustrated story, 2010)

Posthumously

  • La otra orilla (1945, published 1995)
  • Divertimento (novel, 1949, published 1986)
  • El Examen (novel, mid-1950s, published 1986)
  • Diario de Andrés Fava (German Andrés Favas diary, diary of a character from El Examen , mid-1950s, published 1995)
  • Adiós, Robinson y otras piezas breves (Plays, 1984, published 1995)

Anthologies

  • Ceremonias (= Las armas secretas + Final del juego , 1968)
  • Relatos (1970, selection from: Bestiario , Final del juego , Las armas secretas and Todos los fuegos el fuego )
  • Pameos y meopas (1971, poems from 1944–1958)
  • La isla a mediodía y otros relatos (1971, selection from: Bestiario , Final del juego and Todos los fuegos el fuego )
  • La casilla de los Morelli (ed. By Julio Ortega, 1973, selection from: Rayuela , La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos and Ultimo Round )
  • Salvo el crepúsculo (collection of poems, 1984)
  • Cuentos completos 1 (1945–1966) / Cuentos completos 2 (1969–1982) (1996, four volumes)

Film adaptations

  • 1966: Blow Up - directed by Michelangelo Antonioni ; based on the short story Las Babas del Diablo (Eng.
  • 1985: Graffiti - Director: Matthew Patrick
  • 1987: The glass sky - directed by Nina Grosse ; based on the story El otro cielo
  • 1998: Anabel ( Diario para un cuento ) - Director: Jana Bokova
  • 2007 Lucie & Maintenant - directors: Simone Fürbringer, Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel ; according to the travel report Los autonautas de la cosmopista
  • 2009: Mentiras Piadosas - Director: Diego Sabanés; based on the short story La salud de los enfermos

Testimonies

"A prose that makes language bounce, dance and fly."

- Octavio Paz

“Anyone who does not read these stories is lost. Failure to read it is a serious, insidious disease that can have dire consequences over time. Similar to someone who has never tasted a peach. He would slowly become melancholy and paler, maybe his hair would gradually fall out. "

- Pablo Neruda

“You could be friends with this Julio Cortázar, but you could never enter into a closer relationship. The distance, which he knew how to maintain with the help of a system of courtesies and rules that one had to adhere to in order to maintain his friendship, was part of the person's magic: it surrounded him with the aura of a certain mystery, gave his life a secret one Dimension that looked like the source of the unsettling, irrational and savage undercurrent that sometimes shone through even in his most exuberant and cheerful texts. "

- Mario Vargas Llosa

“I had read Bestiarium , his first volume of short stories, in a cheap hotel in Barranquilla, where I slept for one and a half pesos between badly paid ball boys and happy whores, and after the first page I realized that I was dealing with a writer had how I wanted to be one when I grew up. "

- Gabriel García Marquez

Sound carrier

  • The pursuer spoken by Gert Heidenreich. Music: Charlie Mariano & Dieter Ilg. (Gugis Audiobooks & Books - ISBN 3-939461-16-4 )

literature

  • Carlos J. Alonso (Ed.): Julio Cortázar. New readings . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge u. a 1998, ISBN 0-521-45210-4 .
  • Walter Bruno Berg: Grenz -zeichen Cortázar: Life and work of an Argentinian writer of the present (= editions of the Ibero-Americana , series 3, monographs and essays , volume 26). Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-89354-826-2 (Habilitation thesis University of Heidelberg 1988, 424 pages).
  • Wiltrud Imo: Conception and representation of reality in Julio Cortázar's narrative work . Con un resumen in español. Haag + Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-88129-452-X .
  • Peter Standish: Understanding Julio Cortázar (= Understanding modern European and Latin American literature ). University of South Carolina Press, Columbia SC 2001, ISBN 1-57003-390-0 .
  • Mario Vargas Llosa: Preface - Deyá's trumpet (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Julio Cortárzar: The night on the back (= The stories , volume 1 ( Cuentos completos , 1984, translated by Rudolf Wittkopf and Wolfgang Promies)), Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 2916, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-39416-9 .
  • Gabriel García Márquez: The Argentine who managed to make everyone love him. In: "Buccaneers" . Quarterly magazine for culture and politics, No. 20, Wagenbach , Berlin 1984, ISSN  0171-9289 .

Web links

Commons : Julio Cortázar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ugné Karvelis: A Cronopium. The one always and always the other (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Freibeuter , No. 20, Berlin 1984, p. 44, ISSN  0171-9289
  2. ↑ Julio Cortazar: The night on your back . 6th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, p. 3 .
  3. ↑ Jean Montalbetti: Tell us about your doppelganger, Mr. Cortázar! Interview with Julio Cortázar (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Freibeuter , No. 20, Berlin 1984, p. 56, ISSN  0171-9289
  4. ↑ a b Dagmar Ploetz : The uncertain me. Julio Cortázar's short stories "The Persecutor" , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 10, 1979.
  5. ↑ Karsten Garscha, blurb, in: Julio Cortázar: Bestiarium. Stories , translated by Rudolf Wittkopf, Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp) 1979 (1st edition)
  6. ↑ Ugné Karvelis: A Cronopium. The one always and always the other (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Freibeuter , No. 20, Berlin 1984, p. 43, ISSN  0171-9289
  7. ↑ Gloria Susana Esquivel: Instructions for use for Cortázar , January 2014, (translated by Kathrin Dehlan)
  8. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: Foreword - Deyá's trumpet (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Julio Cortázar: The night on the back. Die Erzählungen , Volume 1, translated by Rudolf Wittkopf and Wolfgang Promies, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-39416-9 , p. 10.
  9. ^ Ute stamp: Julio Cortázar - Ruhelos , in: Die Zeit , February 17, 1984.
  10. ^ Jean Montalbetti: Tell us about your doppelganger, Mr. Cortázar !. Interview with Julio Cortázar (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Freibeuter , No. 20, Berlin 1984, p. 53, ISSN  0171-9289
  11. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: Preface - Deyá's trumpet (translated by Elke Wehr). In: Julio Cortárzar: The night on your back. The stories . Volume 1, translated by Rudolf Wittkopf and Wolfgang Promies. Frankfurt am Main 1998
  12. ↑ Gabriel García Márquez: The Argentine who managed that everyone loved him . In: Freibeuter , No. 20, Berlin 1984, ISSN  0171-9289
personal data
SURNAME Cortazar, Julio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cortázar, Julio Florencio (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Brussels
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1984
Place of death Paris