Leopoldo Lugones

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Leopoldo Lugones in 1922

Leopoldo Lugones (born June 13, 1874 in Villa de María del Río Seco , Departamento Río Seco , Córdoba , Argentina ; † February 18, 1938 in Tigre , Province of Buenos Aires , Argentina) was an Argentine poet and essayist .

Life

Leopoldo Lugones was born as the first son of Santiago Lugones and Custodia Argüello on June 13, 1874 in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. His mother initially taught him herself and was responsible for a very strict Catholic upbringing. In his childhood, the family moved to Santiago del Estero , capital of the province of the same name, and soon after moved to the small town of Villa Ojo de Agua in the south of the province , capital of the Ojo de Agua department . His parents later sent him to the Colegio Nacional high school in Cordoba , where he lived with his maternal grandmother. His family moved there in 1892, and it was during this time that Lugones began to gain his first journalistic and literary experience.

In 1896 he moved to Buenos Aires , where he married Juana González. In 1906 and 1911 he made trips to Europe , which at the time was seen as an essential educational requirement of the Argentine elite . In 1897 his only son, Polo Lugones, was born, who would later become police chief under the dictatorship of José Félix Uriburu and who would achieve sad fame for introducing the so-called “ picana ” as an electrical torture method . Leopoldo Lugones himself, however, provoked constant polemics in Buenos Aires, not so much because of his literary work, but rather because of his constant ideological about- turns, which were to lead him from socialism to liberalism and conservatism to fascism .

Frustrated by the political conditions of the 1930s in Argentina, he committed on 18 February 1938 in Tigre , Buenos Aires Province, in a hotel with the name "El Tropezón" suicide by a mixture of hydrogen cyanide took and whiskey.

Literary and political activities

Lugones (third from left, standing) along with other Argentinian intellectuals. The first from the left is the poet Horacio Quiroga , and in the middle, seated, is Alberto Gerchunoff. (1928)

Lugones' literary and political career began in Córdoba, where he worked as a journalist in El Pensamiento Libre , a magazine considered atheist and anarchist ; he also participated in the founding of the city's first socialist center. During this period he published poetry under the pseudonym Gil Paz.

Soon afterwards he joined a group of socialist intellectuals in Buenos Aires, in which, among others, José Ingenieros, Alberto Gerchunoff, Manuel Ugarte and Roberto Payró were active; he wrote sporadically for various media, including the socialist newspaper La Vanguardia and Tribuna . During this time he met Rubén Darío , who was to exert a great influence on his literary work and who paved his entry into the daily newspaper La Nación .

In 1897 Lugones published his first book, Las montañas del oro (The Golden Mountains), whose style was still influenced by French Romanticism . In 1903 he was expelled from the Socialist Party because he had supported the presidential candidacy of the conservative Manuel Quintana. In 1905 he published Crepúsculo del jardín (Twilight of the Garden), a work that was close to literary modernismo and French symbolism ; this tendency was to intensify in his work Lunario sentimental , which came out in 1909.

He experimented with scary stories and fantastic narratives in his work Las fuerzas extrañas (Strange Forces), published in 1909; Together with the short story Cuentos fatales (Fatal Stories, 1926), Lugones established the tradition of the Argentine short story , which was to become so important for the entire 20th century , and is considered to be one of the continent's first science fiction authors.

After his return from Europe, Leopoldo Lugones published his essay Historia de Sarmiento (The History of Sarmiento , 1911). In 1913 he held a series of lectures entitled “El Payador” at the Teatro Odeón , the main theme of which was the gaucho epic “ Martín Fierro ” and the glorification of the gaucho as a paradigm of Argentine nationality .

In 1920 Lugones turned increasingly to nationalist ideas, especially with the publication of Mi beligerancia , in which he set out his political credo . The following year he published El tamaño del espacio (The Size of Space) and in 1922 Las horas doradas , with which he returned to the symbolist direction.

In 1926 he received the Argentine State Prize for Literature (Premio Nacional de Literatura de Argentina) and in 1928 he became chairman of the Argentine Writers' Union (Sociedad Argentina de Escritores). At that time he had already become an ardent advocate of fascist ideas. Lugones became one of the strongest supporters and propagandists of the military coup instigated by Uriburu on September 6, 1930 , with which the previously ruling caudillo of the Unión Cívica Radical Hipólito Yrigoyen was deposed. This close involvement in the political life of his country earned him bitter criticism from many intellectuals.

Works

Poetry

  • Las montañas del oro , 1897
  • Los crepúsculos del jardín , 1905
  • Lunario sentimental , 1909
  • Odas seculares , 1910
  • El libro fell , 1912
  • El libro de los paisajes , 1917
  • Las horas doradas , 1922
  • Poemas solariegos , 1927
  • Romances del Río Seco , 1938
  • Cancionero de Aglaura , posthumously

stories

  • La guerra gaucha , 1905
  • Las fuerzas extrañas , 1906
  • Cuentos fatales , 1926

Publications in German

literature

  • Miguel Dalmaroni: Una república de las letras. Lugones, Rojas, Payró. Escritores argentinos y Estado . Beatriz Viterbo, Rosario 2006, ISBN 950-845-172-6 .
  • María Pia López: Lugones. Entre la aventura y la cruzada . Ediciones Colihue, Buenos Aires 2004, ISBN 950-581-236-1 .
  • Allan Metz: Leopoldo Lugones y los judíos: las contradicciones del nacionalismo argentino . Editorial Milá, Buenos Aires 1992, ISBN 950-9829-35-8 .
  • Jorge Monteleone: Lugones: el canto natal del héroe . In: Graciela Montaldo (ed.): Yrigoyen, entre Borges y Arlt (1916-1930) (= David Viñas (ed.): Historia Social de la Literatura Argentina , vol. 7). Editorial Contrapunto, Buenos Aires 1989, pp. 161-180.

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. 366.

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lugones, Leopoldo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine poet and narrator
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Villa de María , Río Seco Department , Cordoba , Argentina
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1938
Place of death Tigre , Buenos Aires Province, Argentina