Mario Puelma

Mario Puelma (born July 30, 1917 in Santiago de Chile ; † October 1, 2012 in Zurich ) was a Swiss classical philologist of Chilean origin who taught at the University of Friborg (Switzerland) from 1951 . He was particularly concerned with the Roman elegy .

Life

Mario Puelma studied Classical Philology at the University of Munich with Franz Dirlmeier , Rudolf Till , Walter Otto and Ferdinand Sommer . Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War , he emigrated to Switzerland and continued his studies at the University of Zurich . There he was particularly influenced by the philologists Ernst Howald , Eduard Norden and Fritz Wehrli as well as the linguists Manu Leumann and Ernst Risch .

In 1947 Puelma completed his studies with a doctorate . In his dissertation , which he published in an expanded form in 1949, he treated the poet Lucilius . He saw him as the first Roman poet to have implemented the Callimachus ideal of style . This thesis was received critically in the professional world and rejected today by the majority of researchers. Ulrich Knoche, on the other hand, praised the fact that Puelma correctly emphasized the separation of the epigrams from Satura .

After completing his doctorate, Puelma worked for a few years at the University of Tübingen before going to the University of Freiburg in Switzerland as a visiting professor for Classical Philology in 1951 . There he received a teaching position in 1951 , was appointed associate professor in 1953 and full professor in 1960 until he retired in 1988 . In the academic year 1964/1965 he was dean of the philosophical faculty.

In the 1970s, Puelma stood up for equality between German and French at the University of Freiburg. After the coup in Chile in 1973 he wrote a book in which he analyzed Salvador Allende's politics.

In December 2013, his large specialist library was given to the Wuppertal University Library as part of a private donation . His widow Olga Puelma (1927–2019) thus complied with his wish to donate his literature, including private archives, to the study of classical philology . The donation consists of several thousand books.

literature

• A. Guida: [Note bibliografiche]: M. Puelma, Labor et lima. Small writings and supplements . In: Prometheus . Volume 22 (1996), pp. 87-88

Fonts (selection)

• Lucilius and Callimachus. On the history of a genre of Hellenistic-Roman poetry . Frankfurt am Main 1949. Reprinted in New York 1980
• Chile 1970–1973. The destruction of a democracy; Allende's Chilean way to the socialist people's state . Bern 1974. Reprinted 1975
• The Poet and Truth in Greek Poetics from Homer to Aristotle . Friborg (Switzerland) 1989
• Irène Fasel (ed.): Labor et lima. Small writings and supplements . Basel 1995. ISBN 3-7965-0976-2 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Mario Puelma in the catalog of the German National Library
• In memoriam: Prof. em. Mario Puelma. Obituary of the University of Freiburg from October 10, 2012

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of October 8, 2012, p. 10
2. ↑ Swiss private library now in Wuppertal , on stadtnetz-wuppertal.de from December 18, 2013