Nicaragua, so violently tender

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Nicaragua, so violently tender is a book by Julio Cortázar from 1983.

It is the last publication that Cortázar, aware of his imminent death, finished himself at the “end of the world journey of a life that is running out”. The title alludes to the new Nicaragua after its liberation from Somoza's dictatorship : a situation in which the struggle for self-determination is also a struggle against the violence of the past, the “tropical conditions” of Latin America , characterized by “backwardness, obstacles and shackles , the exaggerated manliness mania, the machismo ”.

The texts of the volume are written from the perspective of a solidary companion in this struggle: experience reports from everyday life in the new Nicaragua, critical statements on journalistic articles, two speeches, as well as a poem and a story. In the last years of his life, Cortázar was a frequent visitor to Nicaragua, which for him had become a kind of home and a realization of the Latin American dream for freedom and self-determination.

With his experience reports, Cortázar marks the beginning of a new genre, so to speak . After him, other intellectuals and artists such as B. Dietmar Schönherr and Salman Rushdie visited Nicaragua after the fall of the dictatorship and published their impressions.

Autobiographical

Through the literary forms used by Cortázar - unlike in his stories or novels - the person of the author, the person behind the texts, emerges more strongly, full of humor and characterized by deep humanity and sympathy for those who “spend days, weeks and months The rhythm of daily life, the daily efforts to change things, the joys and sorrows shared by the most diverse strata of the population under the most varied of conditions. "

Factory history

In terms of the history of the work, Cortázar's remarks in a speech about the role of the writer in Latin America are revealing. Cortázar spoke out in favor of the openness of artistic creation to a wide variety of forms of expression. The aim was to transform culture "into an element of collective life that is offered and accepted, exchanged and changed, just as we do with everyday objects, with bread, with bicycles and with shoes." Cortázar together with friends z. B. wrote a comic or a picture story in which the business practices of international corporations and the activities of the CIA in Latin America are criticized. Cortázar also participated, for example, in writing texts for tangos , which were supposed to convey critical content instead of "common folk-dumbing, vulgar and conformist" texts.

Revolution and culture

In connection with the changed concept of culture, Cortázar also made substantial considerations as to why revolutions could succeed or fail. He saw a key in the role that culture played in a liberation and whether there was a mutual “interpenetration of revolution and culture”. Nicaragua - in which culture plays a prominent role, as does Rushdie ("I don't think I have ever seen people who care as much about poetry as the Nicaraguans even in India and Pakistan, where poets enjoy great veneration") and Schönherr ("A conversation is getting underway, literature. I can only follow with difficulty. We are talking about Marcel Proust , Grass , Böll , James Joyce , people talk about it as if they had not occupied themselves with anything else for a lifetime, as if they had not spent years of their lives in the woods ”) - is the positive example for Cortázar in which this succeeds. From Cortázar's point of view, caution towards excessive seriousness and openness to playfulness are essential for the success of liberation: “Mine is a revolution that does not take account of the need for joy, for play, for intellectual, emotional, psychological development Eyes doomed to freeze, to become bureaucratic, to reduce everything to files, to solving problems. The final liberation, the happiness of man is not achieved by moving him near the beehive or the anthill. These insects lead their lives with perfect efficiency, but everything that makes us human, that gives us joie de vivre is missing. "

Quotes

"Only a few months have passed and Nicaragua is already throwing itself into a large-scale literacy campaign that will transform the whole country into a single school for a period that cannot be precisely predicted: Half of the population will practically teach the other to read and write. [ …] Here, illiteracy is not only an obstacle to progress and the development of peoples, but an overwhelmingly negative factor for self-determination and the search for identity, which can often not be clearly identified in the tense Latin American panorama of recent decades . "

“'The sea is like an infinite level of mercury ...', I can well imagine how Rubén Dario saw the vast expanse of the Pacific while writing his poem, as I now do from the terrace of the small house in the holiday village 'El Velero 'do. After all, León, the city of the poet, is not far from here. Otherwise nothing of what surrounds me existed in his time. 'El Velero' - the sailing ship - once one of Somoza's most exclusive clubs, is now a holiday village for the working people. But just like the Cubans, the Nicaraguans seem to think that at this time of year they call winter, only foreigners and madmen can think of bathing in the sea; you imagine it to be full of icebergs or something similar. As always, it's scorching hot for me, the water has a temperature that the Mediterranean would envy in midsummer, and if you don't protect yourself from the midday sun, the crabs will immediately adopt you as one of their own. "

“It is important to break through our intellectual enclave, the restriction to the book, the lecture, the inaugural lecture, on a continent whose cultures are subjugated, alienated, ridiculously minority and elitist, cultures for“ educated people ”. I mean simply that the old concept of culture as an immovable good has to be overcome and the impossible has to be tried in order to turn it into a movable good, an element of collective life that is offered and accepted, exchanged and changed, exactly as we do with consumer goods, with bread, with bicycles and with shoes. "

expenditure

  • Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, tan violentame dulce, Managua 1983.
  • Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 116.
  2. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 79.
  3. ↑ Ugné Karvelis: A Cronopium. The one always and always the other (translated by Elke Wehr), in: Freibeuter , No. 20, Berlin 1984, ISSN  0171-9289 , p. 50.
  4. ↑ Dietmar Schönherr, Nicaragua, mi amor. Diary of a trip and the Posolera project, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1986, ISBN 3-87294-275-1 .
  5. ↑ Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar's Smile. A journey through Nicaragua, Piper Verlag Munich 1987, translated by Melanie Walz, ISBN 3-492-10744-3 .
  6. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 56 f.
  7. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 107.
  8. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 111.
  9. ^ Ralph Doege, Christiane Barnaházi, Jürgen Schütz (editor), Change of Perspective No. 1. Julio Cortázar: Fantomas against the multinational vampires and other stories from and about Latin America, Septime Verlag Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-902711-00-7 .
  10. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 114.
  11. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 120.
  12. ↑ Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar's Smile. A journey through Nicaragua, Piper Verlag Munich 1987, translated by Melanie Walz, ISBN 3-492-10744-3 , p. 33.
  13. ↑ Dietmar Schönherr, Nicaragua, mi amor. Diary of a trip and the Posolera project, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1986, ISBN 3-87294-275-1 , p. 38.
  14. ^ 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 , p. 56.
  15. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p.38 (“The people of Nicaragua take their history into their own hands”)
  16. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p. 47 (“Nicaragua from the inside” - July 1982)
  17. ↑ Julio Cortázar, Nicaragua, so violently tender. With a foreword by Tomás Borge, Peter Hammer Verlag Wuppertal 1985, translated by Gerda Schattenberg-Rincón, ISBN 3-87294-257-3 , p.107 (“The writer and his work in Latin America”)