Juan Carlos Onetti

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Juan Carlos Onetti (born July 1, 1909 in Montevideo , † May 30, 1994 in Madrid ) was a Uruguayan journalist, librarian and writer.

Family of origin

Onetti's parents were Carlos Onetti, an employee of a customs administration, and his wife Honoria Onetti, b. Borges. The paternal grandfather, Pedro O'Nety, came from Gibraltar . He changed his original name to Onetti for political reasons. The mother had spent the first years of her life in the Brazilian Rio Grande do Sul . Juan Carlos Onetti had two siblings, older brother Raúl and older sister Raquel. The father read to his children daily from the works of Dumas , Eça de Queiroz and Flammarion . The family had lived in Montevideo on Calle Dante since 1915, but in 1922 they moved to Villa Colón , which was then outside the capital.

Life

In his new hometown Onetti got to know the novel series Fantômas by the authors Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain through a relative of his father's . Here he left the high school, which was in the capital, as a thirteen-year-old student, and took on a number of undemanding jobs. From March 1928 to February 1929 Onetti - together with friends - published the magazine La Tijera de Colón ("The Scissors of Colón"). He started his activities as a journalist.

In 1930 Juan Carlos Onetti and María Amalia Onetti married - she was his cousin. The couple moved to Buenos Aires , where Onetti first worked in an automobile workshop and then at a company that manufactured silos for agricultural cooperatives. In June 1931 their son Jorge Onetti was born in Buenos Aires. During this time Onetti got to know the works of John Dos Passos and the author Roberto Arlt and he wrote an original version of Der Schacht , which is lost. His first short story appeared in La Prensa newspaper on January 1, 1933 .

After divorcing his first wife, Onetti married her sister María Julia Onetti in 1934. In the 1930s he commuted between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Eventually he managed to find a job as an editorial secretary for the new weekly Marcha , which first appeared on June 23, 1939 in Montevideo. In this position Onetti was also the author of the column La piedra en el charco ("The stone in the puddle") under the pseudonym Periquito el Aguador (" Little Peter, the water carrier "). After political differences with the publisher Carlos Quijano, Onetti quit his work for the weekly newspaper and switched to the Reuters news agency - first in Montevideo and then in Buenos Aires. He stayed in this city for the next fourteen years.

In 1945 Onetti married - for him it was his third marriage - Elisabeth María Pekelhari, a Dutch colleague at Reuters. On July 26, 1951, the daughter Isabel María Onetti was born. In 1945 Onetti also met the violinist Dorothea Muhr (* 1925 in Buenos Aires) on a street in Buenos Aires. After divorcing his third wife in 1954, Juan Carlos Onetti and Dorothea Muhr married in 1955. The marriage lasted almost forty years and ended in 1994 with Onetti's death. The mother of his fourth wife came from England, the father from Austria. In the years before, Onetti had a love affair with the poet Idea Vilariño . Her collection of poems Poemas de amor , published in 1957 and dedicated to Onetti, would - as Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his essay - bear witness to this relationship in an encrypted way.

In 1955, Onetti moved back to Montevideo and started working for the Accíon newspaper . A personally motivated friendship developed with Luis Batlle Berres , then President of Uruguay. In 1957 Onetti was appointed director of the City Libraries - an administrative body in which he worked for eighteen years.

Onetti gave the only lecture of his life in 1972 at the Hispanic Cultural Institute (Instituto de Cultura Hispánicain) in Madrid . At that time he accepted an invitation from the diplomat Juan Ignacio Tena Ybarra.

During the presidency of Juan María Bordaberry , the rule of law in Uruguay fell into a crisis since 1972, which led to the military seizure of power in 1974 . Onetti was arrested on February 10, 1974 because of his jurisprudence for the weekly Marcha in favor of the author Nelson Marra . In his capacity as director of the Instituto de Cultura Hispánicain at the Uruguayan authorities, Ybarra was able to successfully campaign for his release from prison. After three months in detention, Onetti traveled to Madrid with his wife Dorothea Muhr. There the couple moved into an apartment on Avenida de América. In the first two years of his exile, the writer suffered from writer's block . Onetti never returned to Uruguay.

Awards

  • 1962: Premio Nacional de Literatura of Uruguay
  • 1980: Cervantes Prize
  • 1985: Gran Premio Nacional de Literatura of Uruguay
  • 1990: Premio de la Unión Latina de Literatura

Work genesis

Onetti's work comes from journalism, which he practiced for several decades for the purpose of living. He started his work as a writer by exploring his own existence. Onetti published the result in 1939 in his first novel El pozo ( The Shaft ), which appeared in an edition of 500 copies. In the novel, the 40-year-old protagonist Eladio Linacero writes his memories of an act of violence that he inflicted on an eighteen-year-old girl as a teenager. Although not even the small edition has been sold, the almost eighty-page novel marks the break with naturalistic realism and its mannerism in Spanish-language literary history .

Two years later, during the Second World War in 1941, Onetti published the novel Tierra de nadie ( No Man's Land ), in which literary studies observed the influence of the American writer John Dos Passos , especially his work Manhattan Transfer . In the no man's land , which looks at the society of Buenos Aires, Larsen appears for the first time as a gangster and mafioso , who will then play a major role in the corpse collector .

Onetti dedicated the novel Para esta noche ( For this night ), which appeared in Argentina in 1943 shortly after Juan Perón's seizure of power , to the Argentine writer Eduardo Mallea , who was widely read at the time , and who referred to the start of the still unknown Juan Carlos Onetti of the problem area of people's authenticity .

With the publication of the novel La vida breve in 1950 Onetti then made the big leap as a novelist - in the words of Mario Vargas Llosa. In this novel Onetti describes for the first time the imaginary place Santa María, for which Llosa names the fictional Yoknapatawpha County from the works of William Faulkner as a model . Basically, Llosa explains in this context that the modern Latin American novel would not have existed without Faulkner's influence. And at the same time Llosa refers to the influences of James Joyce and Henry James on the work of Faulkner: With Joyce it is his technical mastery and with James the subtle art of storytelling.

After the death of William Faulkner on July 6, 1962, Juan Carlos Onetti wrote in an obituary that appeared in the weekly Marcha in Montevideo on July 13, 1962, a literary praise for the Nobel Prize winner : William Faulkner's wealth and command of the English language come to him no matter what William Shakespeare sought and achieved. And then Onetti writes that Faulkner embodied an artist who wanted to realize his work, and a person who basically did not attach any importance to his work.

In the novel La vida breve , it is the protagonist Juan María Brausen, a forty-year-old employee in an advertising agency, who, as in an act of creation, invents the town of Santa María. In this fictional small town, which hardly differs from a real Uruguayan town, there is a basic requirement that in Santa María love should be something absolute. As an author, Onetti gives the reader the rare opportunity to observe the emergence of a fictional world out of the respective situation.

Quote

"Religious life in the broadest sense is the form that one wants to give one's life."

- Juan Carlos Onetti : Afterword by Anneliese Botond. In: Corpse Collectors. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 275.

Works

  • 1939: El pozo. Novel. Montevideo
    • German edition: The shaft. Translated from Spanish by Jürgen Dormagen. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-518-22007-1 .
  • 1941: Tierra de nadie. Novel.
    • German edition: No man's land. In: Jürgen Dormagen, Gerhard Poppenberg: Collected works. Volume I. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-41703-4 .
  • 1943: Para esta noche. Dedicated to Eduardo Mallea .
    • German edition: For this night. Translated from Spanish by Svenja Becker. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42054-6 .
  • 1943: Un Sueño Realizado.
    • German edition: A dream come true. Stories. Translated from Spanish by Jürgen Dormagen, Wilhelm Muster, Gerhard Poppenberg. Afterword by Heinrich von Berenberg. Wagenbach, Berlin 2001, ISBN 978-3-8031-1201-9 .
  • 1950: La vida breve . Novel. Dedicated to Norah Lange u. Oliverio Girondo . Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires
  • 1954: Los adioses. Novel.
    • German edition: Farewells. Translated from the Spanish by Wilhelm Muster. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 978-3-518-22175-4 .
  • 1959: Para una tumba sin nombre.
    • German edition: For a nameless grave. Novella. Translated from the Spanish by Ulrich Kunzmann. Afterword by Inna Terterjan. Reclam, Leipzig 1982.
  • 1960: La cara de la desgracia.
  • 1961: El astillero.
    • German edition: The shipyard. Translated from Spanish and with an afterword by Curt Meyer-Clason. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 978-3-518-01457-8 .
  • 1962: El infierno tan temido y otros cuentos.
  • 1963: Tan triste como ella.
    • German edition: As sad as you. Stories. Translated from the Spanish by Wilhelm Muster. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 978-3-518-01808-8 .
  • 1964: Juntacadáveres. Dedicated to Susana Soca .
  • 1973: La muerte y la niña.
    • German edition: Death and the Maiden. Translated from Spanish by Jürgen Dormagen. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 978-3-518-22119-8 .
  • 1974: Tiempo de abrazar. Novella.
  • 1979: Dejemos hablar al viento. Dedicated to Juan Ignacio Tena Ybarra. Madrid
    • German edition: Let's let the wind speak. Translated from Spanish by Anneliese Botond. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 978-3-518-03093-6 .
  • 1986: Presencia y otros cuentos.
  • 1987: Cuando entonces. Dedicated to Raquel Maria. Mondadori, Madrid
    • German edition: Magda. Novel. Translated from Spanish by Anneliese Botond. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 978-3-518-40202-3 .
  • 1993: Cuando ya no importe. ( When it's no longer important. )
  • 1998: Welcome Bob. Collected stories.
  • 2007: Collected Works 2. ( The short life. Farewells. For a grave without a name. )

Cinematography

2008 was entitled Nuit de Chien at the Film Festival in Venice the film version of Onetti novel Para esta noche by Werner Schroeter , produced by Paulo Branco , premiered. The German title of the film is Die Nacht .

literature

  • Ramón Chao : Juan Carlos Onetti. Translated from Spanish. Paris 1980
  • Rómulo Casse (Ed.): Juan Carlos Onetti. Papeles críticos. Librería Linardi y Risso, Montevidio 1989
  • David Freudenthal: The worlds of the shipyard. Dissertation University of Heidelberg 2008 ( print version online as PDF file 1 MB. )
  • María Esther Gilio, Carlos María Domínguez : Construcción de la noche: La vida de Juan Carlos Onetti. Cal y Canto, University of Michigan 2009
  • Christina Komi: Recorridos urbanos. La Buenos Aires de Roberto Arlt y Juan Carlos Onetti. Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-86527-533-2 .
  • Mario Vargas Llosa : El viaje a la ficción. El mundo de Juan Carlos Onetti. Alfaguara, Madrid 2008
    • German edition: The world of Juan Carlos Onetti. Essay. Translated from Spanish by Angelica Ammar. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42088-1 .
  • Sonia Mattalía: La figura en el tapiz. Teoria y práctica narrativa en Juan Carlos Onetti. Boydell & Brewer , London 1990
  • Marie-Thérèse Netzlaff-Monteil: Juan Carlos Onetti. 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 .
  • Mechtild Strausfeld (Ed.): Materials on Latin American literature. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-518-06841-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 32f.
  2. ↑ a b Mario Vargas Llosa: The world of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 34-39.
  3. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 46–49 u. P.56.
  4. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 69.
  5. ↑ Juan Ignacio Orué: El infierno tan temido de Onetti. In: Gatopardo.
  6. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 195.
  7. ↑ Dorothea Massmann: The poet's happily divided wife. Juan Carlos Onetti and Dorothea Muhr. SWR from September 14, 2010.
  8. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 46 u. P. 115f.
  9. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 46 u. P. 118f.
  10. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 177.
  11. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 174–178.
  12. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 174–179.
  13. ↑ Afterword by Anneliese Botond. In: Juan Carlos Onetti: Corpse Collectors. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 272
  14. ^ Rainer Traub: The world as a closed institution. In: Der Spiegel No. 27/1989 of July 3, 1989.
  15. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 207f.
  16. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 57f.
  17. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 61–67.
  18. ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 75 u. 217.
  19. ^ Juan Carlos Onetti: Requiem por Faulkner (padre y mastre mágico). In: Marche , Montevideo on July 13, 1962. Quoted from Mario Vargas Llosa: The world of Juan Carlos Onetti. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 71-74 and 217.
  20. ↑ Afterword by Anneliese Botond. In: Corpse Collectors. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp. 273f.
personal data
SURNAME Onetti, Juan Carlos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Uruguayan journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Montevideo
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1994
Place of death Madrid