Roberto Arlt

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roberto Arlt

Roberto Godofredo Arlt (born April 2, 1900 in Buenos Aires ; † July 26, 1942 there ) was an Argentine journalist, storyteller and playwright.

He belonged to the Grupo Boedo , an association of young writers with a more socialist orientation, which stood in contrast to the European and aesthetically oriented Grupo Florida around Jorge Luis Borges . He was hardly recognized during his lifetime, but is now considered to be the founder of the Argentine city novel and an important stylist. He is often compared to Dostoevsky or Alfred Döblin . Several of his novels were made into films. Arlt died at the age of 42 after a heart attack.

life and work

Arlt grew up in an immigrant family who emigrated to Argentina shortly before he was born. His father Karl Arlt came from Prussia, his mother Ekatherine Lobstraibitzer from Austria-Hungary. The family spoke German in their home atmosphere. Arlt grew up in poor conditions, and his father was violent, which was to be reflected in many of Roberto Arlt's texts. He left school at the age of eight. At the age of sixteen he went to Córdoba in order to keep himself afloat with the various jobs, such as mechanic, salesman or dock worker, before trying his hand at writing and journalism. After completing his military service, he married. His first novel ( El juguete rabioso , The Toy) was published in 1926. After returning to Buenos Aires in 1927, he became a police reporter for Crítica . Soon afterwards he got a column in the daily newspaper El Mundo , which got him to be heard. The best of his nearly 2,000 Aguafuertes (etchings) from this renowned sheet are now counted among the classics of Argentine essay writing. In the 1930s he was at times a correspondent for El Mundo in Rio de Janeiro , Spain and North Africa. Until his untimely death, he turned almost entirely to drama. Throughout his life Arlt dealt with the curse of the struggle for existence, rebellion, crime and the psychology of violence in expressive, for some critics also “vulgar” language. In the last years of his life, he even tried to invent a synthetic women's stocking because of his constant financial shortage - in vain.

Arlt's estate is in the library of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin.

Works

prose

  • El diario de un morfinómano (1920)
  • El juguete rabioso (1926), German The evil toy ; Ffm 2006 (Suhrkamp)
  • Los siete locos (1929), German The Seven Irren , Ffm 1971 (island) and 1977 (Suhrkamp)
    • The seven madmen . Novel. Translation Bruno Keller, revised by Carsten Regling. Afterword by Carsten Piglia. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2018
  • Los lanzallamas (1931), German The Flamethrowers , Ffm 1973 (Insel)
  • El amor brujo (1932)
  • Aguafuertes porteñas (1933), essays
  • El jorobadito (1933)
  • Aguafuertes españolas (1936), essays
  • El criador de gorilas (1941)
  • Nuevas aguafuertes españolas (1960), essays

Dramas

  • El humillado (1930)
  • Prueba de amor (1932)
  • Trescientos millones (1932), German three hundred million
  • Escenas de un grotesco (1934)
  • El fabricante de fantasmas (1936)
  • Saverio el cruel (1936)
  • La isla desierta (1937), engl. The desert island
  • Separación feroz (1938)
  • África (1938)
  • La fiesta del hierro (1940)
  • El desierto entra a la ciudad (1942)
  • La cabeza separada del tronco (1964)
  • El amor brujo (1971)

literature

in order of appearance

  • Oscar Masotta : Sexo y traición en Roberto Arlt . Jorge Álvarez, Buenos Aires 1965.
  • José Morales Saravia, Barbara Schuchard (eds.): Roberto Arlt. Una modernidad argentina (Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana; 84). Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 2001, ISBN 3-89354-584-0 (contributions to a colloquium in Bonn).
  • Marily Martinez de Richter (ed.): Modernity in the metropolises. Roberto Arlt and Alfred Döblin. International Symposium Buenos Aires – Berlin, 2004 . Königshausen & Neumann publishing house, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3198-4 .
  • Christina Komi: Recorridos urbanos. La Buenos Aires de Roberto Arlt y Juan Carlos Onetti (Nexos y diferencias; 26). Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-86527-533-2 .
  • Monika Raič: Other side of the world. Cosmopolitan traces in Gustave Flaubert and Roberto Arlt . Diss., University of Innsbruck 2019.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Roberto Godofredo Arlt is the filthy child of Argentine literature. He was born in 1900, one year after his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges, and for a long time regarded as his literary counterpart: In contrast to Borge's multilingual worldliness, Arlt's work was considered very Argentine, coarse instead of subtle, trivial and narrative instead of meta literary. Arlt was the people, Borges the academics. ”Katharina Döbler on Deutschlandradio Kultur , December 4, 2006, according to this website , accessed December 16, 2010
  2. ↑ Sylvia Saitta: light and shadow of modernization in the literature of Roberto Arlt . In: Marily Martinez de Richter (ed.): Modernism in the metropolises. Roberto Arlt and Alfred Döblin . Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, pp. 63–76.
  3. ↑ Andrea Pagni: Buenos Aires - Berlin 1928/1929: Places of utterance by Roberto Arlt and Alfred Döblin . In: Marily Martinez de Richter (ed.): Modernism in the metropolises. Roberto Arlt and Alfred Döblin . Königshausen & Neumann Verlag, Würzburg 2007, pp. 31–44.
  4. ^ For example, Los siete locos (The Seven Crazy) by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson ; his film was awarded the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1973 .
personal data
SURNAME Arlt, Roberto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arlt, Roberto Godofredo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine storyteller, playwright and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Buenos Aires
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1942
Place of death Buenos Aires