Uruguayan literature
The Uruguayan literature is the Spanish-language literature of Uruguay . The La Plata region formed a cultural unit until around 1830/1840. Even after that there was (and still is today) close ties to Argentinian and, of course, Spanish literature . At the end of the 19th century, French influences also made themselves felt. Literature production has always been concentrated on Montevideo . Hardly any authors have become known from the north of the country. Literature in indigenous languages never existed in Uruguay.
The beginnings: Costumbrismo , neoclassic, romantic
The gaucho poetry, created around 1810, is one of the earliest forms of literature in Argentina and Uruguay - originally a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil created in 1828 through English "mediation" . Bartolomé Hidalgo (1788–1822), the creator of the Diálogo de dos gauchos written in the rural dialect : Trejo y Lucero is considered to be its founder . Urban authors in the La Plata region also used the so-called gaucho language and cultivated it in works that can be attributed to Costumbrismo . Under the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, many Argentine writers and opposition figures fled to Montevideo or published their work there.
The neoclassical was represented by the work of Francisco Acuña de Figueroa (1791–1862), the author of the national anthems of Uruguay and Paraguay, the unspectacular, mediocre phase of Romanticism and the like. a. by Adolfo Berro (1819–1841) and Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855–1931). The latter is the author of the historical epic Tabaré (1888) about a half-Spanish Indian prince, which served as a template for operas and for a film ( Tabaré (1917) ), as well as the poem La epopeya de Artigas (1910) about the national hero Artigas .
Lautréamont , the French symbolist and forerunner of surrealism , was born in Uruguay in 1846, which he left in 1859.
Realism and naturalism
The novelist and conservative politician Eduardo Acevedo Díaz (1871–1921), who wrote the first (historical) novels and stories ( El combate de la tapera , Buenos Aires 1892) in Uruguay, represented a social-enlightening realism and - influenced by Homer - created the figure of the local hero. With his works, the transition from "literature in Uruguay" to "Uruguayan literature" took place.
Carlos Reyles began his work in the 1880s and 1890s as a realist or naturalist ( Beba , 1894). In Primitivo (1896) he took up the French fin de siècle literature.
The only representative of naturalism can be Javier de Viana (1868–1926), who lived in exile in Argentina from 1904 to 1918 and described the life of the gaucho , a culture that was declining at the beginning of the 20th century, in great detail. He used the dialect in the dialogues of his novels; his descriptions of nature are characterized by precise, almost scientific terminology.
1900–1930: regionalism , symbolism , modernism , avant-garde
After a phase of civil war, Uruguay's first cultural boom took place after 1904. The plays by Florencio Sánchez (1875–1910), who is considered to be the founding father of theater in the La Plata region, deal with social problems and are still performed today because of their precise observations of regional and social milieus and classes. In 1903 his first piece M'hijo el dotor (My Son, the Doctor) was a great success.
The essay Ariel by the symbolist José Enrique Rodó is considered to be one of the greatest literary works in Uruguay. Written in 1900, it shows the influence of Henri Bergson and deals with the possibility of defending spiritual values in a world of material and technical progress and against the dominance of external influences. These influences mean the United States and its imperial expansion efforts in the Spanish-American War . Figures from Shakespeare's work represent the opposing values. The current established by Rodó is called Arielismo ; it also refers to the thoughts of the Brazilian José Veríssimo .
The modernist poetry was of Julio Herrera y Reissig brought (1875-1910) in 1900 to Uruguay. Delmira Agustini (1886–1914) is considered to be one of the most important Latin American poets of Modernismo , who, like Herrera y Reissig, belongs to the so-called Generación del 900 (Generation 1900). Her themes are eroticism and death.
During the First World War, the country was cut off from European influences. After the war, the Cuento developed in Uruguay, as everywhere in Latin America , the short story that emphasizes the unique and special and is characterized less by a dramatic climax than by atmospheric density. As a result, the Cuento largely supplanted the novel; Because the literature of Uruguay, a thoroughly educated country in which there were hardly any Indians, no oil or other mineral resources, hardly an army and fewer revolutions than elsewhere in Latin America, lacked dramatic conflicts, the presentation of which the form of the novel would have required, as Mario Benedetti noted.
Even if the avant-garde was not as pronounced as in Argentina, futurism found some followers in Uruguay after the First World War. Juan Parra del Riego (1894–1925), who was born in Peru, is one of its most important representatives . As a political author, essayist and poet ( Los himnos , 1927) emerged in the interwar period, the founder of the Socialist Party of Uruguay, the lawyer Emilio Frugoni (1880-1969). Juana de Ibarbourou (1892–1979), also known as Juana de América , was a representative of modernist, melancholy and feminine poetry with a surrealist touch. The Uruguayan poet Jules Supervielle lived mostly in France and published in French.
1930–1945: The pessimistic Generación del centenario
The global economic crisis plunged the middle classes into poverty and the country into deep pessimism, which was also expressed in the further development of the Cuento. As the book market in Uruguay turned out to be very tight, more and more authors were dependent on publishing in Argentina or emigrating there. These include the important narrator Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937), who actually still belonged to the 1900 generation, lived in Paris for a while and initially experimented with language. Later he wrote in the naturalistic style of Edgar Allan Poe influenced fantastic and detailed stories about the wilderness and the animal kingdom on the Río Paraná, which made him the forerunner of a Latin American science fiction poetry. He spent most of his life in Argentina. Quiroga is the first of a series of writers who introduce the fantastic into storytelling; the fantasy author Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964) and Giselda Zani follow him and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges . For these authors, it is not the norm that is interesting, but the excepción , the exception, the improbable.
The pessimism of the authors born between about 1895 and 1910 emerged in the Cuentos and novels of the 1930s and was also evident in the poetry. These authors were called the generation of 1930 or Generación del centenario after the centenary of Uruguayan independence, although they mostly did not even know each other personally and only worked in small groups during the dictatorship of Gabriel Terra from 1931 to 1938. These included Francisco Espínola (1901–1973), who became famous for his story Raza ciega (“Blind Race”, 1926) , the narrator Juan José Morosoli (1899–1957), the playwright and narrator Justino Zavala Muniz (1898–1968) and the lyricist Líber Falco (1906–1955). These authors and also the Christian poets Esther de Cáceres (1903–1971) and Juana de Ibarbourou (1892–1979) represented a regionalismo or criollismo (creolism) that turned back to traditional aesthetic models of the turn of the century; it also found expression in painting and music. A late work in gaucho literature was El gaucho Florido (1932) by Carlos Reyles, which reflected the decline of the gaucho way of life.
City literature after 1945
After 1945 a metropolitan literature emerged in Montevideo: the movemiento montevideoanista . The stories and short novels by Andressen Banchero (1925–1987) deal with everyday life in the modest suburban barrios ( Triste de la calle cortada , 1975). He received various awards for his literary work and was the leading head of the group around the magazine Asir (1948-1959). Even Carlo Martínez Moreno (1917-1986) decided to follow the trend of the critical urban literature. He described the snobbish society of Montevideo. Also Clara Silva (1905-1976) criticized the satiety Montevideo; In her novels she dealt with the religious worries and obsessions of frustrated housewives, but also with the experiences of a juvenile delinquent with the police. She shares her pessimistic worldview with the younger authors of the Generación del 45 , while Alfredo Gravina (1913–1995) was modeled on Maxim Gorkis .
The first book El Pozo ("The Shaft", 1939) by the avant-gardist Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–1994), who immediately became known as a result of this, proved to be groundbreaking for more recent Uruguayan literature . He broke away from the role models of the older generation: For him, it was not the old contrast between Europe and South America that was decisive, but the antagonism of city and country. The fictional city of Santa Maria in Onetti's novel Para esta noche (“For this night”, 1943) can be seen as a symbol of corruption and the decline of Uruguay. The novel was made into a film by Werner Schroeter in 2009 ( This Night ).
Onetti belonged to Carlos Maggi (* 1922), Mario Benedetti , who wrote more than 80 books, Ángel Rama , Domingo Bordoli (1919–1982), the poet Idea Vilariño (2020–2009), Mario Arregui (1917–1985), Emir Rodríguez Monegal , the representative of the poesía esencialista and winner of the Cervantes Prize 1918 Ida Vitale (* 1923), as well as the politician and journalist Manuel Flores Mora (1923–1985) of the influential socially critical but quite heterogeneous intellectual movement Generación del 45 .
The Italian-born journalist and critic, poet and novelist Mario Benedetti (1920–2009), a friend of Onetti, who has received multiple awards, was also an innovator. Less interested in experiment than this one, but more politically, Benedetti wrote numerous novels, short stories, dramas, poetry and essays. He has also worked as a literary critic, editor of the weekly Marcha and director of the Hispanic American Department at the Universidad de la República. In the 1950s an ironic critic of the saturated life, the crippling bureaucracy in Montevideo ( Office Poems 1956 ) and a militant fighter against the military treaty with the United States, he co-founded and leader of the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio in 1971 . His works have been translated into over 20 languages.
Onetti's son Jorge , who was born in Argentina in 1931 and lived for a long time in Montevideo, succeeded in stepping out of his father's shadow with bitter satires in the 1960s.
The polyglot essayist and poet Susana Soca (1906–1959) had lived in France for a long time, where she founded the sophisticated anthological literary magazine Cahiers de La Licorne in 1947 , which offered many authors who fell silent during the war the opportunity to publish. Since 1953 she published the magazine in Uruguay under the name Entregas de La Licorne . The authors included Jorge Luis Borges , Onetti, and Boris Pasternak .
The feminist-realistic narrator and critic Sylvia Lago (* 1932) was a literature professor at the Universidad de la República Montevideo. She has received several awards for her numerous novels and short stories and also edited anthologies, including a. in German Erkundungen (Berlin 1993). Her topics are the lives of women, the everyday lives of young people and the criticism of philistinism in the emerging affluent society of the 1960s.
The still influential work by Mario Levrero (1940–2004), which was partly published in Argentina and Spain, is stylistically isolated . In La ciudad (1970) he describes a Kafkaesque dream world. The poet Marosa die Giorgio Medici (1932-2004) cannot be stylistically assigned to any school.
The dictatorship 1973–1985
During the dictatorship from 1973 to 1985, many authors of the Generación del 45 fell silent , including Sylvia Lago and Idea Vilariño temporarily , or they went into exile. Juan Carlos Onetti - actually an apolitical poet - was arrested in 1974 because of his participation in a jury which awarded a harmless book with a prize that was interpreted as suggestive by the military and only came out of a psychiatric six months after the interventions of international colleagues Clinic free. He then emigrated to Spain. In 1980 he received the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Cervantes Prize . Many Latin American authors recognize Onetti's influence on their work, including Mario Vargas Llosa , who was one of his early readers. Benedetti also had to emigrate and lived in Cuban and Spanish exile from 1973 to 1983.
The politically committed Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015), whose diverse journalistic, documentary and literary works (especially The Open Veins of Latin America , 1971) were translated into 20 languages, was arrested, fled to Argentina, where he was on the list of General Death Squads Videlas and fled again to Spain. The Marcha magazine was banned, Benedetti lost his job at the university and emigrated via Argentina and Peru , where he was also persecuted, to Cuba and then to Spain. The poet and author of novels and short stories Cristina Peri Rossi (* 1941), who followed the example of Julio Cortázar , also emigrated to Spain and now lives in Barcelona . Carlo Martínez Moreno went into exile in 1977.
Under the increasing terror, the descriptions and stylistic devices of the social realism of the Generación del 45 with their social realism proved to be inadequate. Reality now had to be distorted or described metaphorically again if one did not want to fall silent or go into exile. While the regime pretended to be a cultural continuity to the world public, younger authors took refuge in highly artificial language, in fantastic worlds or in ambiguity.
After 1983
In 1985 Galeano returned to Uruguay. The confrontation with the putsch of June 27, 1973 and its consequences formed a focus of his further work. Benedetti also returned from Cuba and temporarily lived in Montevideo again, where he died in 2009.
The works of the narrator and novelist Mario Delgado Aparaín (* 1949), who had to go into hiding during the military dictatorship and describes the impact of the dictatorship on ordinary people, have been translated into several languages. His most important novel is La balada de Johnny Sosa , for which he received the Premio Municipal de Literatura in 1987. Carlos María Domínguez , born in Argentina in 1955, lives in Montevideo , whose works (“Desert Meere”, 2006) have also been translated into German and over 20 other languages. Tomás de Mattos (1947–2016) is one of the few authors from the north of the country. He dealt with historical and biblical subjects ( Bernabé, Bernabé , 1988;) and was temporarily director of the national library. The award-winning Jorge Majfud (* 1969) also comes from Tacuarembó in northern Uruguay , who deals with both pre-Columbian myths and the attitude towards life of the Hispanic people in the USA, where he lives and teaches today.
More recently, new genres have developed. Carmen Posadas (* 1953), who now lives in Spain, is a very productive children's book author and writer of novels and short stories. The surrealist humorist, photographer, illustrator, comic and science fiction writer Mario Levrero (1940-2004) became a cult author towards the end of the century . The neo-historical adventure novels by Alejandro Paternain (1933-2004) found widespread circulation in the 1990s. Through the fictionalized chronicle Maluco, la novela de los Descubridores beyond the dreams of a participant of the circumnavigation Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcanos the fabled wealth of the Moluccas was Napoleón Baccino Ponce de Leon (* 1947) known (English: Five Black Ships , 1994).
Only the generation that grew up after 1985 was able to free itself from the shadow of dictatorship; but the crisis of 2002 again forced them to emigrate en masse. Claudia Amengual (* 1969) deals with the emotional states resulting from dealing with this situation in novels.
literature
- Anthologies
- José Antonio Friedl Zapata: The house on Calle del Socorro and other stories from Uruguay. (= Modern Storytellers of the World, Vol. 32.) Tübingen 1971.
- Explorations: 21 storytellers from the Rio de la Plata . Ed .: House of World Cultures, Berlin 1993. ISBN 3-353-00960-4 .
- Timo Berger (ed.): News from the river: Young literature from Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. ISBN 978-3981206234 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Rössner (ed.): Latin American literary history. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995, p. 212.
- ↑ Zapata 1991, introduction, p. 14 f.
- ↑ Zapata 1971, Introduction, p. 10.
- ↑ G. Zani (often also called "Gisela Zani"): La Cárcel De Aire . Montevideo 1938.
- ↑ Premio Cervantes 2018 para el esencialismo de Ida Vitale on es.euronews.com, accessed on October 4, 2019
- ^ Tiempos de toleranciam tiempos de ira , in: La Red 21 , December 11, 2005 (Spanish)
- ↑ Short biography , accessed December 20, 2015
- ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2009. ISBN 978-3-518-42088-1 .
- ↑ Saúl Sosnowski, Louise B. Popkin (Ed.): Repression, Exile, and Democracy: Uruguayan Culture. Duke University Press, Durham / London 1993, therein the articles in section III.
- ↑ Jorge Majfud applies his fractal vision to Latino immigrants , in: Voxxi , May 2012 ( Memento from February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive )