Venezuelan literature

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The Venezuelan literature is the literature of Venezuela in Spanish and as such a part of the Spanish-American literature. In Europe, however, it was not received to the same extent as Mexican or Colombian literature, which are also much more extensive. This is due to the relatively small class of educated middle-class reading public in Venezuela, to the social segregation of the elites, but also to the long periods of dictatorship in the 20th century, which hindered intellectual production and forced many authors to emigrate.

Oral tradition of the indigenous peoples

El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido by Joseph Gumilla (2nd edition 1741)

The first source on the customs of the indigenous peoples of the central Orinoco is the work El Orinoco ilustrado by the Jesuit Joseph Gumilla . Later, the missionary Felipe Salvador Gilii (1721–1789) , who came from Italy, collected information on the languages ​​and myths of these peoples, which now mostly no longer exist, and on the early colonial history and published them in four volumes in Rome from 1780–1784. The oral traditions and religious traditions of many indigenous peoples without writing, whose languages ​​are perhaps still spoken by one percent of Venezuela's population, can still be discovered and documented if it is not too late for that. Examples are presented in various blogs and events coordinated by the poet Isaías Medina López (* 1958).

Colonial times

In the 16th and 17th centuries the earliest chronicles of Venezuela were written, which at that time belonged to the viceroyalty of New Granada and from 1819 to 1830 to Greater Colombia since independence . The first chronicle of a Creole historian in baroque style was the Historia de la conquista y población de la provincia de Venezuela by José de Oviedo y Baños (1671-1738). As a result, under the influence of the Enlightenment, a journalistic criticism of colonial rule was formed. However, only a few prominent authors emerged. The outstanding literary figure of the period of the struggle for freedom is born in Venezuela, from Classicism embossed Andrés Bello (1781-1865). Bello, a humanist and author of didactic poems ("La agricultura de la zona torrida", 1826), publicist, philosopher, pedagogue, philologist and translator of Plautus , Lord Byron and Victor Hugo , international lawyer and friend of Alexander von Humboldt , had been around since 1810 as an exile, diplomat and university professor constantly abroad and learned several languages ​​autodidactically. He left behind an almost unmanageable body of work and was the first to write a grammar on the use of the Spanish language in Latin America. For the first time, his texts conveyed in-depth knowledge of the resources of the new world that were not used by the colonial rulers, although described with the "aesthetic gesture of the old world". His poems were conceived as part of an epic América that never materialized . In his adopted country of Chile, he polemicized against the approaching romanticism.

Romanticism and Modernismo

The French Revolution freed Latin American thought from the narrow clerical fetters. Simón Bolívar , who liberated New Granada from Spanish rule, was under the influence of the French Enlightenment. His writings and his poems were also stimulated by the thoughts and works of Alexander von Humboldt , whose descriptions of the beautiful nature of South America increased Creole self-confidence enormously. Under the influence of France, Creole authors turned to classicism, which shaped the work of several poets of the time, such as the poems of Rafael María Baralt (1810-1860), who became the first Latin American member of the Real Academia Española , by Fermín Toro (1807 –1865), who traveled to Europe as a diplomat, and by José Antonio Maitín (1804–1874), a Venezuelan poet influenced by the Cuban independence movement, who already marked the transition to Romanticism with his descriptions of nature.

Juan Vicente González (1811–1866), first a theology student, then writer, biographer and historian, received French Romanticism and is often characterized as the first romantic in Venezuela. Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde (1846-1892), an important late Romantic poet, writer and translator who was influenced by both French models and Brazilian contemporaries, can be regarded as a forerunner of Modernismo . a. Heinrich Heine's book of songs first translated into Spanish and published in 1885 while in exile in New York. Gonzalo Picón Febres (1860–1918) was one of the late Romantic Costumbrist prose authors . Eduardo Blanco (1838–1912), novelist, epic poet and briefly foreign minister, wrote the famous heroic epic of the war of independence (“Venezuela heroica”, 1881), which depicts the great battles of the war in five pictures. In his historical novel “Zárate” (1882) he describes the political and social movement of the Creoles , who after the revolution lost support from their mother country, sometimes became impoverished and had to assert themselves against immigrants and mulattos.

Manuel Vicente Romero García (caricature, 1890s)

Manuel Vicente Romero García (1865–1917) wrote Peonía (1890), the first “Creole” novel that reflected the current social development in Venezuela. #The author played a military role in the revolution of 1899, but was mostly remembered by posterity as a politician - like most Venezuelan authors who made a name for themselves as diplomats, lawyers, military officials, entrepreneurs or civil servants and left their writing activities .

Andrés Mata (1870–1931), poet, writer and journalist, stands between romanticism and modernism with his tragic love affair "Idilio Trágico". At times he lived in exile in Curacao and the Dominican Republic until 1895. He later became a parliamentarian and worked as a diplomat in Europe, where he died in Paris. The narrator Pedro Emilio Coll (1872–1947) is considered to be the most important founder and promoter of modernism in Venezuela, along with Mata, who gathered in the group of the so-called Generación del 98 . As a diplomat and politician, he got to know European cultures. This group, a parallel development to the Spanish generation of 1898 , also included Luis Manuel Urbaneja Achelpohl (1873–1937) and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez (1871–1927). Realism and naturalism, on the other hand, were slow to gain acceptance in Venezuela at the end of the 19th century. The Criollismo played a smaller role here than in Argentina or Chile.

The Early 20th Century: Oppression and Exile

The dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–1935) on the one hand intensified intellectual and political oppression; on the other hand Venezuela rose to become a petroleum exporting state. This led to a certain economic boom, from which the majority of those employed in agriculture did not, of course, benefit, alongside severe repression. In 1928 there was massive student unrest. Some authors such as Manuel Díaz Rodríguez cooperated with the regime, others such as José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890–1930), diplomat, educational theorist and poet, took refuge in the hermetic poetry. Ramos Sucre castigated the intellectual life of Venezuela in his writings as mediocre and conformist and applied strict formal standards to his introverted poems.

Generación del 18

The post-war Generación del 1918 turned away from modernism; it combined influences from Spanish classical music and from France with current national themes. Her work is characterized by a sober tone and the avoidance of sentimentality and metaphors . In poetry, they stuck to the meter and used sensualistic language rich in images. Philosophically, some of its representatives were shaped by the theories of Henri Bergson .

As a renewal movement influenced by the Argentine university reforms, however, it could hardly prevail in the dictatorial Venezuela. One of its representatives is Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969), who, with his lyrical-realistic prose, was the founder of the so-called Selva or jungle romance, a specific form of regionalismo or criollismo . Gallegos briefly became president of the country in 1948. The most important international literary prize in Venezuela, the Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallego , which is awarded every two years, was named after him . Gallego's internationally famous novel “Doña Bárbara” (1929) dealt with the conflict between nature and civilization, while his modernist novel “Canaima” (1935), written in exile in Spain and banned in Venezuela, dealt with the development of Indian identity. Other authors of the Generación del 18 also went into exile, such as B. the son of German immigrants Carlos Brandt (1875–1964), a writer and philosopher whose books had to appear in Europe and the USA; the adventurer Rafael de Nogales (1879–1937), active worldwide in wars and revolutions, and who became known in the 1920s and 1930s for his memoirs; the socialist poet, essayist and representative of a poetic regionalismo or nativismo Humberto Tejera (1890–1971), who later taught political science in Mexico.

The generation of 1918 also includes José Rafael Pocaterra (1889–1955) with his socially critical satires and Enrique Bernardo Núñez (1895–1964), novelist, chronicler of the city of Caracas and diplomat. This includes, last but not least , Teresa de la Parra (1889–1936), who was born in Paris, was trained in the classical French novel and influenced by Juana Inés de la Cruz and Marcel Proust , who sublime the bigoted and corrupt upper classes of the country threatened with decline depicted. Her book “Ifigenia. Diario de una señorita que escribió porque se fastidiaba "(" Diary of a young lady who is bored ") is about the desire for freedom of a young woman who grew up in Europe, for whom there is no place in the high society of Caracas and who, after re-education, the social Convention is sacrificed. The book, an "Urtext" of Venezuelan literature, caused a scandal when it was published in 1924.

Also in the generation of 1918 is the poet and later successful diplomat and national prize winner from 1967 Fernando Paz Castillo (1893–1991), a co-founder of the Círculo de Bellas Artes and the magazine Cultura . The sensualistic poet and diplomat Ana Enriqueta Terán (1918–2017) is the latest representative of this movement .

The young poet Ana Enriqueta Terán

Generación del 28

The protest against Gomez was concentrated in the intellectual group Generación del 1928 , which was influenced by European avant- gardeism, to which Julio Garmendia (1898–1955 ) , the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco (1897–1955) and the novelist and lyricist Pedro Sotillo (1902–1977) also belonged to Sotillo. 1977), Miguel Otero Silva (1908–1985), Antonia Palacios (1904–2001), and Juan Oropeza. The movement of the revolutionary left in Venezuela also emerged from this group in 1931.

Many activists of the critical Generación del 28 also left Venezuela, such as the poet Antonio Arraíz (1903–1962), who - made famous through his experimental collection of poems “Aspero” (1924) - wrote the diary “Los lunares de la Virreina” (1931) in exile ) published about his imprisonment and finally emigrated to the USA in 1948 and the historian, essayist, literary critic and writer Mariano Picón Salas (1901–1965), who emigrated to Chile and, on his return, the Venezuelan Writers' Association in 1936 and the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Caracas founded. There he opened up the legacy of the Latin American “Barroco de Indias”, which can neither be understood from a Eurocentric perspective nor as a coarse form of the Baroque in a society of slaves and slave owners.

After Gomez's death in 1935, many intellectuals returned from exile; afterwards avant-garde ( ultraismo ) and surrealist tendencies quickly prevailed around the Viernes newspaper . As in Mexico, many writers were able to secure their livelihood by working at universities or in the diplomatic service, including the poets Alberto Arvelo Torrealba (1905–1971) and Vicente Gerbasi (1913–1992).

The post-war period: violence and inwardness

During the Spanish Civil War and after the Second World War , immigration to Venezuela increased sharply, initially for political and then mainly for economic reasons: the oil wealth created well-paid jobs, while immigrants were still starving in their home countries. The migrants from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Argentina and Germany fought for a long time to preserve their identity, while many Venezuelan intellectuals left the country for political reasons. That was not conducive to literary production.

After 1945, the young authors first looked for a connection with European avant-gardism and surrealism. For a long time, poetry dominated. Juan Calzadillo (* 1931), also known as a painter , presented his first volume of poems, “Primeros Poemas”, in 1954. Ida Gramcko (1924–1994) won her first poetry award at the age of 13.

The further development was similar to that in Colombia. The novelist, essayist, diplomat, minister and university professor Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906-2001), descendant of the German-born Venezuelan freedom fighter Johann von Uslar, coined the term magical realism in 1948 . Ùslar Pietri was the only writer to have twice received the Premio Nacional de Literatura, which has been awarded since 1948. Ramón Díaz Sánchez (1903–1968), laureate from 1952, combined social, biographical and psychological analyzes of the change in Venezuelan society with high performance.

Aqulies Nazoa, painted by the street artist Fe

After the fall of Gallego in 1948 and especially under the brutal dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez 1952-1958, many intellectuals left Venezuela again. Arraíz emigrated to the USA. The popular Marxist journalist and humorist Aquiles Nazoa (1920–1976), winner of the national newspaper award, had to emigrate. The socially committed Carlos Augusto León (1914–1997) was imprisoned and then published abroad, as was the narrator and essayist José Vicente Abreu (1927–1987), who went to Mexico after imprisonment and torture, returned in 1958 and again had to emigrate to Cuba in 1962 . The communist poet and essayist Rafael Cardenas (* 1930), influenced by Hölderlin and Rilke , went to Trinidad in 1957 and, after his return in the 1960s, founded the association Tabla redonda together with other artists . The poet Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922–2003), a master of mystical and erotic poetry (“Elena y los elementos”, 1951), lived abroad for a long time.

Urbanization and contracultura

Since the early 1960s, literature turned more to urban subjects - i.e. H. especially the life in Caracas - and the individual horizons of experience. With increasing urbanization, the urban fringe groups and their contracultura (popular culture) moved into the center of literature. The use of everyday language and a tendency to internalize became characteristic of this phase. Adriano González León (1931–2008), an active opponent of the Jiménez dictatorship, published his collection of short stories "Asfalto-Infierno y otros relatos demoniacos" in 1963 about the asphalt jungle of Caracas. The stories by Salvador Garmendia (1928–2001) are located in the milieu of the lower petty bourgeoisie . The poet Ramón Palomares (* 1935) also belonged to the circle around Garmendia .

Venezuelan literature, which flourished again during this period, also came under the influence of the Cuban Revolution. The subject of violence under the dictatorship and the guerrillas remained dominant for a long time; it was treated paradigmatically by Abreu in his book “Se llamaba SN” (1964). Several of Otero Silva's novels, which dealt with the struggle against dictatorship or the decadence of the upper classes, were translated into German and published in the 1960s to 1990s by the Aufbau-Verlag of the GDR. The psychiatrist Francisco Herrera Luque (1927–1991) combined historical material with precise psychological analysis.

The literary boom of the 1970s and 1980s

Because of the tight book market until well into the 1980s, many authors were dependent on working as a university professor or cultural functionary, including José Balza (* 1939), who had been a narrator and essayist since the 1960s, as well as the one for Francisco Perez Perdomo (1930–2013) and the narrator Laura Antillano (* 1950), whose work is closely linked to her hometown of Maracaibo , where she has lived since childhood , is known for his black humor . Such a double life led Eduardo Casanova Sucre (* 1939), the u. a. worked as ambassador to Denmark and China. However, with “Los caballos de la cólera” in 1972, he succeeded in making the long-neglected Venezuelan novel known throughout the Hispanic-speaking area. His second novel, "La agonía del Macho Luna" (1974), was also distributed at least in the Spanish-speaking world. Some theater pieces are also known, such as "El solo de saxofón" (1975). Denzil Romero (1938–1999), who was influenced by William Faulkner , Alejo Carpentier , Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes , wrote numerous novels and short stories with historical, erotic and esoteric themes. He was awarded the Cuban Premio Casa de las Américas in 1983 .

Literary production has multiplied since the 1980s. This had to do with the growth of the educated and wealthy middle classes, but also with a nationalist-reformist policy and with the more active role of women authors in literary life. Diplomat Antonieta Madrid (* 1939), whose works have been translated into several languages, made a name for herself as a narrator with topics from big city life and the university environment . Isabel Allende lived in Venezuela from 1975 to 1988 and wrote her first major novels there.

Poetry, however, was by no means supplanted by narrative literature. Some poems by Eugenio Montejo (1938–2008) have also been translated into German. Hanni Ossott (1946–2002) was fascinated by the night in her poetry. Armando Rojas Guardia (* 1949) is one of the most important voices in Venezuelan poetry. He lived abroad for a long time and a. influenced by TS Eliot and Rilke .

New tasks for authors: scripts and the boom in telenovelas 1980–1995

Since the 1980s, more and more authors have been working in very different genres and branches of cultural production. The poet, writer and cultural activist Enrique Hernández D'Jesus (* 1947) also became known as a photographer through international exhibitions. Luis Britto García (* 1940) is an enormously productive writer, theater poet, historian and social scientist. Born in Germany, Solveig Hoogesteijn (* 1946), who emigrated to Venezuela with her family in 1947, has been writing scripts for the feature films she has made since the 1970s.

José Ignacio Cabrujas

The theater lost much of its importance due to the upswing in film production, which was only able to free itself from the shackles of state tutelage at a late stage. José Ignacio Cabrujas (1939–1995) became known as an innovative and productive author of telenovelas, but also as a playwright, radio play writer, theater scholar, book author and political satirist . Rudolfo Izaguirre (* 1931) is an important film critic and essayist. Since 1988 he has directed the Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela . His son Boris Izaguirre (* 1965) wrote the scripts for many Venezuelan telenovelas . Since the 1990s, however, film production has declined due to the political unrest. Mexico-born César Miguel Rondón (* 1953) has been moving to Mexico for the production of his telenovelas since around 2003.

The late 1990s and the chavismo

Ángela Zago , ex-guerrilla, consort of Hugo Chávez , professor and writer is an important communicator of the Bolivarian Revolution . The poet Luis Alberto Crespo (* 1941) is the Venezuelan ambassador to UNESCO . Since the 1990s, the psychoanalyst Ana Teresa Torres (* 1945) has emerged through novels and stories . In 2001 she received the Anna Seghers Prize . The writer and essayist Enrique Moya (* 1958) now lives as a translator in Austria. Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (* 1967) has presented an extensive narrative work since the mid-1990s, parts of which have already been translated into French. Today he lives in Spain. The political scientist Francisco Suniaga (* 1954), known for portraying bloody cockfights on Isla Margarita in his hit novel La otra Isla (2005, German: “The Other Island”, 2011), taught in Frankfurt for a while. Juan Carlos Chirinos (* 1967) is an author and literary advisor. He has published novels, short stories, biographies and essays, and edited numerous anthologies. Some of his work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Arabic. He has lived in Spain since 1997. Authors from immigrant families also spoke up more frequently in the 1990s. B. Cristina Policastro (* 1955 or 1956).

After Hugo Chávez won the elections in 1998, many intellectuals, including those from the middle class, showed solidarity with his movement. However, there are few novels that deal with the upheavals in the country's development under the Chavez government. Only the novel The Last Days of the Commandante of the narrator, novelist and director of telenovelas for broadcasters in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico Alberto Barrera Tyszka (* 1960), which was also published in German in 2016, deals with the tumultuous circumstances of Chavez's death from a political perspective divided middle class family and found a positive response. The multiple award-winning author also wrote the novel La enfermedad (2006; The Sickness , 2010) about a doctor's silence towards her terminally ill father.

Between 2004 and 2014, the number of Venezuelan titles translated into German increased significantly. At the 10th International Book Fair in Caracas in March 2014, no Western European countries took part. In addition to Latin American and African countries, there were also Russia, China, India, North Korea, Iran and Palestine. This fair was largely dominated by political literature on the occasion of Chavez's death in 2013. Book production, which was in the lower mid-range of Latin American countries, is largely in the hands of state foundations. Compared to the book market, the importance of telenovelas increased significantly more. Leonardo Padrón (* 1959) wrote the screenplay for the series La mujer perfecta (2010), which is distributed throughout the Spanish-speaking world .

State crisis and exile

The country has been in a severe economic and political crisis since 2013/14, accompanied by censorship measures against newspapers, radio and television. Mismanagement and abuse of power have led to a humanitarian catastrophe in which 4.5 million Venezuelans have fled abroad. Publishing houses, bookstores and writers were largely unaffected by government intervention. However, for economic reasons, book and film production is hardly possible. Many intellectuals gave up their allegiance to the Bolivarian Revolution and emigrated because the Chavismo no longer offered them any employment opportunities. Authors who had emigrated to Venezuela from Colombia, which was torn by the crisis and civil war until a few years ago, also returned to their homeland. The playwright, narrator and columnist Ibsen Martínez (* 1951) now lives in Colombia, Leonardo Padrón went to Mexico, Karina Sainz Borgo (* 1982) emigrated to Spain. In her debut novel Nacht in Caracas (German 2019) she paints a picture of the chaos and violence in the country.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ edition: Filippo S. Gilij: Sagio di storia americana; o sia, storia naturale, civile e sacra de regni, e delle provincie spagnuole di Terra-Ferma nell 'America Meridionale descritto dall' abate FS Gilij. Volume 1-4. Rome: Perigio 1964.
  2. ↑ Examples under [1] and on twitter: [2]
  3. ^ Michael Rössner: Latin American literary history. Stuttgart, Weimar, 2nd edition 2002, pp. 160 ff.
  4. ↑ a b Venezuelan literature , in: Der Literatur-Brockhaus. Mannheim 1988, vol. 3, p. 600.
  5. ↑ Jose Antonio Maitín. Retrieved September 15, 2016 .
  6. ^ Michael Rössner: Latin American literary history . 2nd Edition. 2002, p. 162 f .
  7. ↑ a b Michael Rössner: In search of the lost paradise. Frankfurt 1988, p. 49
  8. ↑ Maike Albath: Epilogue to the German edition 2008
  9. ↑ Cristina Martín Puente: La mitología clásica en la novela Ifigenia. Diario de una Señorita que escribió porque se fastidiaba, de Teresa de la Parra. Universidad Complutense de Madrid 2007 (pdf) (Spanish)
  10. ^ Claudia Gatzemeier: El realismo mágico, lo real maravilloso y la literatura fantástica. Butterfly Verlag 2009. ISBN 3896577867 , p. 33.
  11. ^ Michael Rössner: Latin American literary history. Stuttgart, Weimar, 2nd edition 2002, p. 444.
  12. ↑ E.g. “Fever” 1960, “ I don't cry ” (1975), “ Lope de Aguirre, Prince of Freedom ” (1981), “ The Death of Honorio ” (1993).
  13. ^ In: Curt Meyer-Clason: Poetry from Latin America. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-423-10931-9 , pp. 251-255.
  14. ↑ ATTorres' blog
  15. ^ Peter B. Schumann: Madness and Reality on deutschlandfunkkultur.de, January 5, 2020.

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