1.
Spanish language
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Spanish —also called Castilian —is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain, with hundreds of millions of native speakers around the world. It is usually considered the worlds second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and it is one of the few languages to use inverted question and exclamation marks. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Beginning in the early 16th century, Spanish was taken to the colonies of the Spanish Empire, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa, Oceania, around 75% of modern Spanish is derived from Latin. Greek has also contributed substantially to Spanish vocabulary, especially through Latin, Spanish vocabulary has been in contact from an early date with Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula. With around 8% of its vocabulary being Arabic in origin, this language is the second most important influence after Latin and it has also been influenced by Basque as well as by neighboring Ibero-Romance languages. It also adopted words from languages such as Gothic language from the Visigoths in which many Spanish names and surnames have a Visigothic origin. Spanish is one of the six languages of the United Nations. It is the language in the world by the number of people who speak it as a mother tongue, after Mandarin Chinese. It is estimated more than 437 million people speak Spanish as a native language. Spanish is the official or national language in Spain, Equatorial Guinea, speakers in the Americas total some 418 million. In the European Union, Spanish is the tongue of 8% of the population. Spanish is the most popular second language learned in the United States, in 2011 it was estimated by the American Community Survey that of the 55 million Hispanic United States residents who are five years of age and over,38 million speak Spanish at home. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the language of the whole Spanish State in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas. Article III reads as follows, El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado, las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State, the other Spanish languages as well shall be official in their respective Autonomous Communities. The Spanish Royal Academy, on the hand, currently uses the term español in its publications. Two etymologies for español have been suggested, the Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary derives the term from the Provençal word espaignol, and that in turn from the Medieval Latin word Hispaniolus, from—or pertaining to—Hispania
2.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo KBE was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Borges works have contributed to literature and the fantasy genre. However, some critics consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist and his late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914, Borges family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève, the family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and he also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and he became completely blind by the age of 55, as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination, in 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize and his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages and he dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him, He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, Borgess mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo origin. Her family had been involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence. His 1929 book, Cuaderno San Martín, includes the poem Isidoro Acevedo, commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, de Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borgess own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam was a lawyer, Borges Haslam was born in Entre Rios of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home, the family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suarez and was father of the painter Norah Borges. At age nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wildes The Happy Prince into Spanish and it was published in a local journal, but his friends thought the real author was his father
3.
Juan Gelman
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Juan Gelman was an Argentine poet. He published more than twenty books of poetry between 1956 and his death in early 2014 and he was a naturalized citizen of Mexico, country where he arrived as a political exile of the Military Junta. In 2007, Gelman was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most important in Spanish literature and his works celebrate life but are also tempered with social and political commentary and reflect his own painful experiences with the politics of Argentina. Juan Gelman was born in Buenos Aires, in the Villa Crespo neighborhood and he was the third son of Ukrainian immigrants. Juan Gelman Burichson was born on May 3,1930, in Buenos Aires to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, as a boy he read widely in Russian and European literature under the tutelage of his brother Boris. Juan Gelman learned to read when he was three years old, and spent much of his reading and playing soccer. He developed an interest in poetry at a young age, influenced by his brother Boris, who read to him several poems in Russian. The experience of reading Dostoevskys The Insulted and Humiliated at age eight made an impression on him. As a young man he was a member of notable literary groups. He also worked as a translator at the United Nations and he was always an ardent political activist. In 1975 he became involved with the Montoneros, though he distanced himself from the group. After the 1976 Argentine coup, he was forced into exile from Argentina, in 1976, his son Marcelo and his pregnant daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia, aged 20 and 19, were kidnapped from their home. They became two of the 30,000 desaparecidos, the people who **vanished** without a trace during the reign of the military junta, the remains of Maria Claudia have not yet been recovered. During his long exile, Gelman lived in Europe until 1988, then in United States and later in Mexico, with his wife, Argentinian psychologist Mara La Madrid. In 1997, Juan Gelman received the Argentine National Poetry Prize, in recognition of his lifes work, and in 2007 the Cervantes Prize and he also had a long and brilliant career as journalist, writing for the Argentinian newspaper Pagina/12 until his death. Gelman included Uruguayan police officer Hugo Campos Hermida in a legal suit lodged in Spain for the disappearance of his daughter-in-law in Uruguay, at the beginning of the 21st century, Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle Ibáñez ordered an investigation and Gelmans granddaughter was found. Macarena, who had lived as a child, took the surnames of her parents. Gelman died at age 83 of complications with preleukemia at his home in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City and his granddaughter, Macarena, flew in from Uruguay to attend the funeral
4.
Leopoldo Lugones
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Leopoldo Lugones Argüello was an Argentine writer and journalist. His grandson Pedro Lugones is now a soccer player, born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentinas Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry. He was the son of Santiago M. Lugones and Custodia Argüello. It was his mother who gave young Leopoldo his first lessons and was responsible for his strict Catholic upbringing, later his parents sent him to study at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, in Córdoba, where his maternal grandmother lived. In 1892 the family would move to city, at the time when Lugones was beginning his forays into the fields of journalism. He first worked for La Montaña, a newspaper, and was in favour with the aristocratic Manuel Quintana and this brought him first to Buenos Aires in 1896, where his literary talent developed quickly. That year, he married Juana Agudelo, from whom he had a son, Leopoldo Polo Lugones, in 1899, he became an active Freemason. Lugones was the leading Argentine exponent of the Latin American literary current known as Modernismo and this was a form of Parnassianism influenced by Symbolism. He was also the author of the dense and rich historical novel La Guerra Gaucha. Leopoldo Lugones went to Europe in 1906,1911,1913 and in 1930, in latter year he supported the coup détat against the aging Radical party president. On February 18,1938, the despairing and disillusioned Lugones committed suicide by taking a mixture of whisky, political frustration has been the most widely cited cause of his suicide. Nevertheless, recent publications in Argentina have shed light on another possible motivation and he maintained a passionate and emotional relationship with her until, discovered and pressured by his son, he was forced to leave her, causing in him a depressive decline that would end his life. His descendants have had similarly tragic fates and it is believed that his son Polo, the chief of police during Uriburus dictatorship, was the creator of the picana and the one who introduced it as a method of torture. Polo Lugones committed suicide in 1971, polos younger daughter, Susana Pirí Lugones, was detained and disappeared in December 1978 as a victim of the Dirty War. His older daughter, Carmen, whom he called Babú, is still alive, one of Pirís sons, Alejandro, committed suicide, like his great-grandfather, in Tigre. This comprises Lugones tragic familial fate, curiously similar to that of Horacio Quirogas, himself a friend, the films script, written by Homero Manzi and Ulyses Petit de Murat, is based on the novel by Leopoldo Lugones published in 1905. The film premiered in Buenos Aires on November 20,1942 and is considered by critics of Argentine cinema as one of the most successful films in the history of the cinema
5.
Alejandra Pizarnik
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Alejandra Pizarnik was an Argentine poet. Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29,1936, in Avellaneda and she had a difficult childhood, struggling with a marked European accent to her Spanish, a stutter, acne and self-esteem issues. She also had a habit of gaining weight. These contingencies seriously undermined her self-esteem, because of her negative body image and her continual comparisons to her sister, Alejandras life became even more complicated. A year after entering the department of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published her first book of poetry and she took courses in literature, journalism, and philosophy at the university, but never received her degree. Soon after, she studied painting with Juan Batlle Planas, Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia and Las aventuras perdidas. She was a reader of many dignified authors during her lifetime. From the novels read she delved into more literature with similar topics to learn from different points of view, doing this sparked an interest early on for literature and also for the unconscious, which in turn gave her interest in psychoanalysis. She wrote poetic books of notary sensitivity and formal restfulness for insinuating imagery, the topics of her books focused on loneliness, childhood, pain, and more than anything, death. Between 1960 and 1964 Pizarnik lived in Paris, where she worked for the magazine Cuadernos and she published poems and criticism in many newspapers, translated for Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire, Yves Bonnefoy and Marguerite Duras. She also studied the French religious history and literature in the Sorbonne, there she became friends with Julio Cortázar, Rosa Chacel and Octavio Paz. Paz even wrote the prologue for her poetry book, Árbol de Diana. She returned to Buenos Aires in 1964, and published her most well-known books of poetry, Los trabajos y las noches, Extracción de la de la locura. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, and in 1971 a Fulbright Scholarship, Pizarnik ended her life on September 25,1972 by taking an overdose of Secobarbital sodium at the age of 36. She is buried in Cementerio La Tablada, Buenos Aires, Argentina, “The Sadean Poetics of Solitude in Paz and Pizarnik. Arbol de Alejandra, Pizarnik Reassessed, by Karl Posso and Fiona J. Mackintosh,2007 and these are Not Sweet Girls featuring Alejandra Pizarnik, Giannina Braschi, Marjorie Agosin, and Julia Alvarez, White Pine Press,2000. ISBN 978-1-877727-38-2 La Disolucion En La Obra de Alejandra Pizarnik, Ensombrecimiento de La Existencia y Ocultamiento del Ser, cornerstone, from A Musical Hell, Alejandra Pizarnik, trans. Yvette Siegert, in Guernica, A Journal of Literature and Art, knives and Angels, Women Writers in Latin America
6.
Alfonsina Storni
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Alfonsina Storni was one of the most important Argentine and Latin-American poets of the modernist period. Storni was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland, to Italian-Swiss parents, before her birth, her father had started a brewery in the city of San Juan, Argentina, producing beer and soda. In 1891, following the advice of a doctor, he returned with his wife to Switzerland, in 1896 the family returned to San Juan, and a few years later, in 1901, moved to Rosario. There her father opened a tavern, where Storni worked doing a variety of chores, in 1907, she joined a traveling theatre company which took her around the country. With them she performed in Henrik Ibsens Spectres, Benito Pérez Galdóss La loca de la casa, in 1908, Storni returned to live with her mother, who had remarried and was living in Bustinza. After a year there, Storni went to Coronda, where she undertook studies that would lead to employment as a primary schoolteacher. During this period she started working for the local magazines Mundo Rosarino. In 1912 she moved to Buenos Aires, seeking the anonymity afforded by a big city, the following year her son Alejandro was born, the illegitimate child of a journalist in Coronda. In spite of difficulties, she published La inquietud del rosal in 1916. Storni soon became acquainted with writers, such as José Enrique Rodó and Amado Nervo. Her economic situation improved, which allowed her to travel to Montevideo, there she met the poet Juana de Ibarbourou, as well as Horacio Quiroga, with whom she would become great friends. Her 1920 book Languidez received the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize and she taught literature at the Escuela Normal de Lenguas Vivas, and she published Ocre. Her style now showed more realism than before, and a strongly feminist theme, solitude and marginality began to affect her health, and worsening emotional problems forced her to leave her job as teacher. A year and a half after her friend Quiroga committed suicide in 1937, around 1,00 AM on Tuesday the 25th, Alfonsina left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Later that morning two workers found her body washed up on the beach, although her biographers hold that she jumped into the water from a breakwater, popular legend is that she slowly walked out to sea until she drowned. Also, fifty years after her death, she inspired the Latin American artist Aquino to incorporate her image into many of his paintings. Alfonsina Storni published some of her first works in 1916 in Emin Arslans literary magazine La Nota and her poems “Convalecer” and “Golondrinas” were published in the magazine. She was the winner of the First Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize for her book Languidez
7.
Javier del Granado
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Don Francisco Javier del Granado y Granado, was a poet laureate and favorite son of Bolivia. Bolivias leading poetic light achieved widespread acclaim and recognition, receiving a multitude of national and international awards over a career spanned more than half a century. His death was marked by three days of mourning, and his funeral was a state event. Bolivia has dedicated a plaza and two avenues in his honour, and put up a monument to his memory, along with Víctor Paz Estenssoro and others, del Granado formed the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario. He comes from a literary family that traces its roots back in colonial America to that outstanding humanitarian figure who was the Count of Cotoca. His father, Félix del Granado, a writer in his own right and rector of the University of San Simón, founded the Bolivian Academies of Language. Bolivian human-rights lawyer Juan del Granado is also a member of this family
8.
Vicente Huidobro
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Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He is known for promoting the Avant-garde literary movement in Chile, Huidobro was born into a wealthy family from Santiago, Chile. He spent his first years in Europe, and was educated by French and English governesses. Once his family was back in Chile, Vicente was enrolled at the Colegio San Ignacio, a Jesuit secondary school in Santiago, later, in 1912, she would help him financially and emotionally to publish his first magazine Musa Joven. In 1911 he published Ecos del alma, a work with modernist tones, the following year he married Manuela Portales Bello. In 1913 he published Canciones en la noche, the book included some poems previously published in Musa Joven as well as his first calligram, Triángulo armónico. In 1913, along with Carlos Díaz Loyola, he published three issues of the magazine Azul, and published both Canciones en la noche and La gruta del silencio, the next year, he gave a lecture, Non serviam, in which he reflected on his aesthetic vision. The same year, in Pasando y Pasando, Vicente explained his religious doubts, the same year, he published Las pagodas ocultas, and signed it for the first time as Vicente Huidobro. In 1916, he traveled to Buenos Aires with Teresa Wilms Montt, while in Buenos Aires, Huidobro outlined his creationism literary theory, later a literary movement, and published El espejo de agua. Also in 1916, he moved to Europe with his wife, while passing through Madrid, he met Rafael Cansino Assens, with whom he had exchanged letters since 1914. He settled in Paris and published Adán, a work that began his next phase of artistic development and that same year he published Horizon carré, including poems previously shown in El espejo de agua translated to French with the help of Juan Gris. In October 1918, Huidobro traveled to Madrid, making the first in a series of trips to that city. There he shared both Creacionismo and his knowledge of the Parisian vanguard with the artistic elite, in Madrid, Vicente met with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, refugees in Spain, and resumed his friendship with Rafael Cansinos-Assens. He started the literary movement Ultraísmo, corresponded with Tristan Tzara, in 1919, he brought to Madrid a rough draft of the series of poems that would eventually become his masterpiece, Altazor. That same year, he took some classes and became interested in esoteric subjects like astrology, alchemy. While in Paris, he worked with Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier at L Esprit Nóuveau, there he also worked for the Spanish magazines Grecia, Cervantes, Tableros and Ultra. Grecia magazine took Huidobro’s side, and between August and September Huidobro traveled to Madrid to refute Gómez Carrillo’s claims, in 1921, Huidobro founded and edited an international art magazine, Creación, in Madrid. The magazine featured a Lipchitz sculpture and paintings by Georges Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris, in November he printed a second issue in Paris, titled Création Revue dArt
9.
Patricio Manns
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Patricio Manns is a Chilean composer, author, poet, novelist, essayist, play writer and journalist. Patricio Manns was born in the town of Nacimiento, in the south of Chile on 3 August 1937. He is the son of a school teacher of French descent. Both of his parents played the piano, his father was a jazz aficionado and his mother was also central in cultivating his interest in literature. In his youth he took up a range of occupations. At the beginning of the 1963s he moved to Santiago where he continued his journalistic work. He was initiated in the field of music when he composed Bandido in 1959, which was recorded in Argentina in 1962 by the folk group Los Travadores del Norte and in Chile by Los Cuatro Cuartos. Manns was a member of the New Chilean Song, with Rolando Alarcón and the Parras and of the Peña of Carmen 340, Víctor Jara joined the Peña. Nueva Canción Chilena movement – for some a folkloric renaissance which led to a revolution in the music of the country. Manns would go on to participate in the extensive production of a series of travelling shows called Chile Rie y Canta which were organized throughout Chile by René Largo Farías. In this song, which has been traced as one of the cantatas to be heard in Latin America. Song XII of the cantata América Novia Mia has been recorded by himself, during this time he recorded the album Patricio Manns which included one of his best-known compositions Valdivia en la niebla and the prophetic No Cierres los Ojos. In this recording, which was accompanied by Inti-illimani, the Symphony Orchestra of Chile and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Santiago, the musical arrangements were done by Luis Advis. The military coup of September 11,1973 found him in Chile, late in 1973, Manns settled in Cuba where he began a life in exile that was to last decades. He collaborated with Humberto Solás with the script for the movie La Cantata de Chile, from Cuba he travelled to France where he settled and formed the ensemble Karaxú in 1974 with which he continued to musically collaborate with Cuban artists. From exile Manns launched his struggle against the Pinochet dictatorship becoming a spokesman of the Chilean resistance and this was also reflected in almost all his musical productions, Chansons de la Résistence Chilienne. This collaboration began to form in the works of Inti-illimani. Subsequently, other songs of this period included Medianoche, Arriesgare mi piel
10.
Gabriela Mistral
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Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note, Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended a primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. She respected her sister greatly, despite the financial problems that Emelina brought her in later years. Her father, Juan Gerónimo Godoy Villanueva, was also a schoolteacher and he abandoned the family before she was three years old, and died, long since estranged from the family, in 1911. Throughout her early years she was never far from poverty, by age fifteen, she was supporting herself and her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, a seamstress, by working as a teachers aide in the seaside town of Compañia Baja, near La Serena, Chile. Probably in about 1906, while working as a teacher, Mistral met Romelio Ureta, a railway worker, who killed himself in 1909. The profound effects of death were already in the work, writing about his suicide led the poet to consider death. While Mistral had passionate friendships with men and women. She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing, after winning the Juegos Florales she infrequently used her given name of Lucila Godoy for her publications. Mistrals meteoric rise in Chiles national school system plays out against the politics of Chile in the first two decades of the 20th century. In her adolescence, the need for teachers was so great, and the number of trained teachers was so small, especially in the rural areas, the poet was able to rise from one post to another because of her publications in local and national newspapers and magazines. Her willingness to move was also a factor, between the years 1906 and 1912 she had taught, successively, in three schools near La Serena, then in Barrancas, then Traiguén in 1910, and in Antofagasta in the desert north, in 1911. By 1912 she had moved to work in a liceo, or high school, in Los Andes, in 1918 Pedro Aguirre Cerda, then Minister of Education, and a future president of Chile, promoted her appointment to direct a liceo in Punta Arenas. He had her join in the plan to reform libraries and schools. That year she published Desolación in New York, which promoted the international acclaim she had already been receiving thanks to her journalism. A year later she published Lecturas para Mujeres, a text in prose and verse that celebrates Latin America from the broad, following almost two years in Mexico she traveled from Laredo, Texas to Washington D. C. In early 1925 she returned to Chile, where she retired from the nations education system. The University of Chile had granted her the title of Spanish Professor in 1923
11.
Nobel Prize in Literature
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Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
12.
Pablo Neruda
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Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old and he often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called Neruda the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language, harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western Tradition in his book The Western Canon. On July 15,1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, during his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Nerudas arrest, friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped through a pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was an advisor to Chiles socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973 six and a half hours after that injection. Pinochet, backed by elements of the forces, denied permission for Nerudas funeral to be made a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets, soon after her death, Reyes moved to Temuco, where he married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had had another child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo and a half-sister, Laura and he composed his first poems in the winter of 1914. During this winter, he wrote often about dinosaurs, on July 18,1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay entitled Entusiasmo y perseverancia in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, signed Neftalí Reyes. From 1918 to mid-1920 he published poems, such as Mis ojos. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales del Maule, by mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poems, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have named himself Neruda after the Czech poet Jan Neruda, the young poets intention in publishing under a pseudonym was to avoid his fathers disapproval of his poems. In 1921, at the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile, both works were critically acclaimed and have been translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas sold millions of copies and became Nerudas best-known work, almost one hundred years later, Veinte Poemas still retains its place as the best selling poetry book in the Spanish language
13.
Nicanor Parra
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Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval is a Chilean poet, mathematician, and physicist. He is considered a poet in Chile and throughout Latin America. Some rank him among the most important poets of Spanish language literature, Parra describes himself as an anti-poet, due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function, after recitations he exclaims Me retracto de todo lo dicho. Parra, the son of a schoolteacher, was born in 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, Chile and he comes from the artistically prolific Parra family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. His sister, Violeta Parra, was a singer, as was his brother Roberto Parra Sandoval. In 1933, he entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, after teaching in Chilean secondary schools, in 1943 he enrolled in Brown University in the United States to study physics. In 1948, he attended Oxford University to study cosmology and he returned to Chile as a professor at the Universidad de Chile in 1946. Since 1952, Parra has been professor of physics in Santiago and has read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba. He has published dozens of books, Parra chooses to leave behind the conventions of poetry, his poetic language renounces the refinement of most Latin American literature and adopts a more colloquial tone. His first collection, Poemas y Antipoemas is a classic of Latin American literature and it is cited as an inspiration by American Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg. Parra turned 100 in September 2014, Parra has been proposed on four occasions for the Nobel Prize in Literature. On December 1,2011, Parra won the Spanish Ministry of Cultures Cervantes Prize, on June 7,2012, he won the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda. New Directions Pub. Corp.1967 Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems, ed. David Unger, New Directions,1985, ISBN 978-0-8112-0959-5 Antipoems, How to Look Better and Feel Great. De la Antipoesía al lenguaje del Artefacto | Premio Cervantes 2011 – Universidad Complutense de Madrid – UCM – PDF Adolfo Vásquez Rocca PH. D
14.
Gonzalo Rojas
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Gonzalo Rojas Pizarro was a Chilean poet. His work is part of the continuing Latin American avant-garde literary tradition of the twentieth century, in 2003 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize. He was the son of a coal miner, born in the port town of Lebu. Later on, during his youth he was the editor of the magazine Antarctica in Santiago de Chile, between 1938-1941 he played a part in the surrealist group Mandrágora founded by Braulio Arenas, Teófilo Cid and Enrique Gómez Correa. Seven years later in 1948 his first book of poems was published in Santiago and he studied Law and Literature in the Instituto Pedagógico de la Universidad de Chile. He taught in a number of schools, even a German School in Valparaíso. In 1952 having finally earned his degree, he was awarded a professorship at the University of Concepción, after the 1973 Chilean coup détat he was forced to go into exile, an “undocumented person”. He was stripped of his position and was also banned from teaching at any Chilean university. The University of Rostock in East Germany provided him with a placement and he taught at universities in Germany, the United States, Spain, and Mexico. Subsequently, he lived in the United States between 1980 and 1994, from 1980 to 1985, Gonzalo was a visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, then from 1985 to 1994, he held the title of professor at Brigham Young University. He was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature and the Queen Sofia Prize of Iberian American Poetry and he also received the Octavio Paz prize of Mexico, and the José Hernández prize of Argentina. He was awarded the Cervantes Prize for 2003 the 23 of April 2004, on the morning of April 25,2011, Rojas died as a consequence of a stroke he suffered earlier in February. The government declared two days of official mourning and he was buried in Chillan, Chile. He was considered one of the greatest modern poets in Chile, together with Nicanor Parra
15.
Pablo de Rokha
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Pablo de Rokha was a Chilean poet. He won the Chilean Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1965 and is counted among The four greats of Chilean poetry, along with Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro and he is considered an avant-garde poet and an influential figure in the poetry scene of his country. Pablo de Rokha was born Carlos Díaz Loyola in the town of Licantén in the Maule Region. He was the son of Ignacio Díaz Alvarado and Laura Loyola de Toledo and was the oldest of nineteen siblings. His family was middle class farmers from an area and de Rokha’s father did various jobs to earn a living, such as a farm manager. De Rokha spent his childhood on the farm “Pocoa de Corinto” where his father was working as manager, in 1901, he joined Public School Number 3 in the town of Talca. The following year he joined the San Pelayo de Talca Seminary, from which he was expelled in 1911 for reading forbidden authors like Rabelais and Voltaire and showing them to his classmates. His classmates give him the nickname “El amigo piedra” which he would transform into “Pablo de Rokha”. However, he left the university and dedicated his life to poetry. Around that time he made friends with other intellectuals like Pedro Sienna, Ángel Cruchaga Santa María and Vicente Huidobro, de Rokha also discovered the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the poète maudit and Walt Whitman, with whom he identified strongly. He also worked as journalist for two newspapers “La razón” and “La mañana”, and published some of his first poems in the magazine “Juventud”, de Rokha returned to Talca in 1914 feeling that he had failed in his goals. There, he read the collection of poems “Lo que me dijo el silencio” by Juana Inés de la Cruz, despite criticizing the poetry harshly, he fell in love with their writer and returned to Santiago in search of her. In 1916, Luisa Anabalón became his wife, changing her pseudonym to Winétt de Rokha, the poet went to the house of his future in-laws with a determined attitude, introducing himself as “a poet, and a very proud on”. He was not welcomed by the family and became an enemy of his future father-in-law, Don Indalecio, before the agreed date of the duel, the young poet kidnapped Luisa and married her immediately. Years later the poet remembered the incident with his in-laws, “¡Qué se había creído. El coronel Anabalón enseñándole urbanidad a mi heroísmo, como un elefante que le tirase la barba al mundo y más encima la suegra peluda y metafórica como el patíbulo. ”The colonel Anabalón teaching manners to my heroism, like an elephant pulling his beard at the world, and, on top of that, the mother in law hairy and metaphorical as the gallows. That year the poet published a collection of poems, “Versos de infancia”, between 1922 and 1924, de Rokha lived in San Felipe and Concepcion, where he founded the magazine Dynamo. It was also a time when people began to be able to participate in political life, empowered by the advance of industrialization
16.
David Rosenmann-Taub
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David Rosenmann-Taub is a Chilean poet, musician, and artist. His precocious talent in literature and music was recognized and encouraged by his father, a polyglot, and his mother. She began teaching him the instrument when he was two, by nine, he himself was giving piano lessons and he later studied composition, counterpoint, and fugue with the celebrated composer Pedro Humberto Allende. He began writing poetry at an early age, his first published work. He graduated from the University of Chile in 1948, for Los Surcos Inundados, he received the Premio Municipal de Poesía, the Chilean equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His poetry has been admired by authors as disparate as Witold Gombrowicz, Victoria Ocampo, in 1976, he began to travel, lecturing on poetry, music, and aesthetics in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, where he settled in 1985. His writings since that time are now being published in Chile, along with reissues of his older works
17.
Porfirio Barba-Jacob
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Miguel Ángel Osorio Benítez, better known by his pseudonym, Porfirio Barba-Jacob, was a Colombian poet and writer. Born in Santa Rosa de Osos, Antioquia, to parents Antonio María Osorio and Pastora Benítez, in 1895 he started his travels, first through Colombia, and from 1907 to Central America and the United States, before finally settling down in 1930 in Mexico City. Around 1902 in Bogotá, he founded the literary magazine El cancionero antioqueño, short after, he wrote the novel Virginia, which was never published because the original manuscript was confiscated by the mayor of Santa Rosa for alleged immorality. In 1906 he moved to Barranquilla where he adopted the pseudonym Ricardo Arenales and he continued to use this pseudonym until 1922, when in Guatemala he adopted a new pseudonym which he would use for the rest of his life, Porfirio Barba-Jacob. Around 1907, still in Barranquilla, he wrote his first poems, such as Árbol viejo, Campiña florida, during his journey through Central America, Mexico and the US, he contributed to many magazines and journals. He befriended Porfirio Díaz, which led to his fleeing to Guatemala, then to Cuba, in 1918 he returned to Mexico, where it is said that he wrote a biography of Pancho Villa. In 1922 he was expelled by Álvaro Obregón and fled again to Guatemala, Barba-Jacob then went to El Salvador, and after being deported by Alfonso Quiñones, travelled to Honduras, New Orleans and Cuba. In 1927 he returned to Colombia and, after some recitals and contributions to the Colombian journal El Espectador and he died in 1942 of tuberculosis in Mexico City. Four years after his death, on 11 January 1946, his ashes were claimed by the Colombian government, poemas intemporales A detailed account of Barba-Jacobs life
18.
Jorge Isaacs
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Jorge Isaacs Ferrer was a Colombian writer, politician and soldier. His only novel, María, became one of the most notable works of the Romantic movement in Spanish-language literature and his father was George Henry Isaacs, an English Jew originally from Jamaica. He first settled in Chocó, Colombia, where he made a fortune from gold mining and he then moved to Cali where he converted to Christianity, bought his Colombian citizenship from Simon Bolivar and paid for it in cows. He married Manuela Ferrer Scarpetta, daughter of a Spanish Navy officer and he also owned two haciendas near Cali, called La Manuelita and El Paraíso. The latter would provide the setting for María, El Paraiso has been preserved as a museum, with emphasis upon its relation to the novel. Jorge Isaacs was born in Quibdo in 1837 and he was first educated in Cali, then in Popayán and, finally, in Bogotá between 1848 and 1852. Isaacs returned to Santiago de Cali in 1852 without finishing his baccalaureate studies, in 1854 he fought for seven months in the Cauca Campaign against the dictatorship of General José María Melo. In 1856 Isaacs married Felisa González Umaña, who was fourteen years-old at the time, during the time of the civil wars his family went through a period of economic hardship. Isaacs tried unsuccessfully to become a merchant as his father and he then turned to literature and wrote his first poems between 1859 and 1860. During that time he wrote several dramas of historical theme. Isaacs took arms again in 1860, this time against General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, in 1861 Isaacs father died, when the war ended Isaacs returned to Cali to take over the administration of his fathers businesses, but he found them deeply in debt. This forced him to auction off two of his fathers haciendas La Rita and La Manuelita, which were bought by the industrialist Santiago Eder, Isaacs economic hardship took him back to Bogotá, where he found that his literary efforts were being well received. The members of the readers club El Mosaico offered to publish his poems after Isaacs read them in one of their sessions and this compilation was published under the name Poesías in 1864. That year Isaacs took a job as the supervisor of the construction of a horse-path between Buenaventura and Cali and started to write María, around that time he also fell ill with malaria. When María was published in 1867 it became a success both in Colombia and in other Latin American countries. As a consequence Isaacs became a personality in Colombia and his newly found fame allowed him to start a career as journalist. As a journalist he directed the newspaper La República, of conservative tendencies. As a politician he first joined the Conservative Party, but later switched to the Radical Party, in 1870 he was sent to Chile as consul general
19.
Rafael Pombo
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Rafael Pombo is one of the great poets of Colombia, and the best exponent of romanticism in the country. Great Encyclopedia of Colombia José Rafael de Pombo y Rebolledo was a Colombian poet born in Bogotá. Trained as a mathematician and an engineer in a school, Rafael Pombo served in the army. After completing his assignment, he was hired by D. Appleton & Company in New York to translate into Spanish nursery rhymes from the Anglo-Saxon oral tradition. The product of work, more than a translation, was a transformative adaptation published in two books under the titles Cuentos pintados para niños and Cuentos morales para niños formales. In spite of his extensive and diverse works, Rafael Pombo is mostly remembered for this contribution to childrens literature. Among his most popular childrens fables are Michín, Juan Chunguero, Pastorcita, La Pobre Viejecita, Simón el Bobito, El Gato Bandido, after seventeen years in the United States of America, Rafael Pombo returned to Colombia, where he worked as a celebrated translator and journalist. On August 20,1905 he was crowned as Colombias best poet - his Poesías Completas was published in 1957, Rafael Pombo remained in Colombia until his death on May 5,1912
20.
Nobel Laureate
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They were established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, which dictates that the awards should be administered by the Nobel Foundation. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was established in 1968 by the Sveriges Riksbank, each recipient, or laureate, receives a gold medal, a diploma, and a sum of money, which is decided by the Nobel Foundation, yearly. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and an award that has varied throughout the years. In 1901, the recipients of the first Nobel Prizes were given 150,782 SEK, in 2008, the laureates were awarded a prize amount of 10,000,000 SEK. The awards are presented in Stockholm in a ceremony on December 10. In years in which the Nobel Prize is not awarded due to events or a lack of nominations. The Nobel Prize was not awarded between 1940 and 1942 due to the outbreak of World War II, between 1901 and 2015, the Nobel Prizes and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 573 times to 900 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 870 individuals and 23 organizations, four Nobel laureates were not permitted by their governments to accept the Nobel Prize. Six laureates have received more than one prize, of the six, UNHCR has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize twice. Also the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Bardeen twice, two laureates have been awarded twice but not in the same field, Marie Curie and Linus Pauling. Among the 870 Nobel laureates,48 have been women, the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie and she was also the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes, the second award being the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, given in 1911. A In 1938 and 1939, the government of Germany did not allow three German Nobel nominees to accept their Nobel Prizes. The three were Richard Kuhn, Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 1938, Adolf Butenandt, Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 1939 and they were later awarded the Nobel Prize diploma and medal, but not the money. B In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Peace was not awarded, the Nobel Foundations website suggests that it would have been awarded to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, however, due to his assassination earlier that year, it was left unassigned in his honor. C In 1958, Russian-born Boris Pasternak, under pressure from the government of the Soviet Union, was forced to decline the Nobel Prize in Literature. D In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre refused to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, E In 1973, Lê Ðức Thọ declined the Nobel Peace Prize. His reason was that he felt he did not deserve it because although he helped negotiate the Paris Peace Accords, F In 2010, Liu Xiaobo was unable to receive the Nobel Peace Prize as he was sentenced to 11 years of imprisonment by the Chinese authorities
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Mariano Brull
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Mariano Brull Caballero was a Cuban poet usually associated with the French Symbolist movement. Two Symbolists who strongly influenced him were Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, because of his interest in the sounds of words, he is known for a type of poetry called jitanjáfora in which the words are virtually meaningless, their sounds all-important. A diplomat by profession, he lived years in various countries of Europe. Brull was born in Camagüey, in eastern Cuba, where his father, Miguel Brull and his mother, Celia Caballero, was descended from a family that had resided in Cuba for many generations. As a child he lived in Ceuta and Málaga in Spain and it was during his teenage years, as a student in Camagüey, that he discovered his passion for poetry. He and other students founded a magazine for which they wrote poems. Eagerly reading all the poetry he could, young Brull was especially struck by the work of the French Symbolist poets, in 1908 he moved to Havana where he attended the university, graduating with a Doctor of Law degree at age 22. He worked in a law office but also wrote poetry for the magazine El Fígaro, during 1914 and 1915 he was a member of the small group that formed around the Dominican literary critic, Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Henríquez, believing Brull had a future as a poet, became his mentor, introducing him to editors, in 1916 Brull published his first book of poetry, La casa del silencio. Shortly afterwards he married Adela Baralt and, switching careers, entered the Cuban diplomatic service, though impatient to reach Europe, the first two countries he was sent to as a diplomat were the United States and Peru. In the mid 20s he was stationed in Madrid, while in Madrid, some of Brulls early poetry was published in Paris in a French translation. In 1923 Brull joined about 60 young professionals of Havana who decided to take a stance against the reigning passivity and mediocrity in politics. Called El Grupo Minorista, they demanded an end to years of cultural backwardness, in politics, they denounced dictatorships and called for the formation of a Cuban government more responsive to the people. In 1928 he published his book of poetry, Poemas en menguante. Though also published in Paris, where he was now living, all of his books were small editions for friends and family, paid for out of his pocket. The Brulls lived in Paris from 1927 to 1934 with only two interruptions, a year, each, in Berne and Havana, Brull spent the Great Depression back in Paris. Two or three times a year found him traveling, in 1934 his third book of poetry, Canto redondo, was brought out in Paris. He was stationed in Rome between 1934 and 1937 where fascism was alive and thriving, during these years he was Cubas delegate to the XVII Reunion of the Assembly of the League of Nations and, also, Commissioner for the repatriation of Cubans fleeing the Spanish Civil War
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