Leopoldo Marechal
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Leopoldo Marechal (Buenos Aires, June 11 of 1900 - June 26, 1970) was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century.
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[edit] Biographical notes
Born in Buenos Aires into a family of French and Spanish descent, Marechal became a primary school teacher and a high school professor after obtaining his degree despite enormous economic difficulties. During the 20's he was among the poets who rallied around the movement represented by the literary journal Martín Fierro. While his first published works of poetry, Los aguiluchos (1922) and Días como flechas (1926) tend towards vanguardism, his Odas para el hombre y la mujer shows a blend of novelty and a more classical style. It is with this collection of poems that Marechal obtains his first official recognition as a poet in 1929, the Premio Municipal de Poesía of the city of Buenos Aires.
He travels to Europe for the first time in 1926 and in Paris meets important intellectuals and artists such as Picasso, Basaldúa and Antonio Berni. In his second visit to Paris in 1929, he settles in Montparnasse and widens his circle of friends, which now include artists Aquiles Badi, Alfredo Bigatti, Horacio Butler, Juan del Prete, Raquel Forner, Victor Pissarro and the sculptor José Fioravanti, who would later sculpt the poet's bust in bronze. It is during this second Parisian experience that Marechal writes the first two chapters of his novel Adán Buenosayres, which he would publish only in 1948. Some of its protagonists are based on his friends of the Martin Fierro group, like artist Xul Solar and poet Jacobo Fijman, portrayed as the astrologer Schultze and the philosopher Samuel Tesler.
Back in Buenos Aires, Marechal marries María Zoraida Barreiro in 1934. Their two daughters María de los Ángeles and María Magdalena are born some years after. Marechal obtains once again the First Prize of the prestigious Premio Municipal de Poesía in 1940 for his poetry book entitled Sonetos a Sophia. The poet's young wife dies in 1947 leaving the poet with two small children.
The publication of the writer's Adán Buenosayres - considered by many as the fundamental novel of Argentine literature - did not have the repercussion expected, possibly due to the poet's open sympathies for the government of Juan Domingo Perón, the controversial populist leader greatly influenced by his radical wifeEvita. Among the novel's most ardent admirors was the young Julio Cortázar, who wrote a long critical study in the literary magazine Realidad in 1949. Despite this and other writers' support, Marechal's novel and the rest of his monumental work remained widely ignored by many colleagues of the literary world, including Jorge Luis Borges, whose mother and sister had been imprisoned during the Peronist regime.
Although the seminal influence of his first and subsequent novels has tended to classify him mainly as a novelist, Marechal is first and foremost a poet of primary importance. In fact, even his first novel - which is mainly autobiographical - is in his own words, an extension of poetry: "When I wrote Adán Buenosayres I never intended it to be other than poetry. Ever since my early youth, and taking Aristotle's Poetics as my starting point, I have always believed that all literary genres are and should be types of poetry, whether epic, dramatic or lyrical."
Marechal was not a widely recognized figure in Argentine literature until the 1965 reprint of Adán Buenosayres, which ignited a resurgence of interest in his work.
The poet was officially invited to Cuba in 1967, where he formed part of the international jury for the annual Casa de las Américas prize for literature. Marechal has since become a fundamental influence in Argentine poetry and fiction, although he continues to be a relatively unknown figure on the international scene. Among his more well known literary disciples and friends are Argentine poets Rafael Squirru and Fernando Demaría, to whom he dedicated his Heptamerón's Alegropeya and Poética respectively. Marechal's daughters have established a Foundation (see External Links) for the diffusion of their father's work.
[edit] Work
[edit] Poetry
- Aguiluchos (1922)
- Odas para el hombre y la mujer (1929)
- Laberinto de amor (1936)
- Cinco poemas australes (1937)
- El centauro (1940)
- Cantos a Sophía (1940)
- Canto de San Martín (1950)
- Heptamerón (1966)
- El poema del Robot (1966)
- Poema de la Física (posthumous publication).
[edit] Novels
- Adán Buenosayres (1948)
- El banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965)
- Megafón o la guerra (1970)
[edit] Drama
- Antígona Vélez (1950)
- Las tres caras de Venus, (1952)
- La batalla de José Luna, (1953)
- Don Juan, (1978)
[edit] Essays
- Historia de la calle Corrientes, (1937)
- Cuaderno de navegación, (1966)
[edit] Works about Leopoldo Marechal
- Rafael Squirru, Leopoldo Marechal, Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1961.
[edit] Trivia
- The name of the Los Abuelos de la Nada band ("The Grandparents of Nothingness") was taken from a rant contained in Marechal's "Severo Arcángelo".
[edit] Sources
- Gordon, Ambrose. "Marechal, Leopoldo." In Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century Revised Edition, ed. Leonard S. Klein (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983)
[edit] External links
- http://www.geocities.com/soho/1464/
- Manuscripts in the University of Notre Dame Libraries.
- Biography (Spanish)
- Some texts by Marechal (Spanish)
- Marechal's Las herramientas de la Patria (Spanish)
- El Adán Buenosayres comentado por Julio Cortázar
- Los poemas mas representativos del Poeta Leopoldo Marechal, parte de su Obra.
- Hacia el Adán Buenosayres - La Máquina del Tiempo por Jorge Lafforgue
- Un demiurgo llamado Leopoldo Marechal - La Jornada Semanal por Alejandro Michelena
