Patriotism and romanticism
The first inhabitants of Uruguay, the Guarani Indians gave Uruguay its name, with multiple interpretations, but had little time to add their stone to the edifice of Uruguayan letters, victims of forced assimilation as will also be the Charrúas. Their fate, their way of life, and more broadly the popular culture, will however irrigate the beginnings of national literature, thanks to Bartolomé José Hidalgo, intimately linked to this land where he was born in 1788, to the point that he will join the fight for independence led by "the Orientals" and José Gervasio Artigas at their head. A pioneer of "gaucho literature", he followed its double inclination: patriotism and folklore. Among his writings, still appreciated today, are Cielito de la Independencia and Cielito Oriental, but also dialogues, such as Un Gaucho de la Guardia del Monte and Relación de las fiestas mayas. Paradoxically, Francisco Acuña de Figueroa (1791-1862) signed theNational Anthem , but remained faithful to Spain. He also composed a large body of work with a strong satirical accent, published post-mortem and comprising no less than twelve volumes. Soon the Romantic movement was established, to which Adolfo Berro (1819-1841) belonged, who, despite his brief existence, left the remarkable Población de Montevideo and Yandubayú y Liropeya. More unclassifiable, Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born in 1846 in Montevideo and died in 1870 in Paris, barely older than his predecessor, probably also from tuberculosis. To tell the truth, his biography is as fragmentary as his Songs of Maldoror, published in their complete version in Belgium in 1869 under the pseudonym of Comte de Lautréamont, may seem enigmatic. On the day of his death, his work had barely sold, so it was a strange combination of circumstances that led the art magazine La Jeune Belgique to publish an excerpt in 1885... which excited the surrealists! Since then, this impenetrable text is a classic, mythical and brilliant.
On the other side of the Atlantic, romanticism and patriotism are intertwined, as a matter of course, by Eduardo Acevedo Díaz (1851-1921) and by Juan Zorrilla de San Martín. The former took on political functions, the latter became a diplomat, both were journalists and were inspired by the history, past and present, of their nation. Díaz wrote novels (from Brenda in 1886 to Lanza y Sable in 1914), essays(Carta política) and short stories(El primer suplicio); Zorrilla wrote poems, including Tabaré (1888), the love story between an Indian and a Spanish woman at the end of the sixteenth century, which was elevated to the status of a national epic. He also wrote La Leyenda patria, an ode composed in one week to the glory of the Thirty-Three Orientals who obtained on August 28, 1828 the signing of the Treaty of Montevideo proclaiming Uruguay's independence. In 1866, Jules Laforgue left his native town for good to join his father's town, Tarbes, when he was only 6 years old. He became a reader for a German empress(Berlin, the court and the city, published by L'Escalier) and the author of poetry marked by spleen(Les Complaintes published by Flammarion, L'Imitation de Notre-Dame de la lune published by Gallimard), as a foretaste of the tuberculosis that would take him away at the age of 27. In Uruguay, romantic melancholy is part of a new trend that is about to conquer Spanish-language literature, following in the footsteps of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), a Nicaraguan poet and instigator of "modernismo.
Modernism and avant-garde
The essayist José Enrique Rodó, author of Ariel (1900), inspired by William Shakespeare's The Tempest, had an abundant correspondence with Darío and was in fact declared the theoretician of Uruguayan modernism. This literary movement aims at renewal, as its name indicates, but also at the union between the search for aesthetic harmony (vocabulary, metrics, refinement and even lyricism) and the disharmony of the world, which translates into feelings of loneliness or rejection, the desire to escape, eroticism, and sometimes the defense of the disenfranchised.. If its definition is broad, it is perhaps because modernism is above all the symbol of an era, which is why many authors are found there, including the famous Julio Herrera y Reissig, to whom we owe Las Pascuas del tiempo (before he switched to symbolism with Los Parques abandonados and then Pianos crepusculares), he was a perfect contemporary of Florencio Sánchez (1875-1910), a playwright who is said to have introduced modern drama, for example, with his play M'hijo el dotor, in which the eternal dispute between the arrogance of a city boy and the pride of his peasant father was played out. In another, darker vein, Horace Quiroga had to suffer the death of his family so often that he finally took his own life in 1937, at the age of 58. His nightmarish stories have been translated by Métailié(Tales of Love, Madness and Death, Anaconda) and by Quidam(The Persecuted). The death of Delmira Augusti was not more serene, murdered in 1914 by her ex-husband, she did not know her 28 years. A precocious poetess, her sensual poetry - which earned her the admiration of the greatest, including Rubén Darío, whom she considered her master - can be found in a bilingual edition published by Cap de l'étang (Cantos de la manana/The Morning Songs and Los Calices vacios/The Empty Chalices).
Each on their own side of the ocean, two authors will open the way to metaphysical poetry, heralding the avant-garde current. Although he left his native country at the age of 10, Jules Supervielle remained very attached to it and returned there as often as possible. In Uruguay (Editions des Equateurs), he describes the lost paradise of childhood. But this one is tainted by a terrible tragedy since he learns that those they thought were his parents are in fact his uncle and his aunt, who took him in when he was only an infant and already an orphan. It is after this unexpected revelation that he begins to write down his dreams, as an impossible escape from reality. His work will focus on the unconscious and the pain of exile which will give him his first important collection, Débarcadères (in Gravitations, Gallimard), in 1922. The following year, he published a half-dreamy, half-scary novel, L'Homme de la pampa, available from the same publisher. The "Prince of Poets", as he was called by his peers, died in 1960 after a long life of protean writing and constant back and forth between his two countries of heart. From metaphysical preoccupations to philosophy, there is only one step that separates Supervielle's work from that of Carlos Sabat Ercasty (1887-1982), which has not been translated into French, even though he influenced immense writers such as Pablo Neruda, and won the prestigious National Literature Prize and the Uruguayan Literature Prize. His Poemas del hombre (1921-1922) are divided into several volumes that take as their subject the will, the heart, time and the sea. He is readily associated with the postmodernist and already avant-garde "Generation of 20", spearheaded by Juana de Ibarbourou (1892-1979), nicknamed "Juana de América" by Zurrilla, a pioneer of feminism and a member of the National Academy of Letters since its creation in 1947. She was a pioneer of feminism and a member of the National Academy of Letters since its creation in 1947. Her poetry(La Rose de los Vientos, Oro y tormenta, Perdida, etc.), which is infatuated with eroticism and nature, and tormented by the fear of suffering and death, was nominated for the Nobel Prize on four occasions. Finally, we should mention the ultraist Emilio Oribe (1893-1975), the fabulist Fesliberto Hernández (1902-1964), whose Hortenses can be read in Points, and above all Virginia Brindis de Salas (1908-1958), who was the first black woman in Latin America to publish a book of poetry(Cien cárceles de amor).
In the 20th century, questioning reality
With Juan Carlos Onetti, Uruguayan literature is part of the "Latin American boom", this explosion of young talent that in the 1960s and 1970s will enter the modernity ... even in reality. His own rhymes with disenchantment, so much so that after going into exile in Madrid to escape the dictatorship, he decided not to leave his bed, drinking whiskey and reading detective novels until he breathed his last on May 30, 1994. He signed his literary testament with Cuando ya no importante(When Nothing Matters, Bourgois), putting an end to a bibliography that, from El Pozo(The Well, 10-18) onwards, spelled out his existential anguish (not without a certain humor). Although some of his books are now out of print in our language, we still have the possibility of following in his footsteps Santa Maria, the imaginary city that served as a setting for his La Vie brève and the collection Les Bas-fonds du rêve (Gallimard).
Mario Benedetti will resist in another way to the world and its drifts by becoming a political activist. Also very involved in the Cuban revolution, he also knew the exile but also, according to his formula, the "desexile", a theme that he will dig in many of his works. With Who of Us Can Judge (1953), reprinted in 2019 by Autrement, we are allowed to familiarize ourselves with this writer, prolific and skilled in all areas, whose death on May 17, 2009, at 88 years, prompted a day of national mourning and a solemn burial in the Uruguayan Pantheon in the Montevideo cemetery.
Thus, the novel genre is imposed, although poetry persists and tries to explore new territories, always more singular thanks to the "nomadic words" of Ida Vitale, sensitive poetess and symbolist crowned, at the honorable age of 95 years, by the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2018(Ni plus, ni moins, Seuil), always more distant thanks to the journeys that promises Ricardo Paseyro (1925-2009) with The Divided Soul and In the high sea of the air (Corvelour editions). Saúl Ibargoyen (1930-2019) acts as a link, who also had dual Uruguayan-Mexican nationality, and can be read in verse(Verano violento/Étéviolent, published by Alidades) and in prose(Toute la terre, published by À plus d'un titre).
However, the cruel reality of the twentieth century leaves little room for poetic sentiment, so fiction becomes a vehicle to say the unspeakable, that of Auschwitz and military oppression respectively in The Letters that never arrived and El Bataraz by Mauricio Rosencof (Folies d'encre), that of the plundering of a continent in Les Veines ouvertes de l'Amérique latine by Eduardo Galaeno (Pocket, Terre humaine collection), or that of the impossibility of being in Le Roman lumineux (Noir sur Blanc) by the unclassifiable Mario Levrero. Always in the background, disillusionment leads to the need to question one's own identity as well as the more global one of the society whose painful past is not forgotten, whose uncertain future does not really rhyme with the promise of a bright future. Each in his own category, the writers born in the second half of the century question tirelessly, even if it means being disturbing. Thus, Tomás de Mattos (1747-2016) returns in 1988 in ¡Bernabé, Bernabé! to the massacre of Salsipuedes (1831), the culmination of the armed struggle led by Bernabé Rivera against the Charrúas, a people now extinct whose memory haunts only the memorial dedicated to them in the heart of the Uruguayan capital. As for Carlos Liscano, he used his own tragic history as fertile ground for an incredibly talented work. Sentenced to thirteen years in prison (1972-1985) for his membership in the Tupamaros movement, it was in the penitentiary that he began to write to survive the boredom and solitude highly mortifying. His texts have been republished by Belfond - The Inconstant Reader, Memories of the Recent War, The Writer and the Other - and deserve to be widely read. In a very literary logic, after his interminable imprisonment and several years of exile, he found refuge in the National Library, where he became the curator.
Acritic and teacher, Juan Carlos Mondragón has been acclaimed for his work on various writers, including Lautréamont and Onetti, but he has broken the barrier by creating his own. Intelligent and subtle, his books are similar to his own, knowing how to focus on an individual destiny to find a universal echo(The Peral submarine, Passion and oblivion of Anastassia Lizavetta, Brussels piano-bar, published by Seuil). In the same way, Carmen de Posadas will play with the focal points and will even offer herself a big gap, forsaking the youth literature in favor of the adult novel, sometimes very black. Very well represented in the Seuil catalog, she offers an acerbic, not to say cynical, look that does not leave anyone indifferent, scratching the wealthy class in Cinq mouches bleues (Five Blue Flies), triturating petty jealousies in Petites infamies (Little Infamies), and confirming her taste for unmentionable secrets in Le Témoin invisible (Invisible Witness). His ferocity resonates perhaps with that of Felipe Polleri, who can be discovered at Christophe Lucquin's publishing house(L'Ange gardien de Montevideo, Baudelaire, Allemagne! Allemagne!), or with that of Rafael Courtoisie, who dissects at leisure the body and its wanderings - including organ trafficking and heavy plastic surgery - in Le Roman du corps (published by L'Atanoir). For his part, it is his characters that Pablo Casacuberta likes to examine from every angle, confronting them with situations that are certainly banal but nonetheless inextricable: the relationship with the father in Scipio, the end of adolescence in Here and Now, decrepitude in An Iron Health. Continuing in this vein, the new generation continues to hold up a disturbing mirror, using new means: autofiction in the case of playwright Sergio Blanco(La Colère de Narcisse, published by Actualités éditions), mystery in the case of the young author Cécilia Curbelo(La Décision de Camille ou La Quête de Lucia, published by Des Nouvelles d'ailleurs), science fiction in the case of Fernanda Trías(Crasse rose, Actes Sud).
