From conquest to exile
History turned to bloodshed and ashes when the man nicknamed "Sun" by the natives, because of his blond hair, set foot on the South American continent. After plundering Yucatán and Mexico, Pedro de Alvarado attacked Guatemala in 1523, but the Mayas bravely resisted him for four years. Ironically, it was in Antigua Guatemala that his body was laid to rest, at his daughter's request, after he lost his life in 1541 during another attempt to plunder the Spice Islands. The human massacre went hand in hand with a cultural massacre, as the Mayan codices that survived the auto-da-fé can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Fortunately, the memory of stones is harder to erase: a stele found at the Tak'alik Ab'aj (El Asintal) site in 2020 revives the slim hope of one day deciphering the last secrets of the writing of a civilization that was, without doubt, grandiose. In fact, the inscriptions appearing on the site serve as a "missing link" between the writing of the Mayas and that of the Olmecs, who preceded them and settled on the territory in 1500 BC. Moreover, thanks to her research on another Guatemalan archaeological site, the renowned Piedras Negras, American epigraphist Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985) proved that certain symbols represented dates, and that the Maya were therefore recording real events from their past history. This was a major breakthrough in view of the subtleties of a language that is not only written with an alphabet, but uses mixed elements. The reading direction, which adapts according to the length of the text, makes comprehension even more difficult. According to her last wishes, Tatiana Proskouriakoff's ashes were scattered on this mythical spot.
Literally speaking, Guatemalan literature - that which is intelligible to us - only began to be written after the arrival of the Spaniards, and begins with a quasi-legendary figure, that of Sor Juana de la Concepción, whose life was documented by Thomas Gage, a 17th-century English missionary, but widely questioned until recently. She is said to have taken holy orders in 1619, at the age of 21. Enjoying her father's fortune, she was by no means a recluse: on the contrary, her apartments had the chic of a Baroque palace, where the artists of her time would gather. Nevertheless, poems attributed to her, including El ángel de los forasteros on the subject of her life in the convent, earned her the reputation of being the first Guatemalan poetess. She was followed by Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán (1643-1700), who wrote Recordación Florida, a chronicle in which he describes, among other things, the conquest of Guatemala, and above all Rafael Landivar (1731-1793), who earned the title of National Poet. His work is, however, the fruit of his banishment, since he was forced to leave his native country as a priest when the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and the Spanish colonies in 1767. Exiled to Italy, he wrote - in Latin! - Rusticatio Mexicana, a love song to the country of his birth, and to the country of which he was accustomed. His body was repatriated in the 20th century and now rests in his beloved Guatemala, which he never had the chance to see again.
From independence to dictatorship
While the 19th century ended with the birth of Antonio José de Irisarri, who cut his political and journalistic teeth in Chile rather than Guatemala, ending his life in New York in 1868, where he continued to write poetry and novels, the 20th century began with the birth of José Batres Montúfar (1809-1844). His short life mirrored the events that were shaking his country at the time, full of hopes and disappointments. Nevertheless, although his family destroyed some of his writings after his death, those that remain make him the best Guatemalan representative of the Romantic movement, with Al Volcán, San Juan and Yo pienso en ti. He also drew inspiration from the legends of his country to write satyrical tales such as Tradiciones de Guatemala and Tres cuentos alegres y picantes escritos en verso. A few years his junior, José Milla y Vidaurre inherited the title of father of the Guatemalan novel. He was born in 1822 in a world in upheaval: independence had been declared the previous year, and Guatemala's Captaincy General had been attached to Mexico. In the end, Augustin de Iturbide failed to fulfill his mission and was overthrown, but the foundations were laid for the political development of "Pepe Milla", who became a minister and ambassador. In the field of literature, he specialized more specifically in historical novels, publishing La Hija del Adelantado (1866), set in colonial times, El libro sin nombre, Los Nazarenos and above all El Visitador (1867), which marked the high point of his literary career and portrayed the English privateer Francis Drake. Máximo Soto Hall (1871-1944) was another novelist influenced by him. The latter was born in a country that, once again, had experienced many upheavals: Belgian and then German colonization, liberal revolution.. Guatemala was already under the yoke of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who had seized power in a coup d'état in 1898 and held it authoritatively until 1920, when one of Soto Hall's most famous books, El Problema, was published in Costa Rica in 1899, to great acclaim and controversy, and is still considered the first anti-imperialist novel.
The dictatorship was hardly conducive to freedom of expression, even for writers living abroad, such as Enrique Gómez Carrillo, who had moved to Paris when he was 18 in 1891, and whose pronounced taste for bohemianism earned him the threat of having his scholarship withdrawn if he did not decide to return to Madrid, which he did. This man, whose literary criticism had brought him to the attention of Rubén Darío during the latter's brief exile in Guatemala, nevertheless continued to write numerous articles and books, initially portraits of authors(Esquisses) and then, at the time of the First World War, war chronicles. He died in 1927 in the French capital, his body buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
We should also mention Rafael Arévelo Martínez (1884-1975), whose frail health prevented him from continuing his studies, but did nothing to diminish his precocious talent. Together with his friend Jaime Sabartès (1881-1968) - a Catalan and friend of Picasso who settled in Guatemala - he became the leader of the so-called "1910 generation" of painters. However, Arévalo also published short stories, first in the magazine Electra and then in the magazine Juan Chapín, of which he was editor-in-chief, notably L'Homme qui ressemblait à un cheval, a satirical portrait of the Colombian poet Porfirio Barba-Jacob, whom he compared to an equine, which caused quite a stir. After 1920, Arévelo became head of the National Library and continued to publish "psycho-zoological" works featuring very human animals(El mundo de los maharachías, Viaje a Ipanda). For his part, Jaime Sabartès joined the Alliance française, became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and organized exhibitions of modern art.
Openness and abundance
The twentieth century was hardly more peaceful, oscillating between periods of restriction and periods of openness. One of these periods saw the emergence of the "1920 generation", which saw the emergence of Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974), future winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Luis Cardoza y Aragón (1901-1992). Both opposed the dictatorship and embarked on careers as diplomats, both were passionate about their country's history, but both lived in exile, and both flourished in the avant-garde movement - from surrealism to magic realism - composing rich, sometimes difficult, often critical prose, novelistic in the case of the former, poetic in the case of the latter. If Cardoza's work(Quinta estación, Circulos concentricos, Tierra de belleza convulsiva, etc.) has not been translated into French despite the numerous distinctions it has received, it is possible to make up for it by discovering that of Asturias: Légendes du Guatemala and Poèmes indiens published by Gallimard, Monsieur le Président (his most incisive novel, which takes a South American dictator as its subject, published by GF Flammarion), Le Pape vert published by Albin Michel..
We should also mention Magdalena Spínola (1896-1991), a childhood friend of Miguel Ángel Asturias, who like him became involved in politics, particularly feminist issues. A life made up of travels, conferences and bereavements, saw her publish ardent poetry (from El preámbulo de la ma estra in 1937 to En Vela in 1971) that earned her posterity as the "Guatemalan Muse" and resonated with the work of her colleagues, including Romalia Alarcón Folgar and Elisa Hall de Asturias, born in 1900, who had to fight against the prevailing sexism. The former wrote some fifteen collections of poetry, from Plaquetes in 1938 to El Vendedor de trinos, published posthumously in 1976, while the latter published an essay on alcoholism(Madre maya) and two biographies on a 17th-century settler(Semilla de Mostaza and Mostaza), which were said to have such literary merit that she had to fight to prove that she was the author! Women have struggled to make their mark, yet they have left their mark on Guatemalan literature, like the poet Angelina Acuña (1905-2006), Luz Méndez de la Vega (1919-2012), who worked to safeguard the writings of her colleagues and was appointed to the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua, and Margarita Carrera (1929-2018), who received the Miguel Ángel Asturias Prize in 1996 for her biographies, essays and poems. Lucrecia Méndez, Ana Silvia Monzón and Regina José Galindo(Rage, éditions des Lisières) continue along these lines, combining activism, preservation and literary exploration.
On the men's side, Virgilio Rodríguez Macal (1919-1964) makes the link between tradition and the contemporary world in Guyacán, while Augusto Monterroso(Le Mouton noir et autres fables, éditions Rue Dorion) is recognized for the quality of his prose, even if it is sometimes a little wordy, as in his " Dinosaur ", which long remained the shortest fiction in the Spanish language(Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí : When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there). Although the regimes in power were not always kind to writers - playwright Manuel Arce Leal was forced into exile in France, poet Otto René Castillo was shot in 1967 and his counterpart Roberto Obregón, author of El aprendíz de profeta, "disappeared" in 1970 - a revival is undeniable, particularly since the highly committed Marco Antonio Flores (1937-2013) published Los Compañeros in 1976. New writers are now beginning to make a name for themselves far beyond our borders, from the all-rounder Rodrigo Rey Rosa translated by Gallimard(Manège, Pierres enchantées, Le Matériau humain, Les Sourds) to the highly talented Eduardo Halfon supported by the elegant Table ronde publishing house(Deuils, Monastère, Heliotropo 37, Deuils).
