Luis cardoza y aragon biography
1926: Luis Cardoza y Aragón
This week I'm thinking about Luis Cardoza y Aragón's Maelstrom: Films telescopiados, a 1926 anti-novel, or prose poem, or Surrealist document published in Paris. Cardoza y Aragón was born in Guatemala, and like many Latin American sons of privilege spent time in France (where he hung out with his compatriot, Nobel laureate and high modernist Miguel Ángel Asturias), absorbing the newest and most reckless elements of the cultural avant-garde: the book has references to numerous still-famous figures in Twenties painting, music, and literature, along with a delirious fantasia on the new world coming into being in the wake of war and the crumbling of the old moralism.
Here are two paragraphs from a now-deleted Goodreads review I wrote when I first read it:
Everything I love about art of the 1920s — telegraphic comic-strip surrealism, a restless drive for new and surprising imagery, an unembarrassed embrace of popular culture whether that means jazz, comic strips, movies, or vaudeville, and (less easily identifiable) a haunting fragility that shivers at the memory of having passed beneath the shadow of one great war and the madness flinging headlong towards another — is present in this book. Insofar as it has a narrative, it is the history of a poet named Keemby (the English phonetic spelling of how a Spanish speaker would pronounce the name Quimby), his adventures in Pompierlandia (a reference to the academic artists of French tradition), his love affair with a landscape, his ruminations on God, art, and poetry, his decision not to commit suicide, and, in the first sentence of the book, his murder by cinema shadow. Magic realism nothing, there’s nothing realistic anywhere in the book (save perhaps the emotional content, scorned by the text), but there is plenty of magic, which is just another word for imagination.
It’s extremely funny, as well as being wistful and stirring and erotic and fantastic and occasionally cCardoza y Aragón, Luis (1904–1992)
Luis Cardoza y Aragón (b. 21 June 1904; d. 4 September 1992), Guatemalan poet, essayist, and art critic. Widely recognized for his book Guatemala: Las líneas de su mano (1955), Cardoza y Aragón was one of modern Guatemala's most important literary figures. Following the surrealist tradition of the 1920s, he used experiences in Europe to nourish his aesthetic and social preoccupations through poetic works such as Luna Park (1923) and Maelstrom (1926). With the French anthropologist Georges Raynaud he translated a pre-Columbian Maya-Quiché drama, Rabinal Achí (1928).
In 1931 Cardoza chose exile in Mexico over a return to Guatemala, which was entering one of the most brutal and repressive periods of its modern history under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico y Castañeda (1931–1944). He continued to publish his poetry—Soledad (1936) and El sonámbulo (1937)—and began to write critical essays on contemporary Mexican art, including the controversial volume La nube y el reloj (1940).
Cardoza returned to Guatemala in October 1944, on the eve of the revolution. He was cofounder of Revista de Guatemala (1945) and continued his artistic and political commitment to the revolution until its defeat in 1954.
Cardoza returned to Mexico, where he completed and published Guatemala: Las líneas de su mano (1955), in which he underscores his personal experiences through a presentation of Guatemala's cultural and political heritage. His poetic account of Guatemala, and the hopes of the October Revolution, establish this work as essential reading for understanding Guatemala and its people as well as Cardoza y Aragón's life. He died in Mexico City.
See alsoLiterature: Spanish Americaxml.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A brief overview and a selected bibliography are in Francisco Albizúrez Palma and Catalina Barrios y Barrios, Historia de la literatura guatemalteca, vol. 2 (1986), pp. 205-213. A collection of critical essays, including art
Luis Cardoza y Aragón was a home
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Luis Cardoza y Aragón
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Guatemalan, 1904–1992
Better known in international literary circles for his poetry and his seminal works on Mexican mural painting, Luis Cardoza y Aragón left behind an important body of essays.
A constant search for innovation and a surrealist perspective characterize his extensive literary production. This experimentation with literary forms led him to conceptualize the essay as a “genre that has much of poetry and the most rigorous thought.” In his essays, Cardoza y Aragón blends poetic prose, chronicles, memoirs, and other literary forms to provide texture and depth to his analysis. He explores complex issues from several perspectives, allowing tension and doubt to emerge.
A lifetime radical, committed to the cause of socialism, freedom, and democracy, Cardoza y Aragón struggled against all forms of “isms” in the cultural and political arena.
In his essays on art production he staunchly defends artistic freedom and rejects any attempt to value the work of art on political or ideological merits. Throughout the years, Cardoza y Aragón openly debated with leftist intellectuals and artists on this question, while proclaiming the need to develop a Marxist aesthetics.
His best-known essay, Guatemala, las líneas de su mano (1955; Guatemala, the lines in her hand), exemplifies both Cardoza y Aragón’s political thought and his hybrid approach to the genre. The book is a mixture of memoirs, short stories, literary and cultural criticism, and political and historical analysis. Exiled in Mexico from 1932, Cardoza y Aragón returned to Guatemala in 1944 to participate in the revolutionary process that took place under the administrations of Juan José Arevalo (1944–51) and Jacobo Arbenz (1951–54). During those years Cardoza y Aragón began to write the essay, but had to finish it in Mexico shortly after the 1954 military coup that enLuis Cardoza y Aragón
Guatemalan writer, essayist, poet, art critic and diplomat
In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Cardoza and the second or maternal family name is Aragón.
Luis Cardoza y Aragón (June 21, 1904 - September 4, 1992) was a Guatemalan writer, essayist, poet, art critic, and diplomat. Born in Antigua Guatemala, he spent part of his life living in exile in Mexico.
Cardoza attended primary school in Antigua Guatemala and at the Colegio Centroamericano in Guatemala City. His received a secondary education in the city's Instituto Nacional Central para Varones. In the 1920s, Cardoza moved to Paris, France where he became friends with André Breton. Influenced by the avant-garde members of the surrealist movement, his first work titled "Luna Park" was published in 1923 and dedicated to the Guatemalan writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927). He also got to know fellow Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias who came to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Decades later in 1991 Cardoza wrote a book entitled Miguel Ángel Asturias, Casi Novela (Ediciones Era) about their time in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s that earned him the 1992 Mazatlan Literature award in Mexico.
Exile and diplomatic career
Luis Cardoza was appointed Consul General of Guatemala in New York City under the Guatemalan government of Lázaro Chacón but in the early 1930s left the job and his country because of the dictatorial rule of new President Jorge Ubico. He chose to live in self-imposed exile in Mexico City where he became a member of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), an artist and intellectual group (Renato Leduc, Federico Cantú. Federico Cantú Garza Luis Ortiz Monasterio, Alfonso Reyes, Jose Moreno Villa) that at the time had considerable influence on the artistic, cultural and political life of Mexico. In 1936 Cardoza welcomed to Mexico the French artist Antonin Artaud who had been an early influence as par