Julio Cortázar

[AsgjëSikurDielli]

Julio Cortázar (1914 - 1984)


Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, of Argentine parents abroad on business. When he was four years old, his family returned to Buenos Aires, where he grew up in a suburb. Cortázar attended the Escuela Normal de Profesores Mariano Acosta, a teachers training college. In 1935 he received a degree as a secondary-level teacher. He studied then two years at the University of Buenos Aires and taught in secondary schools in Bolívar, Chivilcoy, and Mendoza. In 1944-45 he was a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo, Mendoza. He joined there a protest against Peron and was briefly imprisoned. After his release he left his post at the university. From 1946 to 1948 he was a director of a publishing company in Buenos Aires. He passed examinations in law and languages and worked then as a translator.

In 1951, in opposition to Peron's regime, Cortázar travelled to Paris, where he lived until his death. In 1953 he married Aurora Bernárdez. They separated and Cortázar lived with Carol Dunlop in later years. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a freelance translator. He translated among others Robinson Crusoe and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe into Spanish, Poe's influence is also seen in his work.

Los Reyes (1949) was Cortázar's earliest work of fantasy interest. The long narrative poem constituted a meditation on the role and fate of the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Cortázar's first collection of short stories, Bestiario, appeared in 1951. It included 'Casa tomada' (A House Taken Over), in which a middle-aged brother and sister find that their house is invaded by unidentified people. The story was first published by Jorge Luis Borges in the magazine called Los anales de Buenos Aires; Borges's sister illustrated it. However, Borges did not like Cortázar as a novelist and once said: "He is trying so hard on every page to be original that it becomes a tiresome battle of wits, no?" (Jorge Luis Borges, ed. by Richard Burgin, 1998)


'They have taken over our section,' Irene said. The knitting had reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.
--'Did you have time to bring anything?' I asked hopelessly.
--'No, nothing.'
--We had what we had on. I remembered fifteen thousand pesos in the wardrobe in my bedroom. Too late now.

(from 'A House Taken Over')

'Casa tomada' set the pattern for a typical Cortázar story - it begins in the real world, then introduces fantastic elements, which changes the rules of reality. In the title story a young girl senses that a tiger is roaming through her house. Other collections followed: Final de juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966), Octaedro (1974), and Alguien que anda por ahí (1977). 'Las Babas del Diablo' from Las Armas Secretas was filmed in 1966 by Michelangelo Antonioni under the title Blow-Up. In Cortazár's story, set in Paris, the protagonist is Roberto Michael, an amateur photographer, who sees a teenage boy and a young woman on a square, and shoots the scene. He develops the roll, enlarges the picture, and realizes that the woman was seducing the boy for a man in a car. The picture becomes Michael's life, he speaks of himself both in the fist person and third persons in the story: ".... nobody really knows who is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I'm seeing... or if, simply I'm telling a truth which is only my truth..." Antonioni used in his film version the theme of appearance versus reality and created around it a murder mystery, which he leaves open. Reality becomes in the film merely a subjective statement, "life itself is an illusion, a Dionysian celebration of masked and anonymous revels." (Neil D. Isaacs in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta, 1981)

"'It's like a waiting room, life is,' said the bald gentleman, carefully grinding out his cigarette with his shoe and examining his hands as if he didn't know what to do with them now; the elderly lady sighed a yes born of long years of agreeing, and put away her little bottle just as the door at the end of the corridor opened and the other lady came out with that look all the others envied, and an almost sympathetic goodbye when she got to the exit.'

(from 'Second Time Around')

[AsgjëSikurDielli]

As a novelist Cortázar gained first attention with Los premios (1960), which appeared when the author was 46. The story centered on a group of people brought together when they win a mystery cruise in a lottery. The ship-of-fools becomes a microcosmos of the world order. His masterpiece was Rayuela (1966, Hopscotch), an open-ended anti-novel, in which the reader is invited to rearrange the material. "The general idea behind Hopscotch, you see, is the proof of a failure and the hope of a victory. But the book doesn't propose any solution; it simply limits itself to showing the possible paths one can take to knock down the wall, to see what's on the other side."(interview from Evelyn Picon Garfield, Cortázar por Cortázar, 1978) The protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, is a writer who is surrounded by a circle of bohemian friends. After the the disappearance of La Maga, his mistress, Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires where he works in odd jobs. He meets his childhood friend, Traveller, with whom he operates an insane asylum, ending on the border of insanity himself.

Oliveira seeks a new world-view outside Cartesian rationalism. Though he never succeeds, his quest is depicted with humor, superb imagery, and optimism. There are two narrative sections: chapters 1-36, which are set in Paris, and chapters 37-56, set in Buenos Aires. The third selection is entitled "Expendable Chapters." The hopscotch progress begins at chapter 73. For this reading, led by the directions, the reader jumps forward and backward through the book.

Rayuela was intended to be a revolutionary novel. It opened the door to linguistic innovation of Spanish language and influenced deeply Latin American writers. The idea for a book based on disconnected noted continued in 62: Modelo para armar (1968). Here the reader had less instructions to arrange the parts. Libro de Manuel (1973) focused on the political condition of Latin America. In this case the various characters shuttle from a mysterious Zone and the City according to Godgame-like instructions they cannot understand or disobey. The novel formed a manual for the child Manuel, a sort of collage of press clippings, and among others revealed torture techniques used by U.S. soldiers in the Far East and juxtaposed them to similar tortures suffered by Latin American political prisoners.

Cortázar visited Cuba after the revolution, and in 1973 he travelled in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. Cortázar became in the 1970s a member of the Second Russell Tribunal for investigation of human rights abuses in Latin America. He also gave the Sandinistas the royalties of some of his last books and helped financially the families of political prisoners. When the seven-year ban on his entry into Argentina was lifted he visited his home country and Nicaragua in 1983.

In 1975 Cortázar was a visiting lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, and in 1980 he was a lecturer at Barnard College in New York. In 1981 he acquired French citizenship. Cortázar received numerous awards, including Médicis Prize for Libro de Manuel in 1974 and Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence in 1983. He died of leukemia in Paris on February 12, 1984. Cortázar's friend Christina Peri Rossi later pondered in her book Yo y Cortázar (2001) did the author die of AIDS instead of leukemia.


- "No one can retell the plot of a Cortázar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost." (Jorge Luis Borges)

[AsgjëSikurDielli]

An Excerpt from Cortazar's Hopscotch

Guy Manod decided to wake up when Ronald and Etienne agreed to listen to Jelly Roll Morton; opening one eye he decided that the back outlined in the light of the green candles must belong to Gregorovious. He shuddered, the green candles seen from a bed made a bad impression on him, the rain on the skylight was strangely mixed with the remnants of his dream-images, he had been dreaming about an absurdly sunny place, where Gaby was walking around nude and feeding crumbs to a group of stupid pigeons the size of ducks. "I have a headache," Guy said to himself. He was not in the least interested in Jelly Roll Morton although it was amusing to hear the rain on the skylight as Jelly Roll sang: "Stood on a corner, an' she was soakin' wet..." Wong would certainly have come up with a theory about real and poetic time, but was it true that Wong had mentioned making coffee? Gaby feeding the pigeons crumbs and Wong, the voice of Wong going in between Gaby's nude legs in a garden with brightly colored flowers, saying: "A secret I learned in the casino at Menton." Quite possible, after all, that Wong would appear with a pot full of coffee.


Jelly Roll was at the piano beating the time softly with his foot for lack of a better rhythm section. Jelly Roll could sing "Mamie's Blues" rocking a little, staring up at some decoration on the ceiling, or it was a fly that came and went or a spot that came and went in Jelly Roll's eyes. "Eleven twenty-four took my baby away-ay..." That's what life had been, trains bringing people and taking them away while you stood on the corner with wet feet, listening to a nickleodeon and laughing and cussing out the yellow windows of the saloon where you didn't always have enough money to go in. "Eleven twenty-four took my baby away-ay..." Babs had taken so many trains in her life, she liked to go by train if in the end there was some friend waiting for her, if Ronald softly put his hand on her hip the way he was doing now, sketching out the music on her skin, "Eleven-thirty'll carry her back one day," obviously some train would bring her back, but who knows if Jelly Roll was going to be on that platform, at that piano, that time he sang the blues about Mamie Desdume, the rain on a Paris skylight at one o'clock in the morning, wet feet, and a whore who muttered "If you can't hand me a dollar then hand me a rotten dime," Babs had said things like that in Cincinnati, ever woman had said things like that somewhere, even in the bed of a king, Babs had a very special idea of what the bed of a king was like but in any case some woman must have said something like, "If you can't give me a million, give me a lousy grand," a matter of proportions, and why was Jelly Roll's piano so sad, so much that rain that woke Guy up, that was making La Maga cry, and Wong who wasn't coming with the coffee.

"It's too much," Etienne said, sighing. "I don't know why I stand for that garbage. It's moving, but it's garbage."

"It's no Pisanello medal, of course," Oliveira said.

"Or opus whatever-you-want by Schoenberg," said Ronald. "Why did you want to hear it? Besides intelligence you also lack charity. Have you ever stood with your feet in a puddle at midnight? Jelly Roll has, you can tell when he sings, it's something you learn, man."

"I can paint better if my feet are dry," Etienne said. "And don't come around with any Salvation Army arguments. Why don't you put on something more intelligent, like those Sonny Rollins solos. At least those modern guys make you think of Jackson Pollock or Tobey, it's easy to see that they've left the age of the pianola and the box of watercolors."

"He's capable of believing in progress in art," Oliveira said yawning. "Don't pay any attention to him, Ronald, and with that hand you have free dig out that little record of the "Stack O'Lee Blues," when all's said and done I think it has a fine piano solo on it."

"That business about progress in art is ancient nonsense," Etienne said, "but in jazz as in any art there's always a flock of fakers. Music that can be translated into emotion is one thing, but emotion which pretends to pass as music is another. Paternal grief in F sharp, sarcastic laughter in yellow, violet and black. No, my boy, it's hard to say where art begins, but it's never that stuff."

No one seemed disposed to contradict him because Wong had quietly appeared with the coffee and Ronald, shrugging his shoulders, had turned loose Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians and after a terrible scratching they reached the theme that fascinated Oliveira, an anonymous trumpet followed by the piano, all wrapped up in the smoke of an old phonograph and a bad recording, of a corny prejazz band, all in all like those old records, showboats, Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies, its Charleston, its Black Bottom, its Shimmy, its Fox Trot, its Stomp, its Blues, to label its forms, this style and the other one, swing, bebop, cool, a counterpoint of romanticism and classicism, hot and intellectual jazz, human music, music with a history in contrast to stupid animal dance music, the polka, the waltz, the zamba, a music that could be known in Copenhagen as well as in Mendoza or Cape Town, a music that brings adolescents together, with records under their arms, that gives them names and melodies to use as passwords so they can know each other and become intimate and feel less lonely surrounded by bosses, families, and bitter love affairs, a music that accepts all imaginations and tastes, a collection of instrumental 78's with Freddie Keppard or Bunk Johnson, the reactionary cult of Dixieland, an academic specialization in Bix Beiderbecke, or in the adventures of Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, or Thad Jones, the vulgarities of Erroll Garner or Art Tatum, repentance and rejection, a preference for small groups, mysterious recordings with false names and strange titles and labels made up on the spur of the moment, and that whole freemasonry of Saturday nights in a student's room or in some basement cafe with girls who would rather dance to "Stardust" or "When Your Man Is Going to Put You Down," and have a sweet slow smell of perfume and skin and heat, and let themselves be kissed when the hour is late and somebody has put on the "The Blues With a Feeling" and hardly anybody is really dancing, just standing up together, swaying back and forth, and everything is hazy and dirty and lowdown and every man is stroking shoulders and the girls have their mouths half-opened and turn themselves to delightful fear and the night, taking them with a single hot phrase that drops them like a cut flower into the arms of their partners, and there comes a motionless race, a jump up into the night air, over the city until a miniature piano brings them to again, exhausted, reconciled, and still virgins until next Saturday, all of this from a kind of music that horrifies solid citizens who think that nothing is true unless there are programs and ushers, and that's the way things are and jazz ie like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in and tonight in Vienna Ella Fitzgerald is singing while in Paris Kenny Clarke is helping open a new cave and in Perpignan Oscar Peterson's fingers are dancing around and Satchmo, everywhere, with that gift of omnipresence given him by the Lord, in Birmingham, in Warsaw, in Milan, in Buenos Aires, in Geneva, in the whole world, is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something completely beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into obscure and forgotten central flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin, he shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the only one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or perhaps that there have been other paths that made for softer walking and that they had not taken those, or that they only took them in a halfway sort of way, and that a man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be bishop or knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on.


I set right here and think

three thousand miles away,
set right here and think


three thousand miles away,
can't remember the night
had the blues this bad any-way...

[ATMAN]

Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)

http://www.emcrise.com.br/nao-pereci.../cortazar2.jpg



Produttore dell'Argentina, uno dei padroni grandi della storia corta fantastica, che è stata confrontata a Jorge Luis Borges . Molte delle storia del Cortázar seguono la logica dei hallucinations e dei obsessions. I temi centrali nel suo lavoro sono la ricerca per l'identità, la realtà nascosta dietro le vite giornalieri della gente comune ed il angst existential. Il debito dell'autore allo symbolism ed al Surrealists francesi è stato dimostrato in un certo numero di studi. Diverso di Borges, Cortázar si è transformato in in un radicale politico che è stato coinvolto nelle dimostrazioni di anti-Peronist ed ha sostenuto la rivoluzione cuban, il Cile del Allende e Sandinista Nicaragua.

"nessuno retell della latta il diagramma di una storia di Cortázar; ogni consiste delle parole risolute in un ordine risoluto. Se proviamo a ricapitolarli, ci rendiamo conto che qualcosa è stata persa assai." (Jorge Luis Borges)
Julio Cortázar è stato sopportato a Bruxelles, Belgio, dei genitori dell'Argentina all'estero sul commercio. Quando aveva quattro anni, la sua famiglia ha rinviato a Buenos Aires, in cui si è sviluppato in su in un sobborgo. Cortázar ha assistito al Escuela Normal de Profesores Mariano Acosta, un'università di addestramento di insegnanti. In 1935 ha ricevuto un grado come insegnante del secondario-livello. Ha studiato allora due anni all'università di Buenos Aires ed insegnata in scuole secondarie in Bolívar, in Chivilcoy ed in Mendoza. In 1944-45 era un professore di letteratura francese all'università di Cuyo, Mendoza. Ha unito là una protesta contro Peron e brevemente imprisoned. Dopo il suo rilascio ha lasciato il suo alberino all'università. 1946 - 1948 era un direttore di un'azienda di pubblicazione a Buenos Aires. Di ha passato gli esami la legge e lingue e di ha lavorato di allora come traduttore.

In 1951, nell'opposizione al regime del Peron, Cortázar ha viaggiato a Parigi, in cui ha vissuto fino alla sua morte. In 1953 ha sposato Aurora Bernárdez. Hanno separato e Cortázar ha vissuto con Carol Dunlop durante gli anni più tardi. Da 1952 ha lavorato per l'Unesco come traduttore freelance. Ha tradotto tra altri Robinson Crusoe e le storia di Edgar Allan Poe nello Spagnolo, influenza del Poe inoltre è vista nel suo lavoro.

Los Reyes (1949) era lavoro più in anticipo del Cortázar di interesse di fantasia. Il poem narrativo lungo ha costituito una meditazione sul ruolo e sul destino del Minotaur nel suo labirinto. Prima accumulazione delle storia corte, Bestiario del Cortázar , comparso in 1951. Ha incluso 'il tomada del casa '(una Camera rilevata), in cui un fratello e una sorella middle-aged trovano che la loro casa è invasa dalla gente non identificata. La storia in primo luogo è stata pubblicata da Jorge Luis Borges nello scomparto denominato anales il de Buenos Aires del Los ; La sorella del Borges la ha illustrata. Tuttavia, Borges non ha gradito Cortázar come novelist e detto una volta: "sta provando così duro ad ogni pagina ad essere originale che si transforma in in una battaglia tiresome degli spiriti, no?" ( Jorge Luis Borges , ed. da Richard Burgin, 1998)

-- 'hanno assunto la direzione della nostra sezione, 'Irene detto. Il lavoro a maglia aveva annaspato fuori da lei mani ed il filato ha funzionato indietro verso il portello e disappared sotto esso. Quando ha visto che le sfere di filato erano dall'altro lato, ha caduto il lavoro a maglia senza guardarlo.
-- 'avete avuti tempo di portare qualche cosa?' Ho chiesto disperatamente.
-- 'no, niente.'
-- abbiamo avuti che cosa abbiamo avuti sopra. Mi sono ricordato di quindici mila pesi nel wardrobe nella mia camera da letto. Troppo in ritardo ora.
('da una Camera rilevata ')
'il tomada del casa 'ha determinato il modello per una storia tipica di Cortázar - comincia nel mondo reale, allora introduce gli elementi fantastici, che cambia le regole della realtà. Nella storia di titolo una ragazza giovane percepisce che una tigre sta vagando attraverso la sua casa. Altre collezioni seguite: De juego finale (1956), secretas di armas di Las (1959), fuego di EL di fuegos di los di Todos (1966), Octaedro (1974) ed ahí di por di anda del que di Alguien (1977). 'Las Babas del Diablo 'da Las Armas Secretas è stato filmato in 1966 da Michelangelo Antonioni sotto il blow-Up di titolo . Nella storia del Cortazár, l'insieme a Parigi, il protagonista è Roberto Michael, un photographer dilettante, che vede un ragazzo teenage e una donna giovane su un quadrato e spara la scena. Sviluppa il rullo, ingrandisce l'immagine e si rende conto che la donna stava seducendo il ragazzo per un uomo in un automobile. L'immagine si transforma in in vita del Michael, parla di sè entrambi nella persona del pugno e nelle terze persone nella storia: ".... nessuno realmente conosce chi sta dicendole, se sono io o che cosa realmente ha accaduto o che cosa sto vedendo... o se, semplicemente io sono dicendo ad una verità a quale è soltanto la mia verità... " Antonioni ha usato nella sua versione della pellicola il tema dell'apparenza contro la realtà e generata intorno esso un mistero di omicidio, che lascia aperto. La realtà si transforma in nella pellicola soltanto in una dichiarazione soggettiva, "vita in se è un'illusione, una celebrazione di Dionysian dei revels mascherati ed anonimi." (Neil D. Isaacs in Filmmakers europeo moderno e nell'arte di adattamento , ed. da Andrew S. Horton e Joan Magretta, 1981)

"'è come una stanza attendente, la vita è, 'ha detto il signore calvo, stridente con attenzione verso l'esterno la sua sigaretta con il suo pattino ed esaminante le sue mani come se non conoscesse che cosa ora fare con loro; la signora anziana sighed sì un nato degli anni lunghi di essere conforme e messo via la sua bottiglia piccola appena mentre il portello all'estremità del corridoio si è aperto e l'altra signora ha uscito con quella sguardo tutti gli altre invidiate e quasi un simpatico arrivederci quando ha ottenuto all'uscita.' ('da seconda volta intorno ')
Mentre un novelist Cortázar ha guadagnato la prima attenzione con i premios di Los (1960), che sono comparso quando l'autore era 46. La storia ha concentrato su un gruppo di persone riuniti quando vincono una crociera di mistero in un lottery. Gli sped-de-sciocchi diventa microcosmos dell'ordine del mondo. Il suo masterpiece era Rayuela (1966, Hopscotch), un anti-romanzo espandibile, in cui il lettore è invitato a riorganizzare il materiale. "l'idea generale dietro Hopscotch , vedete, siete la prova di un guasto e della speranza di una vittoria. Ma il libro non propone alcuna soluzione; si limita semplicemente a mostrare i percorsi possibili uno può prendere ai colpi giù la parete, vedere che cosa è dall'altro lato." (intervista dal por Cortázar di Evelyn Picon Garfield, di Cortázar , da 1978) il protagonista, Horacio Oliveira, è un produttore che è circondato da un cerchio degli amici della Boemia. Dopo la scomparsa di La Maga, il suo mistress, Oliveira rinvia a Buenos Aires in cui lavora nei lavori dispari. Viene a contatto del suo amico di infanzia, viaggiatore, con quale funziona un asylum insano, concludentesi sul bordo di insanity egli stesso.

Oliveira cerca un rationalism cartesiano della nuova parte esterna di mondo-vista. Benchè non riesca mai, la sua ricerca è descritta con umore, il linguaggio figurato superb e l'ottimismo. Ci sono due sezioni narrative: capitoli 1-36, che sono regolati a Parigi e capitoli 37-56, insieme a Buenos Aires. La terza selezione è autorizzata "capitoli consumabili." Il progresso del hopscotch comincia al capitolo 73. Per questa lettura, condotto tramite i sensi, il lettore salta in avanti ed indietro attraverso il libro.

Rayuela è stato inteso per essere un romanzo rivoluzionario. Ha aperto il portello ad innovazione linguistica della lingua spagnola ed ha influenzato i produttori profondamente dell'America latina. L'idea per un libro basato sul staccato su celebre continuato in 62: Modelo paragrafo armar (1968). Qui il lettore ha avuto meno istruzioni per organizzare le parti. Libro de Manuel (1973) ha messo a fuoco sullo stato politico dell'america latina. In questo caso i vari caratteri si muovono da una zona mysterious e dalla città secondo Godgame-come le istruzioni che non possono capire o disobey. Il romanzo ha formato un manuale per il bambino Manuel, una specie del collage dei residui della potatura meccanica della pressa e tra altri tecniche rivelarici di tortura usate dai soldati degli STATI UNITI nell'Estremo-Oriente e juxtaposed loro alle torture simili sofferte dai prigionieri politici dell'America latina.

Cortázar ha visitato la Cuba dopo la rivoluzione ed in 1973 ha viaggiato in Argentina, nel Perù, nell'Ecuador e nel Cile. Cortázar è diventato negli anni 70 che un membro del secondo tribunale di Russell per indagine sui diritti dell'uomo abusa in america latina. Inoltre ha dato al Sandinistas i diritti d'autore di alcuni dei suoi ultimi libri ed ha aiutato finanziariamente le famiglie dei prigionieri politici. Quando il divieto di sette anni di sua entrata in Argentina è stato alzato ha visitato il suo paese d'origine e la Nicaragua in 1983.

In 1975 Cortázar era un conferenziere di visita all'università di Oklahoma ed in 1980 era un conferenziere all'università di Barnard a nuovo York. In 1981 ha acquistato la cittadinanza francese. Cortázar ha ricevuto i premi numerosi, compreso il premio di Médicis per Libro de Manuel in 1974 ed ordine di Rubén Darío di indipendenza culturale in 1983. È morto della leucemia a Parigi il 12 febbraio 1984. L'amico che del Cortázar Christina Peri Rossi più successivamente pondered in suo libro Yo y Cortázar (2001) ha fatto il dado dell'autore del AIDS anziché la leucemia.