Mario Benedetti
Mario Benedetti was a prominent Uruguayan writer born in 1920, celebrated for his contributions to fiction, poetry, and drama. Growing up in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, he drew inspiration from the city's vibrant urban life and its complexities. His literary journey began early; he penned his first novel at the age of twelve. Benedetti's works often reflected his experiences, including his critique of bureaucracy and social inequities, themes that resonated deeply in his homeland. Following a military coup in 1973, he faced persecution due to his political affiliations and went into exile, living in countries like Argentina and Spain before returning to Uruguay in 1985 after the restoration of democracy. Among his most notable works are "La tregua" (The Truce) and "Gracias por el fuego," which explore human emotions and societal challenges. Benedetti continued to write until his passing in 2009, leaving behind a rich legacy of literature that continues to resonate with readers across cultures. His posthumously published works further showcase his enduring influence in the literary world.
Mario Benedetti
Uruguayan novelist, short fiction writer, poet, and nonfiction writer
- Born: September 14, 1920
- Birthplace: Uruguay
- Died: May 17, 2009
- Place of death: Montevideo, Uruguay
Biography
Mario Benedetti’s importance modern writing and to Uruguay cannot be overstated. He is famed for the quality of his writing, which has achieved international renown, and his mastery of fiction, poetry, and drama has been widely acknowledged. Born in 1920 to a middle-class family, Benedetti wished to become a writer almost from his infancy; he wrote a novel at age twelve. At the age of four, the family moved to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a bustling city of over one million people that was home to half the country’s population.
Montevideo would serve as a source of inspiration and passion for Benedetti all his life; it represented the complexities as well as excitements, adventures, and endless mini-dramas of daily urban life. In his travels, in fact, Benedetti expected to find a similar energy in other large cities such as Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City; however, a stay in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, although exciting and alive with theater, film, and music, disappointed him because of America’s discrimination, bigotry, and indifference to the great gaps between rich and poor—subjects that would appear in an early novel called Gracias por el fuego: Una novela. These concerns became the subject matter of several works, many of which reflected, among other things, Benedetti’s firsthand knowledge of bureaucratic workings (he had worked in a firm that imported car parts). Three years later, Benedetti published a collection of essays that won the Ministry of Public Instruction Prize. With his first novel, Quién de nosotros (1953), he revealed a quality of maturity that reflected those writers he most admired, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.
In his poems, Benedetti often discussed the perils of excess bureaucracy a theme not well understood or appreciated in Uruguay, but accepted and admired because of the quality of the writer. In 1959, Benedetti published Montiveanos, a collection of short stories that contains some of his most beloved stories. The following year, his novel La tregua (The Truce) appeared; it became one of the most beloved of all South American novels. In 1973, the Uruguayan military staged a coup d’état, which, because Benedetti was active in a left-leaning political coalition, had written for Marcha (a left-leaning periodical), and had set his verse novel, El cumpleaños de Juan Angel (1971) in the turbulent Uruguayan 1960s (when police and the military used indiscriminate force to repress social upheaval), Benedetti and his wife were forced into exile. Moving to Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and then Spain, they fled possible assassination. With the restoration of democracy in 1985, they returned to Montevideo, where the people welcomed him home as a national hero. Benedetti remained associated with a group of writers recognized as the “Generation of 1945,” a group that used realism to explore the contradictions of life and what we define as “reality.”
In the 2000s, he published several poetry collections, including Insomnios y duermevelas (2002), Little Stones at My Window (2003; Charles Dean Hatfield, translator), Defensa propia (2004), and Virvir adrede (2007). He also published a novel, El porvenir de mi pasado, in 2003.
Benedetti died on May 17, 2009, at the age of eighty-eight. In 2006 he was predeceased by his wife, Luz López Alegre, to whom he had been married for sixty years. Benedetti's posthumously published works include The Rest Is Jungle and Other Stories (2010) is a collection of Benedetti's stories from early in his career through the year of his death, translated by Harry Morales, and Witness: The Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti (2012), translated by Louise B. Popkin, one of Benedetti’s close associates.
Author Works
Long Fiction
Quién de nosotros, 1953
La tregua: Una novela, 1960 (The Truce, 1969)
Gracias por el fuego: Una novela, 1965
El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel, 1971
Primavera con una esquina rota, 1982
La borra del café, 1993
Andamios, 1996
El porvenir de mi pasado, 2003
Nonfiction
Peripecia y novela, 1948
Escritos políticos (1971–1973), 1985
Cuarenta y cinco años de escritos críticos: 1948–1993, 1993
Poetry
La víspera indelebe, 1945
Poemas de la oficina, 1956
Poemas del hoy por hoy, 1961
Inventario, 1963
Poemas de otros, 1977
La casa y el ladrillo, 1977
Vientos del exilio, 1982
Antología poética, 1984
Geografías, 1984
Preguntas al azar, 1986
Yesterday y mañana, 1988
Las soledades de Babel, 1991
Inventario dos, 1985–1994, 1994
El amor, las mujeres y la vida, 1996
La vida ese paréntesi, 1997
Insomnios y duermevelas, 2002
Defensa propia, 2004
Short Fiction
Esta mañana, 1949
Montiveanos, 1959
La vecina orilla, 1977
Blood Pact, and Other Stories, 1997
Bibliography
Bach, Caleb. “Urban Chronicler with A Poetic Sting.” Americas 50.4 (1998): 38. Literary Reference Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2016. Examines the work of acclaimed Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti with background on his life.
Davison, Phil. “Mario Benedetti: Writer in the Vanguard of South America's Literary Boom in the Second Half of the 20th Century.” The Independent, 11 June 2009, www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mario-benedetti-writer-in-the-vanguard-of-south-americas-literary-boom-in-the-second-half-of-the-1703159.html. Accessed 22 Apr. 2016. Presents an obituary of Benedetti, including a brief biography and a discussion of his literary output.
Gregory, Stephen. “Mario Benedetti as Propagandist: ‘Them’ And ‘Us’ in the Political Essays of 1971–1973.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 87.2 (2010): 225–42. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Apr. 2016. A critical examination of Benedetti's nonfiction writing.
Morales, Harry. "Mario Benedetti." The Brooklyn Rail, 8 July 2010, brooklynrail.org/2010/07/fiction/mario-benedetti. Accessed 30 June 2017. Presents a biography of Benedetti and a brief review of his literary career.
Rohter, Larry. “Mario Benedetti, Writer Revered in Latin America, Dies at 88.” The New York Times, 19 May 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/arts/20benedetti.html. Accessed 22 Apr. 2016. Presents an obituary of Benedetti, describing his influence on South American literature.