Augusto Roa Bastos

Augusto Roa Bastos, (born Asunción, June 13 1917 – died Asunción, April 26 2005) is undoubtedly one of the greatest Paraguayan novelists of all time, and indeed among the most important Latin American writers. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia and worked as journalist and a film scriptwriter. He was best known for Yo el Supremo (1974, "I, the Supreme"). This is one of the foremost Latin American novels to tackle the question of dictators and dictatorships, in the person of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay with an iron fist and no little eccentricity for 26 years in the early 19th century. His other major work was Hijo de Hombre (1960, "Son of Man"). He also wrote numerous other novels and stories.

Biography

Roa Bastos spent his childhood in Iturbe, a small town some 200 km to the south of the capital Asunción, where his father managed a sugar refinery.

In 1932, with the outbreak of the Chaco War, he dropped out of school and joined the troops as a medical auxiliary; the horrors he experienced during this time set him firmly against violence for the rest of his life. After the war, his first jobs were as a bank clerk and reporter on the Asunción daily El País; around the same time, he began writing for the theater. During World War II he was invited to London by the British Council; he also served as El País's war correspondent in London and covered the Nuremberg Trials for the paper.

In 1947, because of his activities in opposition to President Higinio Morínigo during the Paraguayan Civil War, he was forced to flee the country. He settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he published most of his work. With the arrival of the military dictatorship in 1976, however, he left Argentina for France, where he taught Guaraní and Spanish literature at the University of Toulouse.

Roa Bastos did not return to his native Paraguay until 1989, following the downfall of Alfredo Stroessner for whom he professed detestation. That same year, he was awarded the Premio Cervantes (Cervantes Prize), awarded by the Spanish Royal Academy and its correspondent academies in the various American nations, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the Spanish-language novel; he spent the prize money on educational and literary projects in Paraguay.

His novels blend the present and past by creating scenes with myths from precolonial times and Christian legends, developing a special kind of magic realism which allows him to create a poetic image of an oppressed people whose potential has been tragically wasted. Hijo del hombre portrays the struggle between the governing élite and the oppressed in Paraguay from the 1860s until the Chaco War in 1930. In Yo, el supremo, he is also fundamentally concerned with the power (and the weakness) of writing itself: its plot revolves around the dictator's efforts to uncover who has been forging his signature on a series of pasquinades discovered around the capital, and also his relationship with his secretary, to whom he dictates his thoughts and orders, but whom he never feels he can fully trust.

Bibliography

El ruiseñor de la aurora, y otros poemas (1942)
El naranjal ardiente, nocturno paraguayo (1947-1949)
El fiscal ("The Fiscal") (1950)
El trueno entre las hojas ("Thunder among the leaves") (1953)
Hijo de hombre ("Son of Man") (1960)
El Baldío ("The Vacan Lot") (1966)
Madera Quemada ("Burned Wood") (1967)
Los pies sobre el agua (1967)
Moriencia (1969)
Cuerpo presente, y otros textos (1972)
El pollito de fuego (1974)
Los Congresos (1974)
Yo, el Supremo ("I, the Supreme") (1974)
El somnámbulo (1976)
Lucha hasta el alba (1979)
Los Juegos ("The Games") (1979)
Antología personal ("Personal Anthology") (1980)
Contar un cuento, y otros relatos (1984)
La tierra sin mal ("The soil without evil") (1988?)
On Modern Latin American Fiction (1989)
Vigilia del Almirante (1992)
Madama Sui (1996)
Metaforismos (1996)

References

Helena Buffery, Roa Bastos and the Question of Cultural Translatability (or how does one get to Paraguay?). Dissidences 1.1 (2005).

Biography

Bibliography

Further Reading

References