The literary oeuvre of Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti, who died Sunday night, is enormous and diverse, comprising dozens of books of poetry, songs, novels, short stories, chronicles, essays, plays and humour. As Randall points out in her introduction, “His early poems reveal a characteristically Uruguayan or, more accurately, rioplatense pessimism,” and this is particularly true in the often frustrating post–WWII years in Latin America leading up to the Cuban Revolution. I’ve always had a soft spot for Uruguay. He was a writer, known for The Truce (1974), Dale nomás (1974) and Pedro y el capitán (1984). Largely unknown in the English-speaking world, Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti is regarded as one of Latin America’s most important voices.…[T]ranslator Louise Popkin met Benedetti in Buenos Aires in the ’70s, where the poet was exiled for opposing the Uruguayan dictatorship. Benedetti became politically active in 1949, organizing against Uruguayan military cooperation with the United States. 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The essay which won Sweetland's award explores this duality and the exile of a somewhat famous Uruguayan author named Mario Benedetti. A short but compelling novel by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti focused on the themes of exile, loyalty and conscience. “Our torturers are generally catholic,” Benedetti tells us in the first stanza, but despite their belief in the Trinity and their cause, “when they die they don’t go to heaven / because murderers aren’t allowed there.” In the second stanza he describes the victims as “martyrs” and as possibly even “angels or saints,” “but they don’t go to heaven either / because to them there’s no such thing.” The poem delivers a sharp, poignant message about the ironic realities of the time, but it is relatively flat, with few poetic elements and little that would invite the reader to return to it. He was married to Luz López Alegre and Luz. Follow Sounds and Colours: Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Mixcloud / Soundcloud / BandcampSubscribe to the Sounds and Colours Newsletter for regular updates, news and competitions bringing the best of Latin American culture direct to your Inbox. Like this article? For 12 years, from 1973 to 1985, when a civic-military dictatorship ruled Uruguay, Benedetti lived in exile. It was fiction, but with autobiographical references to his exile. When he was four years old his family moved to Montevideo. It tells the story of a love triangle: Miguel and Alicia met at school, becoming incredibly close, always there for each other, but then Lucas arrived. I felt frustrated by the narrative arc and the building of the core story. Home » Uruguay » Mario Benedetti » Andamios [Scaffolds]. It He was forcibly separated from his wife, who stayed behind caring for their aging mothers, for over a decade. With the publication of Witness, one can only hope that another great Uruguayan writer will now gain a larger audience in North America. told in a very round-about way, an overly-intellectual attempt at taking seven pages of the book, it does little other than address Since then it has become one of the world's #1 sources for information on the topic, printing specialist books as well as maintaining this website, with collaborators based around the world. letter to Miguel, leaves many of the questions unanswered. At age four the boy was taken to Montevideo, where he received a superior education at a private school. Set during the military dictatorship it is the story of Santiago, a political opponent of the government being held in a Montevideo prison. Shss, do not tell them. In this period the poet describes having lost his “core like a slow-running clock,” doubtlessly resulting from life in the working-class world where—he writes in the poem “Payday”—“they pay me, of course, at the end of each month / for keeping their books up to date / and letting life go by, / one drop at a time / like rancid oil.” In these poems, Benedetti confronts the problem of the man-made inhumane world, which he would later dedicate his life to fighting, yet here only expressed in the ennui, the desperate sense of helplessness before a system designed to extinguish every “drop” of humanity in favor of numbers in a ledger (or now, a computer). Clifton Ross is a Berkeley-based writer and filmmaker. He was a writer, known for The Truce (1974), Dale nomás (1974) and Pedro y el capitán (1984). He was not as famous as his contemporaries as a novelist. The REUTERS/Andres Stapff/Files. It’s the last of these that feels the most ground-breaking, Benedetti adding in short stories of people exiled, including stories of himself, which offers a break from the very claustrophobic story of Santiago and Graciela, while also opening up the novel to a broader environment of what was happening at the time, akin to breaking the fourth wall. His exile was made particularly trying by the fact that his wife had to remain in Uruguay to look after both of their mothers. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. novel is split into three parts: Miguel’s story, a letter by They both showed Benedetti as an inventive storyteller with some fine turns of phrasing, but they felt insular, their characters tied to the pages, rarely offering anything other than a pencil drawing of what their lives were like. As with Who Among Us? The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé (Penguin Modern Classics) - Kindle edition by Benedetti, Mario, Morales, Harry. – which like the other has been translated by Nick Caistor, and is the shortest of the two novels. The book begins down the line, Alicia and Miguel have two children but their 11-year-old marriage is on the rocks, not helped by the fact that Miguel has engineered for Alicia to travel to Argentina to meet Lucas, and all his old concerns have returned to the surface. Witness ends with Benedetti’s recognition that his exile is an exile from the world, a world in which consumerism and capitalism seem to have gained the upper hand against the struggle for humanity. He went to Cuba in 1976 and the following year to Madrid, Spain. Broadly, it relates the linguistic exile we each experience as citizens of a multilingual world and the physical exile of Mario Benedetti, the author who wrote the source texts for my translation project and was forced to remain outside of his home country of Uruguay for over a decade. Feminist poet, author, and activist Margaret Randall wrote the introduction, which offers an excellent biography and personal reminiscences of Benedetti. Witness ends with Benedetti’s recognition that his exile is an exile from the world, a world in which consumerism and capitalism seem to have gained the upper hand against the struggle for humanity. Shying away from the surrealism that fascinated Pablo Neruda and the magical realism of the so-called Latin American Boom writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Benedetti gave us simple work that eschews all labels. Exiled in the 1970s during the military coup – his participation in the leftwing coalition Frente Amplio made this a foregone conclusion – his work is also tied with the political and social struggles that the country had faced. He was married to Luz López Alegre and Luz. This Uruguayan writer and poet left us with his extensive work, always so full of values and social commitment. Chapters alternate between his turmoil from behind bars, the thoughts of his wife Graciela who has slowly become distant from Santiago and fallen in love with Rolando (Santiago’s best friend), the thoughts of Santiago’s father as he tries to deal with knowing about Graciela and Rolando, the more innocent thoughts of their daughter Beatriz, and other passages that tell about this affair, as well as the stories of exiles. 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