Braulio Arenas was a Chile

Chile

Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

an poet and writer, founder of the surrealist

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 Mandrágora

Mandrágora

For other uses see Mandragora .La Mandrágora was a Chilean Surrealist group "officially founded" on 12 July 1938 by Braulio Arenas , Teófilo Cid and Enrique Gómez Correa . The group had met in Talca and first started exchanging in 1932...

group.

Life

Braulio Arenas lived most of his youth in the north of Chile, moving in his teens to Talca

Talca

Talca is a city and commune in Chile located about south of Santiago, and is the capital of both Talca Province and Maule Region . As of the 2002 census, the city had a population of 193,755....

 to study. There he encountered Teófilo Cid

Teófilo Cid

Teófilo Cid was a Chilean poet....

 and Enrique Gómez Correa

Enrique Gómez Correa

Enrique Gómez Correa was a Chilean poet, lawyer and diplomat....

 among others, and participated to literary activities with them.

Years later, he started law studies in Santiago, which he soon abandoned to focus on writing. Through Eduardo Anguita

Eduardo Anguita

Eduardo Anguita Cuéllar was a Chilean poet, who was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1988.- Life :...

, he met Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro

Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo , which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them.Huidobro was born into a wealthy...

, father of "Creationism" literary movement, which disputed literary innovations with Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

 and Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

. Influenced by these European currents, Arenas founded with some friends, in 1938, the Surrealist group Mandrágora

Mandrágora

For other uses see Mandragora .La Mandrágora was a Chilean Surrealist group "officially founded" on 12 July 1938 by Braulio Arenas , Teófilo Cid and Enrique Gómez Correa . The group had met in Talca and first started exchanging in 1932...

. This circle supported the Popular Front

Popular Front (Chile)

The Popular Front in Chile was an electoral and political left-wing coalition from 1937 to February 1941, during the Presidential Republic Era...

 government. The same year, one of his short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

, Gehenna, was published in Miguel Serrano

Miguel Serrano

Miguel Serrano was a Chilean diplomat, explorer and author of poetry, books on spiritual questing and Esoteric Nazism...

's Antología del verdadero cuento en Chile.

Arenas received in 1984 the Chilean National Prize for Literature

Chilean National Prize for Literature

Chile's National Prize for Literature was created by Law No. 7,368 during the presidency of Juan Antonio Ríos on 8 November 1942. It consists of a lump-sum monetary prize and a life-time monthly stipend . It was originally awarded every year until the amendments introduced by Law No...

, winning some recognition albeit confidential editions of his works (often less than 800 exemplaries).

External links

• Página dedicada a Braulio Arenas
• Poemas de Braulio Arenas
• Estudios sobre Braulio Arenas
• Entrevista a Braulio Arenas por Ştefan Baciu
  Stefan Baciu
  Ştefan Baciu was a Romanian poet, essayist, journalist, translator, art critic, diplomat, and university professor who spent most of his life in exile, first in Latin America, then in the U.S....
  
  
• Estudio de Luis G. de Mussy: Mandrágora: La Raíz De La Protesta O El Refugio Inconcluso (2001).