Juan Gelman - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Juan Gelman is an Argentine poet

Argentine literature

Argentine literature is the body of literary work produced in Argentina. Among Argentina's best-known and most influential authors are Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Hernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Roberto Arlt, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Ernesto Sabato...

. He has published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956. He won the Cervantes Prize in 2007, the most important in Spanish literature. His works celebrate life but are also tempered with social and political commentary and reflect his own painful experiences with the politics of his country.

Juan Gelman's Life

Juan Gelman was born in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, in the Villa Crespo

Villa Crespo

Villa Crespo is a middle-class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, located in the geographical centre of the city. It had a population of 83,646 people in 2001, and thus population density of 23,235 inhabitants/km²....

neighborhood, in 1930. He was the third son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father, Jose Gelman, was a social revolutionary who participated in
the 1905 revolution in Russia; he immigrated to Argentina, went back shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, and then returned to Argentina for good, disillusioned.

Juan Gelman learned how to read when he was three years old, and spent a lot of his childhood biking, playing soccer, and reading. He developed an interest in poetry at a very young age, influenced by his brother Boris who was an avid reader. He read Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....

's "The Insulted and Humiliated

The Insulted and Humiliated

Humiliated and Insulted is a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in 1861 in the monthly magazine Vremya.-Plot introduction:...

" at eight, and subsequently became feverish in the days following. As a young man, he was part of many literary groups and later got an important job as a journalist. He also worked as a translator at the United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

.

He was an ardent political activist until 1975, and got involved with the Montoneros

Montoneros

Montoneros was an Argentine Peronist urban guerrilla group, active during the 1960s and 1970s. The name is an allusion to 19th century Argentinian history. After Juan Perón's return from 18 years of exile and the 1973 Ezeiza massacre, which marked the definitive split between left and right-wing...

, though he later distanced himself from them. After the 1976 Argentine coup, he was forced into exile

Exile

Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...

from Argentina for twelve years. In 1976, both his son Marcelo and his pregnant daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia (who were 20 and 19 years of age at the time) were kidnapped from his home and executed. They became two of the countless desaparecidos, the people who vanished without a trace during the military regime. He was able to find his granddaughter, who was born before Maria Claudia's murder and given to a pro-government family, in the year 2000 in Uruguay

Uruguay

Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

. He lived in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

until 1988, when he returned to Argentina and began working for the Buenos Aires newspaper Pagina/12
Página/12
Página/12 is a newspaper based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.Página/12 was founded on May 25, 1987, by journalist Jorge Lanata in association with writer Osvaldo Soriano and investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky...

. In 1997, Juan Gelman received the Argentine National Poetry Prize, in recognition of his excellent work. He now lives in Mexico with his wife, and continues to write for Pagina/12.

Gelman included Uruguayan police officer Hugo Campos Hermida

Hugo Campos Hermida

Hugo Campos Hermida was a Uruguayan police officer.-Background:Hermida also received training in the United States, including from the Drug Enforcement Administration.-Significant roles:...

in his complaint before the Spanish justice for the "disappearance

Forced disappearance

In international human rights law, a forced disappearance occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the...

" of his niece in Uruguay.

External links

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Juan Gelman's Life

Further reading

External links