Álvaro Cepeda Samudio
Encyclopedia
Álvaro Cepeda Samudio was a Colombian
journalist
, novelist, short story
writer
, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America
, he is known in his own right as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically-, intellectually- and politically-active climate for which this particular time and place, that of mid-century Colombia, has become known. His fame is considerably more quaint outside of his home country, where it derives primarily from his standing as having been part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia in which fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez
—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group
—and painter Alejandro Obregón
also played prominent roles. Only one of his works, La casa grande, has received considerable notice beyond the Spanish-speaking world, having been translated into several languages, English and French among them; his fame as a writer has therefore been significantly curtailed in the greater international readership, as the breadth of his literary and journalistic output has reached few audiences beyond those of Latin America and Latin American literary scholars.
(although his birthplace is commonly mistaken for the town of Ciénaga, where his family was from), Colombia, two years before striking United Fruit Company
workers at Ciénaga's railroad station were massacred by the Colombian army, an event that with age became pivotal to the writer's social- and political-consciousness, as evidenced in its central role in his only novel, La casa grande. Known as the Santa Marta Massacre
, the incident is also depicted in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude
) (1967), the seminal novel of his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, and served a similar motivating principle in his dedication to social and political awareness through journalism
and literature
, among other means. He enrolled at the Colegio Americano, an English-language school in Barranquilla
, for elementary and high school. In the spring of 1949, he traveled to Ann Arbor, MI, USA and attended the University of Michigan English Language Institute for the summer term. For the fall term in the 1949-50 school year he attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
in New York City
. For the winter term, he attended what is now Michigan State University (then Michigan State College) in Lansing, MI before returning home to Barranquilla.
, where his first short stories were also published. Along with García Márquez and fellow journalists and Barranquilla Group members Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas, he founded the weekly newspaper Crónica in April 1950, dedicating its pages primarily to literature and sports reporting. Cepeda Samudio made the point to include, for the first eight months of its publication, a foreign short story in each issue. He also spent time writing columns for the Barranquilla daily newspaper El Heraldo, for which his wife, Tita Cepeda, currently contributes cultural columns. In 1953, he was offered the general management position of this paper, which he accepted with great enthusiasm, telling García Márquez that he wanted to transform it "into the modern newspaper he had learned how to make in the United States", at Columbia University. However, it was "a fatal adventure," owing, García Márquez suggests, to the fact that "some aging veterans could not tolerate the renovatory regime and conspired with their soulmates until they succeeded in destroying their empire." Cepeda Samudio left the paper shortly thereafter. He was also the Colombian bureau chief for Sporting News, based out of St. Lewis, and ultimately secured his position as one of his country's preeminent journalists and editors by becoming the editor-in-chief first of El Nacional and later of the 'Diario del Caribe.
and William Faulkner
. In his column in El Heraldo acclaimed the innovations of Bestiario
(1951), the first volume of short stories by Julio Cortázar
.
His promotion of the need for innovative literary styles and means, particularly within Colombia, is found in more than simply his essayistic criticism and columns, however, and he went on to write two short story collections and a novel in which his ideals found themselves manifested. His first published short story collection, Todos estábamos a la espera (We Were All Waiting) (1954), bears the markings of his interest in Hemingway, and created a considerable publishing event among academic critics of the time. Seymour Menton, who translated La Casa Grande into English, states that the first story in the collection "is narrated in the first person by the protagonist without any intervention by the traditional moralizing and artistic omniscient narrator." This full embrace of a greater psychological impulse within the stories, as well as a rejection of any mediating contextualizations, was among the many claims Cepeda Samudio made for the necessary "modernization" of literature. García Márquez would later state that Todos estábamos a la espera "was the best book of stories that had been published in Colombia".
His first novel, La casa grande (1962) further explores this narrative reliance on a singular, unmediated narrator, and experiments, in a manner he hadn't displayed before, with structure, breaking the narrative up into ten distinct sections. His adoration of the works of Faulkner can perhaps be most fully seen in this work. In addressing the events of the Santa Marta Massacre through disjointed narratives which circumnavigate the violence without fully delving into the actualities of it, the central actions and content of the novel are presented as the inner reactions to them on the part of those associated with the event, not as an expository account of the event itself; García Márquez states that "everything in this book is a magnificent example of how a writer can honestly filter out the immense quantity of rhetorical and demagogic garbage that stands in the way of indignation and nostalgia." Menton suggests that, in this way, it "is one of the important forerunners of One Hundred Years of Solitude," and García Márquez elaborates, "it represents a new and formidable contribution to the most important literary phenomenon in today's world: the Latin American novel."
Cepeda Samudio's final publication of fiction was the short story collection Los Cuentos de Juana (1972), with illustrations by his good friend Alejandro Obregón
. One of the short stories was developed into a film, Juana Tenía el Pelo de Oro, which was released in Colombia in 2006.
) (2002), García Márquez writes that his friend was "more than anything a dazzling driver—of automobiles as well as letters." The influence of Cepeda Samudio, not solely on the works of later Colombian and Latin American writers, but also on García Márquez, is evident not only in the latter writer's confessions in his autobiography of "imitating" his friend, but also in his clear admiration for his literary abiltiies. In his short story, La increible y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
) (1978), written in the year of Cepeda Samudio's death and published six years later in a collection of the same name, the third-person narrative takes a brief and sudden digression into the first-person
, informing the reader that "Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, who was also traveling in the region, selling beer-cooling equipment, took me through the desert towns" of which the story, and most of the stories in the collection, take place, suggesting the sharedness of the lands traversed in his stories with his polymath "driver" friend. In the final chapter of Cien años de soledad, the fictionalized Barranquilla Group referred to as the "four friends" leave Macondo
, "Álvaro" being the first among them. In preparation for his departure, the narrator states that Álvaro
Colombian people
Colombian people are from a multiethnic Spanish speaking nation in South America called Colombia. Colombians are predominantly Roman Catholic and are a mixture of Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians.-Demography:...
journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, novelist, 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...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
, he is known in his own right as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically-, intellectually- and politically-active climate for which this particular time and place, that of mid-century Colombia, has become known. His fame is considerably more quaint outside of his home country, where it derives primarily from his standing as having been part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia in which fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group
Barranquilla Group
The Barranquilla Group was the name given to the group of writers, journalists, and philosophers who congregated in the Colombian city of Barranquilla in the middle of the twentieth century; it became one of the most productive intellectual and literary communities of the period.Among the most...
—and painter Alejandro Obregón
Alejandro Obregón
Daniel Alberto Alejandro María de la Santísima Trinidad Obregón Roses commonly known as Alejandro Obregón was a Colombian painter, muralist, sculptor and engraver.-Career:...
also played prominent roles. Only one of his works, La casa grande, has received considerable notice beyond the Spanish-speaking world, having been translated into several languages, English and French among them; his fame as a writer has therefore been significantly curtailed in the greater international readership, as the breadth of his literary and journalistic output has reached few audiences beyond those of Latin America and Latin American literary scholars.
Early life and education
Álvaro Cepeda Samudio was born in BarranquillaBarranquilla
Barranquilla is an industrial port city and municipality located in northern Colombia, near the Caribbean Sea. The capital of the Atlántico Department, it is the largest industrial city and port in the Colombian Caribbean region with a population of 1,148,506 as of 2005, which makes it Colombia's...
(although his birthplace is commonly mistaken for the town of Ciénaga, where his family was from), Colombia, two years before striking United Fruit Company
United Fruit Company
It had a deep and long-lasting impact on the economic and political development of several Latin American countries. Critics often accused it of exploitative neocolonialism and described it as the archetypal example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of the...
workers at Ciénaga's railroad station were massacred by the Colombian army, an event that with age became pivotal to the writer's social- and political-consciousness, as evidenced in its central role in his only novel, La casa grande. Known as the Santa Marta Massacre
Santa Marta Massacre
The Banana massacre, in Spanish, Matanza de las bananeras or Masacre de las bananeras was a massacre of workers for the United Fruit Company that occurred on December 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia...
, the incident is also depicted in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
) (1967), the seminal novel of his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, and served a similar motivating principle in his dedication to social and political awareness through journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, among other means. He enrolled at the Colegio Americano, an English-language school in Barranquilla
Barranquilla
Barranquilla is an industrial port city and municipality located in northern Colombia, near the Caribbean Sea. The capital of the Atlántico Department, it is the largest industrial city and port in the Colombian Caribbean region with a population of 1,148,506 as of 2005, which makes it Colombia's...
, for elementary and high school. In the spring of 1949, he traveled to Ann Arbor, MI, USA and attended the University of Michigan English Language Institute for the summer term. For the fall term in the 1949-50 school year he attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is one of Columbia's graduate and professional schools. It offers three degree programs: Master of Science in journalism , Master of Arts in journalism and a Ph.D. in communications...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. For the winter term, he attended what is now Michigan State University (then Michigan State College) in Lansing, MI before returning home to Barranquilla.
Journalistic career
As with many of the core members of the Barranquilla Group, Cepeda Samudio began his career as a journalist, writing first, in August 1947, for El NacionalEl Nacional
El Nacional is a Venezuelan publishing company under the name C.A. Editorial El Nacional, most widely known for its El Nacional newspaper. It, along with Últimas Noticias and El Universal, are the most widely read and circulated daily national newspapers in the country, and it has an average of...
, where his first short stories were also published. Along with García Márquez and fellow journalists and Barranquilla Group members Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas, he founded the weekly newspaper Crónica in April 1950, dedicating its pages primarily to literature and sports reporting. Cepeda Samudio made the point to include, for the first eight months of its publication, a foreign short story in each issue. He also spent time writing columns for the Barranquilla daily newspaper El Heraldo, for which his wife, Tita Cepeda, currently contributes cultural columns. In 1953, he was offered the general management position of this paper, which he accepted with great enthusiasm, telling García Márquez that he wanted to transform it "into the modern newspaper he had learned how to make in the United States", at Columbia University. However, it was "a fatal adventure," owing, García Márquez suggests, to the fact that "some aging veterans could not tolerate the renovatory regime and conspired with their soulmates until they succeeded in destroying their empire." Cepeda Samudio left the paper shortly thereafter. He was also the Colombian bureau chief for Sporting News, based out of St. Lewis, and ultimately secured his position as one of his country's preeminent journalists and editors by becoming the editor-in-chief first of El Nacional and later of the 'Diario del Caribe.
Literary career and outlook
Cepeda Samudio's desire for a "renovatory regime" extended, however, far beyond his influence over La Nacional. Writing for his column Brújula de la cultura (Cultural Compass) in El Heraldo, he consistently decried a need for "a renovation of Colombian prose fiction". He avidly sought out and championed what would have been, particularly at the time and in the considerably culturally conservative Colombia, considered "unorthodox" literature to many of his friends, notably García Márquez and other members of the Barranquilla Group, by introducing many to Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
. In his column in El Heraldo acclaimed the innovations of Bestiario
Bestiario
Bestiario is a book of 8 short stories written by Julio Cortázar.-Stories:* “Casa tomada”* “Carta a una señorita en París”* “Lejana”* “Ómnibus”* “Cefalea”* “Circe”* “Las puertas del cielo”* “Bestiario”...
(1951), the first volume of short stories by Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
.
His promotion of the need for innovative literary styles and means, particularly within Colombia, is found in more than simply his essayistic criticism and columns, however, and he went on to write two short story collections and a novel in which his ideals found themselves manifested. His first published short story collection, Todos estábamos a la espera (We Were All Waiting) (1954), bears the markings of his interest in Hemingway, and created a considerable publishing event among academic critics of the time. Seymour Menton, who translated La Casa Grande into English, states that the first story in the collection "is narrated in the first person by the protagonist without any intervention by the traditional moralizing and artistic omniscient narrator." This full embrace of a greater psychological impulse within the stories, as well as a rejection of any mediating contextualizations, was among the many claims Cepeda Samudio made for the necessary "modernization" of literature. García Márquez would later state that Todos estábamos a la espera "was the best book of stories that had been published in Colombia".
His first novel, La casa grande (1962) further explores this narrative reliance on a singular, unmediated narrator, and experiments, in a manner he hadn't displayed before, with structure, breaking the narrative up into ten distinct sections. His adoration of the works of Faulkner can perhaps be most fully seen in this work. In addressing the events of the Santa Marta Massacre through disjointed narratives which circumnavigate the violence without fully delving into the actualities of it, the central actions and content of the novel are presented as the inner reactions to them on the part of those associated with the event, not as an expository account of the event itself; García Márquez states that "everything in this book is a magnificent example of how a writer can honestly filter out the immense quantity of rhetorical and demagogic garbage that stands in the way of indignation and nostalgia." Menton suggests that, in this way, it "is one of the important forerunners of One Hundred Years of Solitude," and García Márquez elaborates, "it represents a new and formidable contribution to the most important literary phenomenon in today's world: the Latin American novel."
Cepeda Samudio's final publication of fiction was the short story collection Los Cuentos de Juana (1972), with illustrations by his good friend Alejandro Obregón
Alejandro Obregón
Daniel Alberto Alejandro María de la Santísima Trinidad Obregón Roses commonly known as Alejandro Obregón was a Colombian painter, muralist, sculptor and engraver.-Career:...
. One of the short stories was developed into a film, Juana Tenía el Pelo de Oro, which was released in Colombia in 2006.
Film career
Cepeda Samudio harbored an intense love and knowledge of films, and often wrote in his columns criticisms on the subject. García Márquez writes that his substenance as a film critic would not have been possible had he not partaken in "the traveling school of Álvaro Cepeda". The two eventually made a short black and white feature together called La langosta azul (The Blue Lobster) (1954), which they co-wrote and directed based on an idea by Cepeda Samudio; García Márquez states that he conceded to take part in its creation as "it had a large dose of lunacy to make it seem like ours." The film still occasionally makes appearances at "daring festivals" around the world, with the help of Cepeda Samudio's wife, Tita Cepeda.Late life
Cepeda Samudio died in 1972, the year that his final collection of short stories, Los cuentos de Juana, was released, of lymphatic cancer, the same condition which his lifelong friend García Márquez was diagnosed with in 1999. In his memoir, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the TaleLiving to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale is the first volume of the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez....
) (2002), García Márquez writes that his friend was "more than anything a dazzling driver—of automobiles as well as letters." The influence of Cepeda Samudio, not solely on the works of later Colombian and Latin American writers, but also on García Márquez, is evident not only in the latter writer's confessions in his autobiography of "imitating" his friend, but also in his clear admiration for his literary abiltiies. In his short story, La increible y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Souless Grandmother is a 1972 novella by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.-Plot summary:...
) (1978), written in the year of Cepeda Samudio's death and published six years later in a collection of the same name, the third-person narrative takes a brief and sudden digression into the first-person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
, informing the reader that "Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, who was also traveling in the region, selling beer-cooling equipment, took me through the desert towns" of which the story, and most of the stories in the collection, take place, suggesting the sharedness of the lands traversed in his stories with his polymath "driver" friend. In the final chapter of Cien años de soledad, the fictionalized Barranquilla Group referred to as the "four friends" leave Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
, "Álvaro" being the first among them. In preparation for his departure, the narrator states that Álvaro
bought an eternal ticket on a train that never stopped traveling. In the postcards that he sent from the way stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem.
Fiction
- Todos estábamos a la espera, (1954)
- La casa grande, (1962)
- Los cuentos de Juana, (1972)