Competing
with writers as important as Mario Benedetti and
Alfredo Bryce Echeñique, Chilean poet Gonzalo
Rojas was awarded with the 2003 version of the Cervantes,
the so-called "Hispanic Nobel Prize".
At his 85 years of age, Rojas still highlights his
passion for love and life´s simplest things.
He was born
in 1917 in Lebu, a small town in Chile´s 8th
Region. Now he lives in Chillán, where he
got the news of this important international recognition.
So far, there have been 29 writers who have recieved
the Cervantes. Rojas has worked as a teacher, a
journalist and then a professor, and has been Cultural
Counsellor in China and Ambassador in Cuba. After
the State Coup of 1973 against Salvador Allende,
he went to exile in Caracas, Venezuela, where he
stayed for six years.
Some of his jobs got him in direct connection to
Chile´s most poor and to our country´s
history. He worked for a while teaching how to read
to miners in Atacama, and then was a member of the
mythical surrealistic group called La Mandrágora.
He was also the inspector of the traditional Barros
Arana intern school.
Still, at his 85 years of
age, he declares himself to be "eternally
in love with love". Gonzalo Rojas drowns
his writing in erotism and the meeting of life
and death. He says he´s no "inventor",
but a "genealogical poet". Rather than
a Chilean poet, he prefers to call himself "Iberoamerican".
He published his first book
in 1984, "La miseria del hombre" (Man´s
misery). Among his most important work -which
is completed by no more than 17 titles- one finds
"Contra la muerte" (Against death, 1964),
Oscuro (Dark, 1997), "Antología de
aire" (Air´s anthology) and his most
recent books: a trilogy of love, death and what´s
sacred titled "¿Qué se ama
cuando se ama?" ("What does one love
when one loves?"), "El réquiem
de la mariposa" ("The butterfly´s
requiem") and "Das Heilige". The
Cervantes Award goes along with Chile´s
National Literary and the Reina Sofía Iberoamerican
Poetry Awards, both obtained in 1992.
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