Featured Post

September 1, 2022

Almanac of Story Tellers: Esteban Echeverria

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books

Today is the story of  September 2nd
 ___________________________________________________________________________

    It is the 245th day of the year, leaving 120 days remaining in 2022. 

   
    On this date in 1805, the Argentine writer Esteban Echeverría was born in Buenos Aires.


    His stories are credited as being the first Argentine literature, a deliberate break from the country's Spanish-European tradition. He is considered one of the finest examples of the Romantic movement in Latin America.

    He not only was an author, but he encouraged others. He spend five years in France (1825-1830) absorbing the new Romantic tradition in literature -- works that rejected the order, calm, and rationalism that Classical literature emphasized in favor of the individual, the subjective, and the emotional.

    In the late 1830s, Echeverría helped form the Salón Literario in an effort to spread the ideas of the Pan-American Romantic movement. But in 1840, fearing for his life because of his writings and his efforts to overthrow the government of Juan Manuel de Rosa, he fled to Uruguay, where he lived for the rest of his life. 

    Among his early works in Argentina were La Cautive (The Captive, in English), a narrative poem that takes place on the Argentine plains free from European influences.

    But perhaps his best-known story is El Matadero, variously translated as The Slaughterhouse or The Slaughter Yard, which is believed to have been written in the late 1830s, but was published posthumously in 1871. It tells the story of a government's order to kill bulls for the people, and is widely seen as an attack on de Rosa's brutality and lies, and that the meat would be used to feed the wealthy instead.

    Echeverria died in 1851.

No comments:

Post a Comment