Julio Florencio CortázarMontes-Bradley, Eduardo. "Cortázar sin barba". Editorial Debate. Random House Mondadori. p. 35, Madrid. 2005. (; 26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984) was an Argentine and naturalised French novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.
Cortázar lived his childhood, adolescence, and incipient maturity in Argentina. In 1951, he settled in France for what would prove to be more than three decades. However, he also lived in Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.
Biography
Early life Julio Cortázar was born on 26 August 1914, in Ixelles,Cortázar sin barba, by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Random House Mondadori, Editorial Debate, Madrid, 2004 a municipality of Brussels, Belgium. According to biographer Miguel Herráez, his parents, Julio José Cortázar and María Herminia Descotte, were Argentine citizens, and his father was attached to the Argentine diplomatic service in Belgium.Herráez, Miguel. Julio Cortázar, Una Biografía Revisada Alrevés, 2011 p. 25
At the time of Cortázar's birth, Belgium was occupied by the German troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II. After German troops arrived in Belgium, Cortázar and his family moved to Zürich where María Herminia's parents, Victoria Gabel and Louis Descotte (a French national), were waiting in neutral territory. The family group spent the next two years in Switzerland, first in Zürich, then Geneva, before moving for a short period to Barcelona. The Cortázars settled outside of Buenos Aires by the end of 1919.Montes-Bradley, Eduardo. "Cortázar sin barba". Editorial Debate. Random House Mondadori, p. 110, Madrid, 2005.
Cortázar's father left when Julio was six, and the family had no further contact with him.Herráez, Miguel. Julio Cortázar, Una Biografía Revisada Alrevés, 2011, , pp. 38 & 45, Cortázar spent most of his childhood in Banfield, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, with his mother and younger sister. The home in Banfield, with its backyard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories.Banfield is mentioned in the short story "Conducta en los velorios" from Historias de cronopios y de famas. Despite this, in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá on 4 December 1963, he described this period of his life as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness." He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother, who spoke several languages and was a great reader herself, introduced her son to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elves, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's".
Education and teaching career
Cortázar obtained a qualification as an elementary school teacher at the age of 18. He would later pursue higher education in philosophy and languages at the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, but left for financial reasons without receiving a degree.Herráez, Miguel. Julio Cortázar, Una Biografía Revisada. Alrevés, 2011, , p. 343. According to biographer Montes-Bradley, Cortázar taught in at least two high schools in Buenos Aires Province, one in the city of Chivilcoy, the other in Bolivar. In 1938, using the pseudonym of Julio Denis, he self-published a volume of sonnets, Presencia. Omar Prego, Muchnik Editores, 1985 (p. 33). He later repudiated this work, saying in a 1977 interview for Spanish television that publishing it was his only transgression to the principle of not publishing any books until he was convinced that what was written in them was what he meant to say. TVE 1977.
In 1944, he became professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza, but owing to political pressure from Peronists, he resigned the position in June 1946. He subsequently worked as a translator and as director of the Cámara Argentina del Libro, a trade organization.Herráez, Miguel. Julio Cortázar, Una Biografía Revisada. Alrevés, 2011, , pp. 118–119.
In 1949, he published a play, Los Reyes (The Kings), based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
In 1980, Cortázar delivered eight lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Years in France In 1951, Cortázar immigrated to France, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, though he travelled widely. From 1952 onwards, he worked intermittently for UNESCO as a translator. He wrote most of his major works in Paris or in Saignon in the south of France, where he also maintained a home. In later years he became actively engaged in opposing abuses of human rights in Latin America, and was a supporter of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua as well as Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution and Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile.
Cortázar had three long-term romantic relationships with women. The first was with Aurora Bernárdez, an Argentine translator, whom he married in 1953. They separated in 1968Herráez, Miguel. Julio Cortázar, Una Biografía Revisada Alrevés, 2011 pp. 245–252. when he became involved with the Lithuanian writer, editor, translator, and filmmaker Ugnė Karvelis, whom he never formally married, and who reportedly stimulated Cortázar's interest in politics, although his political sensibilities had already been awakened by a visit to Cuba in 1963, the first of multiple trips that he would make to that country throughout the remainder of his life. In 1981 he married Canadian writer Carol Dunlop. After Dunlop's death in 1982, Aurora Bernárdez accompanied Cortázar during his final illness and, in accordance with his longstanding wishes, inherited the rights to all his works.«Las cartas de Cortázar», article in the newspaper El Mundo (Madrid), 15 July 2012.Julio Cortázar. Cartas, 3 (2000 edition, Alfaguara), p. 1785. .
Last years and death In August 1981, he suffered a gastric hemorrhage; his life was miraculously saved, and he continued to write. President François Mitterrand granted him French nationality. In 1983, after the restoration of democracy in Argentina, Cortázar made one last trip to his homeland, where he was welcomed by his admirers, who would stop him in the street or ask for autographs, in contrast to the indifference of the authorities—President Raúl Alfonsín refused to see him.
Cortázar died in Paris in 1984, and is interred in the cimetière du Montparnasse. The cause of his death was reported to be leukemia, though some sources state that he died from AIDS as a result of receiving a blood transfusion.Una nueva biografía sostiene que Cortázar habría muerto de sida clarin.com, 7 June 2001«Peri Rossi: “Cortázar murió de sida por una transfusión”», article in the newspaper ABC from 25 January 2009.
Works
Julio Cortázar started writing in his earliest days at school. His first printed book was a collection of sonnets heavily influenced by Stéphane Mallarmé called Presencia ("Presence"), published under the pseudonym Julio Denis in 1938. He also published a few stories using the same pseudonym. His first major work to be published under his real name was Los Reyes (1949, "The Monarchs"), a poetic drama that passed almost unnoticed. In the late forties Cortázar's short stories however began to attract interest, particularly after the story Casa Tomada ("House taken over") was published in a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges.
Cortázar became notable for his numerous short stories, collected in such volumes as Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959) that established his reputation as a writer of short fiction. Cortázar's stories characteristically include fantastic and mythical elements where the protagonists in initially ordinary situations find themselves in strange or horrific situations. In 1967, English translations by Paul Blackburn of stories selected from these volumes were published by Pantheon Books as End of the Game and Other Stories; it was later re-titled Blow-up and Other Stories. Cortázar published four novels during his lifetime: Los premios (The Winners, 1960), Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963), 62: A Model Kit (62 Modelo para Armar, 1968), and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel, 1973). Except for Los premios, which was translated by Elaine Kerrigan, these novels have been translated into English by Gregory Rabassa. Two other novels, El examen and Divertimento, though written before 1960, only appeared posthumously.
Hopscotch, the most significant of his novels, established Cortázar as one of the leading writers of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s and has been called the greatest Latin American novel of the 20th century. Other notable works from this period include Historias de cronopios y famas (1962), a book of brief and eccentric prose passages that resists categorization, and an expanded Final del Juego (1964) including ten additional stories.Standish p.7
Cortázar took influence from English, French and Spanish-American literature, including writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe.Standish, p.14-15 His use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness owes much to James Joyce,Zavaleta, Carlos Eduardo (1999), "Julio Cortázar y James Joyce" . Alma Mater Nº 18–19. but his main influences were SurrealismPicón Garfield, Evelyn. Es Julio Cortázar un surrealista?, 1975 and the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz."El jazz en la obra de Cortázar" , p. 41. This last interest is reflected in Hopscotch and the notable story "El perseguidor" ("The Pursuer"), which Cortázar based on the life of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker.Sommer, Doris, "Grammar Trouble for Cortázar", in Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 211.
Cortázar also published poetry, drama, and various works of non-fiction, some of which relate to or accompany visual works. In the 1960s, working with the artist José Silva, he created two almanac-books or libros-almanaque, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos and Último Round, which combined various texts written by Cortázar with photographs, engravings, and other illustrations, in the manner of the almanaques del mensajero that had been widely circulated in rural Argentina during his childhood.Herráez, Miguel. Julio Cortázar, Una Biografía Revisada Alrevés, 2011, , p. 242. One of his last works was a collaboration with Carol Dunlop, The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, which relates, partly in mock-heroic style, the couple's extended expedition along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille in a Volkswagen camper nicknamed Fafner. As a translator, he completed Spanish-language renderings of Robinson Crusoe, Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Mémoires d'Hadrien, and the complete prose works of Edgar Allan Poe.Biblioteca Julio Cortázar, Fundación Juan March.
Influence and legacy
Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup (1966) was inspired by Cortázar's story "Las babas del diablo", which in turn was based on a photograph taken by Chilean photographer Sergio Larraín during a shoot outside of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Cortázar also made a cameo appearance in Antonioni's film, playing a homeless man who has his photograph taken by David Hemmings' character. Cortázar's story "La autopista del sur" ("The Southern Thruway") influenced another film of the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard's Week End (1967).Jean Franco, "Comic Stripping: Cortázar in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, eds. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, p. 416. The filmmaker Manuel Antín has directed three films based on Cortázar stories, Cartas de mamá, Circe and Intimidad de los parques.“No hice otra cosa que plagiar a Cortázar”, Pagina 12, 21 March 2012.