Noticias
In the centenary of his birthday
Juan Rulfo is one of the main voices of Spanish-American literature: Elsa Cross·
May 14, 2017With only 325 pages Juan Rulfo left an indelible mark in the Mexican and universal literature, with the book of stories El llano en llamas (1953), made up of 17 stories and the novel Pedro Páramo, published in 1955.
In the framework of the centenary of his birth, Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno (Jalisco, May 16, 1917 - Mexico City, January 7, 1986) is recognized as one of the greatest narrators in the world, whose unique style work dazzled authors as important as Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag.
Poet Dolores Castro said that he is simply an incomparable author "because he is the best writer in Mexico I believe, he is a writer who could, through the dead, give an overview of who we are, our passions, our way of being, of the dream, of the reality. I think he is the most capable writer of moving from poetry to narrative, not to mention poetry giving a ghostly but exact narration of the whole situation, especially of poor people who live in the country”.
For his part, the poet and philosopher Jaime Labastida, director of the Mexican Academy of Language, considered that Juan Rulfo is the one who opens the modern narrative in Mexico, since although there were first-class narrators who placed fiction prose at the highest level, like Alfonso Reyes, Martín Luis Guzmán and Rafael Muñoz, Rulfo was who recovered in his stories the rural atmosphere with an incomparable style.
"Rulfo's style is so personal, so unique, so concise, so full of phrases of an economy and such an incredible rigor, that starts the modern narrative. There is no description of landscape although it is located in rural Jalisco and the theme is: the Guerra Cristera and others, but remember when you ask a character: who is Pedro Páramo? the answer is not the physical description of the man nor what he does, the answer is: he is a living bile. That economic character of Rulfo's phrases is what gives him all its meaning and vigor and keeps him alive today”.
Poet Elsa Cross, National Prize of Arts and Literature 2016, considered that "Juan Rulfo is one of the main voices of Hispanic American literature. In his work, poetic strength, mystery and a tremendous intensity meet itself imbuing his characters and their plots. His work is a permanent lesson”.
It is said that Juan Rulfo is the most widely read and studied Mexican writer in the country and abroad, since only Pedro Páramo, who the author wrote in four months, has been translated into almost 30 languages and will be available in Nahuatl.
When the Mexican writer of Spanish origin, Tomás Segovia was awarded in 2005 with the XV Latin American and Caribbean Literature Prize, which was presented at the Guadalajara International Book Fair with the name of Juan Rulfo, he pointed out that this is one of the novelists and greatest storytellers in the world.
“I was dazzled with his prose, he is a very peculiar author, I think he is the type of writer who has the pure gift, that is to say, he is a mysterious writer, nobody knows why Rulfo had that talent, because in other writers one can track their work, culture, influences, even biography, but Rulfo is a pure miracle”.
For the Jalisco poet Hugo Gutierrez Vega, who died in 2015, "Juan Rulfo’s work is above importance, is in the field of prodigies and literary expertise, is made of murmurs, silences and words, the dead who remained stuck on the ruinous walls”.
Rulfo himself pointed out in an interview in 1973 that the writing of Pedro Páramo was a search for style. "I had the characters and the atmosphere. I was familiar with that part of the country, where I had spent my childhood, and I had deepened these situations. But I could not find a way to express them. So, I simply tried to do it with the language I had heard from my people, the people of my town ... Then, the system applied finally in the stories first; then in the novel, I used the language of the people, the language spoken that I had heard from my elders, and that it is still alive to this day”.
The author acknowledged that it is a dark novel where the main character is not Pedro Páramo, but the people who are "a dead people where only souls live, where all the characters are dead, and even the narrator is dead. Then there is no limit between space and time. The dead have no time or space. They do not move in time or space. Then as they appear, they vanish. And within this confusing world, it is assumed that the only ones who return to earth (it is a very popular belief) are the souls, the souls of those dead who died in sin. And as it was a town in which almost all died in sin, most of them returned. They inhabited the village again, but they were souls, they were not living beings”.
And as people die where they want, Juan Rulfo recognized that Pedro Páramo went from a Mexican novel, to being universal, because "human problems are the same everywhere. Love, death, injustice, suffering, are not new themes that are suggested in Pedro Páramo. I have been told that it is “a novel of love for the homeless”. I do not know. I tell the search for a father, as a hope. As one who seeks his childhood and tries to recover his best days, and in that search finds nothing but disappointment. And in the end his hope collapses 'like a pile of stones?".
This book was widely celebrated by writers like Jorge Luis Borges, who considered that "Pedro Páramo is one of the best novels of the Hispanic literature, and even of all the literature", whereas for Susan Sontag "Rulfo’s novel is not only one of the masterpieces of 20th century world literature, but one of the most influential books of the century”.
Elena Poniatowska reminded that Pedro Páramo was initially called Los murmullos (The murmurs), "because that is what is heard throughout the novel, a murmur of souls in pain that roam the streets of the abandoned village. Rulfo looks like those reckless men who accept the ghost's appointment and start talking to him at midnight”.
In Pedro Páramo, the author "sums up everything dreamed of reality and presents dead people who live that reality as if in reviving, but in another look, they were able to better appreciate that reality”, said Dolores Castro.
But in Rulfo's work, there is also El Llano en Llamas, which, for this poet, is made up of stories that are great. "I remember Efrén Hernández talking about Rulfo and yes, he also considered that he was one of the best narrators in Mexico and please note that Efrén Hernández was a very good one”.
Writer Evodio Escalante has pointed out that Rulfo "can be read by the peasants and the inhabitants of the city, I believe that he is one of the national authors with greater penetration in all social strata. Even in the countryside, I have seen peasants who have El llano in llamas, because they identify with the world that Rulfo built, because it is the world of the peasants, of the time of the Revolution and also of our time, because things have not changed much”.
Although Pedro Páramo, is a masterpiece, "some tales of El Llano en llamas are irreplaceable; they are wonderful: Diles que no me maten, Luvina, Anacleto Morones, Talpa, are extraordinary stories”, said Jaime Labastida
The director of the Mexican Academy of Language emphasized that both Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas are real literary jewels. In Luvina, "the husband and the wife speak: “do you hear? / what? / That / what / the silence”. What a dialogue, Luvina is not described, is wha the prints in the characters as a feeling, like a sensation and that is what is important, there is the node of the validity of Rulfo’s work in my opinion”.
In addition, Rulfo leaves everything as a suggestion, his work is a "huge amount of virtual literature. What Rulfo does is to place the characters in a sordid environment, full of problems, distressing, but he doesn’t say it, that is to say it becomes deduced from the narrative itself without any description”, added the philosopher
Compared to Marcel Proust, of great exhuberance, details and tenderness, Jaime Labastida pointed out that Rulfo is "concise, fundamental traits, basic traits of the characters, he is there also present in an enormous personal anguish, the murder of the father and the orphanage of Rulfo, because it is reflected in those men who always want to avenge the death of the father”.
Juan Rulfo was the third of five brothers from a wealthy family. He started primary school in 1924, the same year his father died and seven years later his mother did. He remained in his grandmother’s custody, later he entered a boarding school in Guadalajara.
A strike at the University of Guadalajara prevented him from enrolling in it and in 1934 he moved to Mexico City. At the end of that decade he began as a writer and a photographer, and from 1945 he began to publish his stories in two magazines: America, from the capital, and Pan, from Guadalajara, while his images appeared for the first time, also in America in 1949.
It was in 1946 when he began working for a tire company as a traveling agent and two years later, he married Clara Aparicio with whom he had four children.
In 1952 and 1953 he obtained two scholarships from the Mexican Writers Center, which allowed him to publish in 1953 El Llano en llamas, where he gathers stories already published in America and incorporates other unpublished ones, and in 1955 Pedro Páramo, which he published three previews in 1954, in the magazines Las letras patrias, Universidad de México and Dintel.
In 1958 he finished writing his second novel, El gallo de oro, which was not published until 1980. In 2010 appeared the final edition of this work, after a careful review of the original that allowed to eliminate errors and inconsistencies of the previously known version.
Since the publication of the first two titles Rulfo's literary prestige has steadily increased to become the most recognized Mexican writer in Mexico and abroad. Among his admirers are writers as renowned as Mario Benedetti, José María Arguedas, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Susan Sontag, Elias Canetti, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Urs Widmer, Gao Xingjian and Kenzaburo Oe, among many others.
Juan Rulfo was awarded several prizes such as the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1956 (Pedro Páramo), while in 1970 he won the National Prize for Literature. Later, in 1976, he was chosen member of the Mexican Academy of the Language, taking possession in 1980 and won the Prince of Asturias of Spain prize, in 1983.
The author also wrote scripts for cinema. In 1960 the movie El despojo was made, based on a Rulfo’s idea, while in 1964, El gallo de oro directed by Roberto Gavaldón, adapted by Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, was taken to the cinema. The movie, El rincón de las vírgenes, directed by Alberto Isaac in 1972, is an adaptation of two stories included in El llano en llamas.
During the last two decades of his life, Rulfo dedicated them to his work at the National Indian Institute of Mexico, where he was in charge of the edition of one of the most important collections of contemporary and ancient anthropology in Mexico.
Mexico,Distrito Federal
