Twentieth Century
Two great Latin American poets appeared in Chile at the time when Vicente Huidobro's (1893–1948) creacionismo lost its force. These poets are Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), who won Nobel Prizes in literature in 1945 and 1971, respectively. The poetry of Gabriela Mistral, including Desolación (1922), Ternura (1925), Lagar (1954), is forceful and passionate. Despite its disregard for form, it possesses—in its love song to its native Chile—a deep lyricism. Pablo Neruda is one of the great poets of 20th-century Latin America. His work incorporates varied currents and shows a rich range of lyrical and epic elements. From his initial romanticism of Crepusculario (1920–1923) and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1923–1924), he shifted to an expressionist and surrealist stage with Residencia en la tierra (1925–1931 and 1931–1935), the epic España en el corazón (1937), and Canto general (1950). Neruda's work culminates in the 5 volumes of Memorial de Isla Negra (1964). Another major Chilean poet is Nicanor Parra (born 1914), with his unique "antipoemas", Poemas y antipoemas (1954), Versos de salón (1962).
Contemporary Chilean fiction is rooted in the naturalist novels of Eduardo Barrios (1882–1963) and Joaquín Edwards Bello (1886–1968), and continues through the realism of Manuel Rojas (1896–1973), an echo of whom is heard in the work of Fernando Alegría (1918). Carlos Droguett combined realism with a concern with form in his Eloy (1960). Enrique Lafourcade (born 1927) satirized the Rafael Leónidas Trujillo regime in La fiesta del rey Acab (1959) and Augusto Pinochet in "El gran taimado", a work which resulted in his self-exile for a time. The stories of Juan Emar (1893–1964), known by the pseudonym Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi, embrace both cosmopolitan and local trends. Emar's works include the story collection Diez (1937) and the unfinished posthumous novel Umbral (1996), which is perhaps the most daring work in 20th-century Chilean fiction. José Donoso (born 1924) is another major 20th-century writer; his works include El lugar sin límites (1966) and El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), which described the fallen world of Chile's bourgeoisie. Donoso's Casa de campo (1978) shows his great power of imagination. Another 20th century novelist is Jorge Edwards (born 1931), author of the novels El peso de la noche (1965), and Las máscaras (1967).
Read more about this topic: Chilean Literature
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state.... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious ‘retreat’ of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)