The shape..
On his arrival in 1502, Christopher Columbus baptized Honduras, a country that had already been populated for some time. As is often the case, the first literature to emerge from this confrontation was the work of missionaries such as the Nicaraguan Fernando Espino (c. 1600-1676), who mingled with the Indian populations, learning their language and introducing them to his faith through self-penned songs. In 1674, in Guatemala, he published Relación verdadera de la reducción de los indios infieles de la provincia de la Taguisgalpa llamados Xicaques. Antonio de Paz y Salgado, considered the first Honduran writer, was born in Tegucigalpa, then under the rule of the General Captaincy of Guatemala in the 18th century, although the exact year is not known. One thing is certain: his satirical manual, El Mosqueador, which provided remedies and tricks to ward off imbeciles, was widely acclaimed. Wit was therefore the order of the day, and it was this spirit that permeated the work of his successor, albeit in an entirely different register. The priest José Trinidad Reyes (1797-1855) can be considered a worthy heir to the Enlightenment: thanks to his "pastorelas" - musical and poetic compositions - he popularized theater. A fervent feminist, he was also an excellent educator, founding the Sociedad del Genio Emprendedor y del Buen Gusto in 1845 and inaugurating the University of Honduras two years later, while also setting up a library and importing printing equipment. From a more political standpoint, he composed an Elegía al General don Francisco Ferrera, en la muerte de su hijo Fulgencio, followed by the poems Honduras and A la independencia.
He was followed by Juan Ramón Molina (1875-1908) and Froylán Turcios (1875-1973). The former followed in the modernist vein opened by Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, whom he had met in 1890. Although somewhat forgotten today, his poetry(El Chele, Christmas Clovers, El poema del Optimista) is considered to be of equal quality to that of his master. The second followed in the footsteps of Italian decadent Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938). Like him, he favored strong, sometimes violent stories(Cuentos del Amor y la Muerte, El Vampiro, El Fantasma Blanco...), and opened up Honduran literature to new horizons. Finally, Lucila Gamero de Medina (1873-1964) more than distinguished herself by becoming the first Honduran woman to publish novels, as Blanca Olmedo (1908) took a stand against the Church and high society. A freedom of tone perfectly in keeping with her feminist activism, but unheard of in her day.
... to the bottom
Reality was thus beginning to intrude on literature, and the journalist Rafael H. Valle (1891-1959) is all the more important if we don't just praise him for his travelogues and biographies(Visión del Perú, Tres pensadores de América, México en el mundo de hoy, etc.), but place him in this innovative vein. It was also reality that caught up with Generation 35, for although it is described as bohemian - an adjective that would not have displeased Clementina Suárez (1902-1992), "mother of Honduran poetry", renowned for her freedom of tone and morals - it is also referred to as the Generation of the dictatorship, since it evolved under Tiburcio Carías Andino. The avant-garde became critical, but also concerned with giving a voice to the most humble, and Honduran peasants became the central characters of "criollismo", a regionalist literature with a cultural vocation, pioneered by Marcos Carias Reyes (1905-1949). Alongside him, in this Generation 35, we should also mention Claudio Barrera, whose writings are voluntarily political(La pregunta infinita, Fechas de sangre, La liturgia del sueño, ..), Argentina Díaz Lozano, who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1974, Oscar Castañeda Batres(Digo el amor, La estrella vulnerada, Madre Honduras), Jacobo Carcamo, who received the prestigious Ramón Rosa Prize in 1955, one year after Barrera, and of course Alejandro Castro, founder of the magazine Tegucigalpa, which brought these authors together. Indeed, there were many publications whose columns included more or less committed writings, as the links between the press and literature were particularly strong in Honduras. So it's perhaps no coincidence that the man who penned his country's most famous novel excelled in both fields, and that Prisión verde pioneered the genre of social realism. Ramón Amaya Amador was a journalist, but before that he held several precarious jobs, including one on a banana plantation. It was from this experience that he drew inspiration for his book, denouncing working conditions and the allocation of land to the richest farm owners. Written during the dictatorship, this work had to be published abroad, and it was also far from his native country that Amador died in 1966, at the age of 50, in a plane crash.
Roberto Sosa (1930-2011), whose international renown also stems from his ability to breathe new life into Honduran poetry, was also known for his ability to challenge and denounce. Although relations with the authorities were not always peaceful, literature was able to flourish from the end of the twentieth century onwards, as demonstrated by the careers of Eduardo Bahr, Julio Escoto, Ernesto Bondy Reyes and Jorge Luis Oviedo, who, in addition to their literary work, did much to develop intellectual life, by creating magazines, writing workshops, publishing houses, theater groups and so on The new generation seems to be taking over, including Raúl López Lemus(Sombra en el Tintero, which made him the first Honduran to win Guatemala's Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize), Kalton Harold Bruhl, a member of the Honduran Academy, and Giovanni Rodríguez, whose Los días y los muertos (2016) made its mark with its violence and realism.
