Old and New Worlds
The year 1499 marks the arrival of the Spaniards and the decline of the Chibchas who until then populated the region of Bacatá, now Bogotá. However, a myth survived and was echoed by the conquistadores: El Dorado. Strangely enough, the story ricochets since Christopher Columbus (to whom Colombia owes its name, as a tribute, although he did not discover it), thinking of visiting the Indies, was about to find the golden pagodas described by Marco Polo (who was in fact evoking Burma). Now, the Chibchas - who venerated Bochica - had for customary rite a ceremony during which their chief, covered with golden powder, immersed himself in the lake of Guatavita, and received in offering objects, composed among others of the precious metal, that his people threw him. The same veneration for gold that agitated the old and new occupants of the country contributed to the myth, justified bloody fights... and an unquenchable thirst that led Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (1509-1579) almost to madness, who some think served as a model for Cervantes' Quixote (1605). As booty, the Spaniards also received the many languages spoken by the natives, all of them related but among which the Muisca was preferred to serve as a language of Christianization. Alas, here again, despite the efforts of the Dominican friar Bernard de Lugo to freeze this idiom in writing in a work dated 1619, the language of the colonists quickly imposed itself, to the detriment of the original culture. At the same time, another Spaniard set out to collect the habits and customs of the first peoples, Juan de Castellanos, who in 1589 wrote his Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias
, in which he evoked the first hours of colonization, especially that of Colombia, where he arrived in 1544, and elaborated a precise description of the Indians. This testimony is precious, as much for what it tells as for what it reveals of the humanity of the one who established it. The chroniclers soon gave way to the poets, but these, although born on the South American continent, remained under the influence of the currents that agitated old Europe, in particular Spain, with which they were always affiliated. One of the best representatives of this period is Hernando Domínguez Camargo, who was born in Bogotá in 1606, although his style, which was part of the cultism movement, may now seem very dated. He was inspired by the work of Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) to adopt this baroque, convoluted and overloaded writing to the point of excess in his Poema heroico de san Ignacio de Loyola or in his "satirical sonnet" A Guatavita. On the other hand, Francisco Álvarez de Velasco and Zorrilla (1647-1703), the author of Rhytmica Sacra and Moral y Laudatiria, had an undisguised admiration for Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, who, for his part, pursued an approach that was the complete opposite of Góngora's: "conceptualism", an aestheticism characterized by its direct and unadorned approach.From religion to politics
While their predecessors had mainly exploited religious themes, the writers born in the 18th century will rather devote themselves to political questions. For the time being, Francisco Antonio Zea (1766-1822) already embodied the Colombian Enlightenment, fighting for the reform of education in a country that was then enjoying a great intellectual effervescence, especially thanks to the appearance of printing and the press. Journalists, travelers and professors met in circles and, as a man of science, Zea contributed to botany, a passion that he pursued in parallel with his growing patriotic commitment. His perfect contemporary, Camilo Torres Tenorio, also born in 1766, also took on political functions after honing his eloquence as a lawyer, earning him the nickname of "Word of the Revolution" which he used in Memorial de Agravios, in which he criticized the Spanish government and defended Creole minorities. Although this manifesto was not published until later, it did not prevent him from spearheading the federalist movement, which violently opposed the centralist trend. Finally, the poet José Joaquín Ortiz (1814-1892) was a worthy representative of the issues that preoccupied his time. Thus, with La Bandera colombiana (The Colombian Flag), his most famous work, he displayed his ideas, but also became in literature the link between neoclassicism and romanticism. In 1871, he contributed to the creation of the Colombian Academy of Language, located in Bogotá, and opened the door to a new generation of writers, to which should be added the playwright Julio Ardoleda Pombo (1817-1862), the poets Gregorio Gutiérrez González (1826-1872) and Julio Flórez (1863-1923), and above all Rafael Núñez (1825-1894). President of the Republic and initiator of the Regeneración, the latter also became a poet. Although the verses of his Himno Patriótico were adopted as the lyrics of the national anthem, they are only a part of his writing work, which consists of poems (Versos in 1885, Poesías
in 1889) and essays, both journalistic and political.This being said, the Romantic movement was also invented in the "costumbrismo" movement, a Spanish specificity that spread to the European continent and to the South American continent where it took on a nationalist dimension. Josefa Acevedo de Gómez (1803-1861), one of the first women to take up the pen, not without difficulty, is linked to this art of describing habits and customs, as are José Caicedo Rojas (1816-1898) and José Maria Cordovez Moure (1835-1918), who both joined El Mosaico. This group, founded in 1858 by Eugenio Díaz Castro (1803-1865) and José María Vergara y Vergara (1831-1872), aimed to build a national literature based on folklore, and its authors published in an eponymous magazine that was published until 1872. Jorge Isaacs (1837-1895) was also one of them, submitting his first poems to his peers, but he became famous with his novel María. This story, published in Colombia in 1867, tells of difficult, even impossible, love stories between protagonists who do not belong to the same social classes or ethnic groups. Considered a masterpiece, this novel was translated into French and English. Finally, the life and literary work of Tomás Carrasquilla (1858-1940) are at a crossroads: he witnessed the changes that were shaking up the political landscape of his country and was influenced by costumbrism and later by modernism, which was already evident in the work of José Asunción Silva, the author of Nocturne
, who committed suicide at the age of 31 in 1896, and in that of Guillermo Valencia Castillo (1873-1943), known as "El Maestro. Before mentioning the modernism that several generations of writers would take up, let us mention two authors who once again prove that the world was evolving: Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913), who was involved in the feminist cause, and Candelario Obseo (1849-1884), who was the forerunner of the Poesía Negra y oscura. He used the language of the Afro-Colombian community in La familia Pygmalion, Lectura para ti and Cantos populares de mi Tierra, published posthumously in 1887, since his short life ended with his suicide at the age of 35, following a heartbreak that sounded like the last proof of the discrimination he had to endure because of the color of his skin..From modernism to the modern age
The first generation that truly asserted itself in modernism was the so-called "Centennial" generation, which appeared in 1910, the year of the commemoration of independence. It is associated with Porfirio Barba-Jacob (Canción de la vida profunda), Eduardo Castillo (El árbol que canta), Aurelio Martínez Mutis (La Epopeya del cóndor, La Esefera conquistada), and above all José Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928), who distinguished himself in the Tunja Floral Games, where he won second place. A prolific poet, his most famous work is a novel, La Vorágine (1924), which is based on real events and describes the exploitation of the inhabitants of the Putumayo region. But post-modernism was already making its mark, notably through the emblematic León de Greiff (1895-1976), a disciple of the Symbolists and a leading figure in the Los Nuevos group founded in 1925, notably with Rafael Maya (1897-1980). Some fifteen years later, a new group was formed under the name Piedra y cielo, in homage to a title by the future Nobel Prize for Literature 1956, the Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez. Its most prominent members were Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Jorge Rojas and Eduardo Carranza. The rejection of conventions and traditions, which served as a common thread in these different periods and revolutionized poetry in depth, led to "Nadaism", close to nihilism and existentialism, and linked to the Beat Generation, with which bridges were created. A movement of the avant-garde and counter-culture, willingly subversive, even strongly ironic, Nadaism was initiated by Gonzalo Arango Arias (1931-1976), who published the First Manifesto in 1958. He knew how to be particularly federative, bringing together writers as different as Fernando González Ochoa (1895-1964), whose preface Viaje a pie
in 1967, or Amílcar Osorio and Jotamario Arbeláez, two young authors born in 1940. With this new, more critical approach, literature will now draw on reality and the writer will take on the role of witness, which, in view of the unrest and violence that marked the 20th century, is a necessity. In any case, tongues are loosened and the metaphor remains weak in view of the editorial effervescence, the authors are now counted by the dozens, some crossing the barrier of translation. The most illustrious is Gabriel García Márquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Born in 1927 in Aracataca, he died in Mexico City in 2014, leaving behind a prolific body of work, often associated with Magical Realism, whose masterpiece is without question One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, we should not forget his friend, Álvaro Mutis, whose novels and stories can be found in French at Grasset (Le Dernier visage, Un Bel morir, Les Carnets du palais noir), and their many successors. Without aiming to be exhaustive, we could mention Laura Restrepo(Délire, Calmann-Lévy), Andrés Caicedo(Traversé par la rage, Belfond), Mario Mendoza Zambrano(Satanas, Asphalte), Héctor Abad Faciolince(L'oubli que nous serons, Folio) or Juan Gabriel Vasquez(Chansons pour l'incendie, Seuil).
