From yesterday..
The history of El Salvador didn't begin with the arrival of the Spanish in 1522, since the Pilpils, a Nahuatl people, had long occupied it and given it the name Cuzcatlan, "the place of precious stones". The other richness - cultural - unfortunately succumbed to colonization and, today, barely a few hundred speakers still master the original language. So, in 2017 and 2018, the new generation embarked on a collection of this Nahuatl heritage. This project - Titajtakezakan - was supported by Unesco. It was orality that gave rise to the first literary genre, as theater flourished there long before poetry, even though Miguel de Cervantes, in his famous Voyage to Parnassus, fervently mentions Juan de Mestanza. Juan de Mestanza, a native of Agudo (Spain) who became mayor of Sonsonate between 1585 and 1589, was a versifier in his spare time. Two centuries later, Miguel Álvarez Castro (1795-1856), considered El Salvador's first poet, was still active in the political world. A hostile terrain that led to his exile from Nicaragua and his death in absolute poverty; fertile ground that certainly inspired his neo-classical work with its strong patriotic overtones. Finally, we could mention Francisco Díaz (1812-1845) and Juan José Cañas (1826-1918), who in turn wore the double hats of poet and soldier.
However, it was Francisco Gavidia who earned his posterity. Born in 1863 in El Salvador, where he lost his life in 1955, he soon abandoned his studies but joined La Juventud, a literary circle, where he was able to indulge his insatiable curiosity for languages and letters. Self-taught, an accomplished polyglot - to the point of creating his own "idioma Salvador", which met with little success, but in which he nonetheless composed several poems(Los Argonautas, A Marconi) - he travelled as far as Paris and was doubly crowned at the end of his life, with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa awarded by the University and the José Matías Delgado Order received from the hands of the President of the Republic. His work is as encyclopedic, eclectic and abundant as his knowledge! It ranges from poetry(Versos) to theater(Ursino, Júpiter, Héspero), essays(1814, Historia moderna de El Salvador) to fiction(Conde de San Salvador o el Dios de Las Casas, Cuentos y narraciones). He befriended - and is said to have influenced - a famous writer, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, father of Modernism.
Like Gavidia, Alberto Masferrer (1868-1932) was a man of many talents - journalist, politician, teacher and writer - which he put to good use in his fight against poverty and his stand for the rights of the less fortunate. Many buildings still bear his name, and his grave has been declared a national monument. Arturo Ambrogi, born in 1875, was also, in a way, the guardian of the humble, becoming a worthy representative of the so-called "costumbrismo" movement, a literature inspired by folklore and sometimes tinged with a touch of romanticism. We owe him numerous peasant chronicles: Cuentos y Fantasías, Máscaras, Manchas y Sensaciones, El Libro del Trópico... To this "costumbrismo", Salvador Salazar Arrué (1899-1975), known as Salarrué, added more literary twists: although he depicted rural life, he dared to mix local vocabulary with a more sustained register in a modern and experimental style that still inflames his readers. His most popular collections are Cuentos de barro and Cuentos de cipotes, the latter not without a certain trivial humor, as the title suggests.
... to today
While the 19th century would not have ended without the appearance of the first female authors - the activist Prudencia Ayala (1885-1936), the poet Claudia Lars (1899-1974) and Consuelo Suncín Sandoval (1901-1979), whose married name - de Saint-Exupéry - will not obscure the fact that she was an artist in her own right - the 20th century quickly showed its colors. Indeed, 1932 saw the birth of the man who became the leader of the most important - and most representative - literary movement of the new century. Italo López Vallecillos, who died in Mexico City in 1986 at the age of 53, had a busy career, serving as editor-in-chief of the newspaper El Independiente and founding theEditorial Universitaria Centroamericana (EDUCA). It was also under his impetus that the Generación comprometida ("Committed Generation") was born, bringing together a number of writers in the 50s, Salvadoran and otherwise, who had in common the need to confront political opposition in their country. From 1956 onwards, this circle was based at the Law Faculty of the University of El Salvador, and had a profound influence not only on societal issues, but also on literature, which opened up to other perspectives, from science fiction to theater of the absurd. This revival was driven by outstanding Salvadoran writers such as Manlio Argueta and Roque Dalton, both born in 1935. The former began writing poetry as a teenager, and won a prestigious prize for his passage into adulthood. Exiled to Costa Rica for almost two decades because of his political writings, he became director of the National Public Library on his return. The latter met with a terrible fate: his descriptions of the economic and social situation, deemed too realistic, earned him serious reprisals, and he was assassinated at the age of 39.
Horacio Castellanos Moya - born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, a country of which he is a national even if he now lives far from it - and Rafael Menjívar Ochoa, whose reputation is well established. The new generation is already showing promise thanks to Claudia Hernández, Grabriela Trujillo - an expatriate in France, whose language she has adopted - and journalist Óscar Martínez. All three were born in El Salvador between 1975 and 1983.
