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Augusto Roa Bastos

Paraguayan writer (1917–2005)

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Roa Bastos's life and writing were marked by experience with dictatorial military regimes. In 1947 he was forced into exile in Argentina, and in 1976 he fled Buenos Aires for France in similar political circumstances. Most of Roa Bastos's work was written in exile, but this did not deter him from fiercely tackling Paraguayan social and historical issues in his work. Writing in a Spanish that was at times heavily augmented by Guaraní words (the major Paraguayan indigenous language), Roa Bastos incorporated Paraguayan myths and symbols into a Baroque style known as magical realism. He is considered a late-comer to the Latin American Boom literary movement. Roa Bastos's canon includes the novels Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man) and El fiscal (1993; The Prosecutor), as well as numerous other novels, short stories, poems, and screenplays.

Biography

Early life (1917–1932)

Roa Bastos was born in Asunción on 13 June 1917. He spent his childhood in Iturbe, a provincial town in the Guairá Department where his father was an administrator on a sugar plantation. It was here, some 200 kilometres (120 mi) to the south of the Paraguayan capital of Asunción, that Roa Bastos learned to speak both Spanish and Guaraní, the language of Paraguay's indigenous people. At the age of ten he was sent to school in Asunción where he stayed with his uncle, Hermenegildo Roa, the liberal bishop of Asunción.

His uncle's extensive personal library provided the young Roa Bastos with his first exposure to the classical Spanish literature of the Baroque and Renaissance traditions that he would imitate in his early poetry throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, his uncle's emphasis on the mystical aspects of classic literature would have a profound Roa Bastos's later writings. His experience of Guaraní social customs and language combined with the traditional Spanish education that he received in Asunción, created a cultural and linguistic duality that would manifest itself in much of Roa Bastos's writing. His rural upbringing also exposed Roa Bastos to the exploitation and oppression of the indigenous and peasant peoples of Paraguay, which would become a prominent theme in his writing.

War and writing (1932–1947)

In 1932 the territorial Chaco War began between Paraguay and Bolivia and continued until 1935. At some point, perhaps as late as 1934, Roa Bastos joined the Paraguayan army as a medical auxiliary. The war would have a profound effect on the future writer who said: "when I left for that war I dreamed of purification in the fire of battles." Instead of glory he found "maimed bodies" and "destruction" which left him to question "why two brother countries like Bolivia and Paraguay were massacring each other", and as a consequence Roa Bastos became a pacifist.

Directly after the war he worked as a bank clerk and later as a journalist. During this time he began writing plays and poetry. In 1941 Roa Bastos won the Ateneo Paraguayo prize for Fulgencia Miranda, although the book was never published. In the early 1940s he spent significant time on the yerba mate plantations in northern Paraguay, an experience he would later draw upon in his first published novel, Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man). In 1942 he was appointed editorial secretary for the Asunción daily El País.

In 1944 the British Council awarded Roa Bastos a nine-month fellowship for journalism in London. During this time he traveled extensively in Britain, France and Africa and witnessed the devastation of WWII first hand. He served as the El País war correspondent, notably conducting an interview with General Charles de Gaulle after the latter's return to Paris in 1945. Roa Bastos also broadcast Latin American programs at the invitation of the BBC and France's Ministry of Information.

Throughout this eventful period in his life Roa Bastos continued to write and he was considered a poet of the Paraguayan avant garde. In 1942 he published a book of poems in the classic Spanish style, which he titled El Ruiseñor De La Aurora (The Dawn Nightingale), a work he later renounced. He also had plays successfully performed during the 1940s, though they were never published. Of his prolific poetry of the late 1940s only "El naranjal ardiente" (1960; "The Burning Orange Grove") was published.

Exile in Argentina (1947–1976)

During the 1947 Paraguayan Civil War, Roa Bastos was forced to flee to Buenos Aires, Argentina, because he had spoken out against President Higinio Moríñigo. About 500,000 of his fellow Paraguayans left for Argentina at the same time. Roa Bastos remained in Argentina until just before the establishment of the military dictatorship there in 1976, and he did not return permanently to Paraguay until 1989. He found exile difficult, but his time in Buenos Aires was a prolific period. Roa Bastos said this in reference to his exile:

I can't complain...Exile brought out in me, in addition to a revulsion against violence and against depreciation of the human condition, a feeling for the universality of man. Exile lent me perspectives from which to know my own country from other people's point of view, and from which to live for the enormity of its misfortune.

In 1953 the collection of 17 short stories El trueno entre las hojas (1953; Thunder Among the Leaves) was published and circulated internationally, but it was not until the 1960 publication of the novel Hijo de hombre (Son of Man) that Roa Bastos won major critical and popular success. The novel draws on the oppressive history of Paraguay from the rule of Dr. Jose Gaspar de Francia in the early 19th century until the Chaco War in the 1930s. Its multiple narrative perspectives and historical and political themes anticipate his most famous work, Yo el Supremo, written more than a decade later. Roa Bastos adapted Hijo de hombre into an award-winning film in the same year as its publication.

Roa Bastos further established himself as a screenwriter with the screenplay of Shunko (1960), directed by Lautaro Murúa and based on the memoirs of a country school teacher. In 1961 he once again collaborated with Murúa for Alias Gardelito (1961), which depicted the lives of urban petty criminals and became a major independent film of the nuevo cine movement. In 1974 Roa Bastos published his influential masterpiece Yo el Supremo, the result of seven years' work. When Jorge Rafael Videla's military dictatorship came to power in 1976, however, the book was banned in Argentina, and Roa Bastos was exiled once again, this time to Toulouse, France.

France (1976–1989)

In Toulouse Roa Bastos taught Guaraní and Spanish literature at the University of Toulouse. Although he had been allowed to visit Paraguay to work with a new generation of Paraguayan writers, starting in 1970, he was again barred from entry in 1982, for purportedly engaging in subversive activities. There is however, little evidence that he participated in sectarian politics of any kind. In France, Roa Bastos faced the second forced relocation of his life, but he also won a new readership for his work during this time. Helen Lane's English translation of Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme), published in 1986, was greeted with widespread acclaim in the English-speaking world. However, in France, Roa Bastos's writing focus was primarily academic, and his literary output did not match that of his time in Argentina. In 1985 Roa Bastos retired from the University of Toulouse. Following the downfall of the oppressive Alfredo Stroessner regime in 1989, Roa Bastos returned to Paraguay at the request of its new leader Andrés Rodríguez.

Return to Paraguay and Cervantes Prize (1989–2005)

Following the toppling of the Stroessner regime, Roa Bastos won the Premio Cervantes (Cervantes Prize), awarded by the Spanish Royal Academy in partnership with the Spanish government, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Spanish-language literature. It was at this time that Roa Bastos began to travel frequently between Paraguay and France. In 1991, representing Paraguay, Roa Bastos signed The Morelia Declaration "demanding the reversal of the ecological destruction of the planet." It was at this time that Roa Bastos again became an active novelist and screenwriter.

In 1991 Roa Bastos adapted Yo, el Supremo for the screen. His first novel since Yo, el Supremo, Vigilia del almirante (1992; Vigil of the Admiral) was published in 1992, and El fiscal (1993; The Prosecutor) the following year. Although neither of his later novels had the impact of his earlier work, El fiscal is considered an important work. Roa Bastos died on 26 April 2005 in Asunción from a heart attack. He was survived by his three children, his third wife, Iris Giménez, and a reputation as one of Latin American's finest writers.

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