Mario Benedetti · Lablypedia

Early life and education

Benedetti was born 1920 in Paso de los Toros in the Uruguayan Tacuarembó Department to Brenno Benedetti, a pharmaceutical and chemical winemaker, and Matilde Farrugia, both of Italian descent. Two years later, they moved to Tacuarembó, the capital city of the departament, and shortly after that his father tried to buy a business but was cheated and went into bankruptcy, so they moved to Montevideo, the capital city of the country, where they lived in difficult economic conditions. Mario completed six years of primary school at the Deutsche Schule Montevideo, where he learned German, which later allowed him to be the first translator of Franz Kafka in Uruguay. His father immediately removed him from the school when Nazi ideology started featuring in the classroom. For the next two years he studied at Liceo Héctor Miranda, but for the rest of his high-school years he did not attend an educational institution. In those years he learned shorthand, which was his livelihood for a long time. At the age of 14 he began working, first as a stenographer and then as a salesman, public officer, accountant, journalist, broadcaster and translator.

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Career

He trained as a journalist with Carlos Quijano, on the weekly newspaper Marcha. From 1938 and 1941 he lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He worked in different professions on both banks of the Río de la Plata river, for example, as a stenographer. In 1946 he married Luz López Alegre.

He was a member of the "Generation of 45", an Uruguayan intellectual and literary movement that included Carlos Maggi, Manuel Flores Mora, Ángel Rama, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Real de Azúa, José Pedro Díaz, Amanda Berenguer, Ida Vitale, Líber Falco, Juan Carlos Onetti, among others.

He wrote for the weekly Uruguayan newspaper Marcha from 1945 until it was forcibly closed by the military government in 1973, and was its literary director from 1954. In 1957, he traveled to Europe and visited nine countries as a correspondent for Marcha weekly magazine and El Diario newspaper.

In 1960, Benedetti published what would become his best-known novel, La Tregua (The Truce). It was eventually translated into 19 languages. It was later adapted into the 1974 film The Truce.

Exile, 1973–1985

For 12 years, from 1973 to 1985, when a civic-military dictatorship ruled Uruguay, Benedetti lived in exile. He first went to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then to Lima, Peru, where he was detained, deported and then given amnesty. He went to Cuba in 1976 and the following year to Madrid, Spain. His exile was made particularly trying by the fact that his wife had to remain in Uruguay to look after both of their mothers. In 1980, he moved to Palma, Majorca.

Return to Uruguay, 1985

Benedetti returned to Uruguay in March 1985, following the restoration of democracy, and thereafter divided his time between Montevideo and Madrid. He was granted Honoris Causa doctorates by the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, the Universidad de Alicante, Spain and the Universidad de Valladolid, Spain.

For his poetry and novels Benedetti won numerous international awards. In 1986, he was awarded Laureate Of The International Botev Prize. On 7 June 2005, he was named the recipient of the Menéndez Pelayo International Prize. His poetry was also used in the 1992 Argentine movie The Dark Side of the Heart (El lado oscuro del corazón), in which he read some of his poems in German.

Personal life and death

In the last ten years of his life, Benedetti suffered from asthma and, in order to avoid the cold, spent his winters in Madrid where it was summer, though as his health deteriorated he eventually remained in Montevideo. In 2006, his wife Luz López died, ending more than six decades of matrimony.

Before dying, he dictated to his personal secretary, Ariel Silva, what would become his last poem:

Mi vida ha sido como una farsa
Mi arte ha consistido
En que esta no se notara demasiado
He sido como un levitador en la vejez
El brillo marrón de los azulejos
Jamás se separó de mi piel

— (Fragment) Translation:

My life has been like a fraud
My art has consisted
In its not being noticed too much
I've been like a levitator in my old age
The brown sheen of the tiles
Never came off my skin

He died in Montevideo on 17 May 2009. He had suffered from respiratory and intestinal problems for more than a year. His remains are buried at the National Pantheon in the Central Cemetery of Montevideo.