Juan Rulfo

Template:About Template:More citations needed Template:Family name hatnote Template:Short description Template:Infobox writer Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno, best known as Juan Rulfo (Template:IPA; 16 May 1917 – 7 January 1986<ref name=official>Template:Cite web</ref>), was a Mexican writer, screenwriter, and photographer. He is best known for two literary works, the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, and the collection of short stories El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain, 1953). In spite of Rulfo's slim literary production, he is considered one of the greatest Mexican and Latin American writers of the twentieth century who has influenced many subsequent writers including the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.

Early life

Rulfo was born in 1917 in Template:Ill (disputed as being in San Gabriel, Jalisco), although he was registered at Sayula, in the home of his paternal grandfather.<ref name=official/> Rulfo's birth year was often listed as 1918, because he had provided an inaccurate date to get into the military academy that his uncle, David Pérez Rulfo — a colonel working for the government — directed.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

After his father was killed in 1923 and his mother died in 1927, Rulfo's grandmother raised him in Guadalajara, Jalisco.<ref name=official/> Their extended family consisted of landowners whose fortunes were ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War of 1926–1928, a Roman Catholic revolt against the persecutions of Christians by the Mexican government, following the Mexican Revolution.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Rulfo was sent to study in the Luis Silva School, where he lived from 1928 to 1932.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He completed six years of elementary school and a special seventh year from which he graduated as a bookkeeper, though he never practiced that profession.Template:Citation needed Rulfo attended a seminary (analogous to a secondary school) from 1932 to 1934, but did not attend a university afterwards, as the University of Guadalajara was closed due to a strike and because Rulfo had not taken preparatory school courses.<ref name=official/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Rulfo moved to Mexico City, where he entered the National Military Academy, which he left after three months. He then hoped to study law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1936, Rulfo was able to audit courses in literature at the University, because he obtained a job as an immigration file clerk through his uncle.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Career

Template:More citations needed section At the University Rulfo began writing under the tutelage of a coworker, Template:Ill. In 1944, Rulfo co-founded the literary journal Pan.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Later, he was able to advance in his career and travel throughout Mexico as an immigration agent. In 1946, he started as a foreman for Goodrich-Euzkadi, but his mild temperament led him to prefer working as a wholesale traveling sales agent. This obligated him to travel throughout all of southern Mexico, until he was fired in 1952 for asking for a radio for his company car.Template:Citation needed

Rulfo obtained a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> There, between 1952 and 1954, he was able to write two books.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The first book was a collection of harshly realistic short stories, El llano en llamas (1953). The stories centered on life in rural Mexico around the time of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War. Among the best-known stories are "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me!"), a story about an old man, set to be executed, who is captured by order of a colonel, who happens to be the son of a man whom the condemned man had killed about forty years earlier. The story contains echoes of the biblical Cain and Abel theme as well as themes related to the Mexican Revolution, such as land rights and land use. In the story "No oyes ladrar los perros" ("Do You Hear the Dogs Barking?") a man carries his wounded adult son on his back to find a doctor. His monologue reveals the burdens of a father facing the complicated truth of a son who became a bandit and killed his own godfather. The story "El hombre" ("The Man") evinces a complex narrative structure consisting of alternating voices and eventually revealing a complex cycle of violence. Rulfo's spare descriptive style, dialogues often revealing colloquial language and harsh landscapes metaphoric of the many characters' existential crises elevates Mexican regional fiction to a more universal stage.

Rulfo's second book was Pedro Páramo (1955), a short novel about a man named Juan Preciado who travels to his recently deceased mother's hometown, Comala, to find his father, only to find a deserted village populated by spectral figures. Through uncanny encounters with these figures, his own death and dialogues among the ghosts a portrait of a cruel despotic strongman Pedro Páramo is revealed. Again, Rulfo turns what could on the surface be considered regional literature into a story replete with universal myths, such as the search for the father, love triangles, revenge, solitude, etc. Initially, the novel met with cool critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the first four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed. Páramo was a key influence for Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Pedro Páramo has been translated into more than 30 languages, and the English version has sold more than a million copies in the United States.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The book went through several changes in name. In two letters written in 1947 to his fiancée Clara Aparicio, he refers to the novel he was writing as Una estrella junto a la luna (A Star Next to the Moon), saying that it was causing him some trouble.Template:Citation needed During the last stages of writing, he wrote in journals that the title would be Los murmullos (The Murmurs). With the assistance of a grant from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, Rulfo was able to finish the book between 1953 and 1954;Template:Citation needed it was published in 1955.

In passages of the novel Pedro Páramo, the influence of American novelist William Faulkner is notable, according to Rulfo's former friend, philologist Antonio Alatorre.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Between 1956 and 1958, Rulfo worked on a novella entitled El gallo de oro (The Golden Cockerel), which was not published until 1980. A revised and corrected edition was issued posthumously in 2010. The Fundación Rulfo possesses fragments of two unfinished novels, La cordillera and Ozumacín.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Rulfo told interviewer Luis Harss that he had written and destroyed an earlier novel set in Mexico City.<ref>Harss, Luis and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers.</ref>

From 1954 to 1957, Rulfo collaborated with the Río Papaloapan Commission, a government institution working on socioeconomic development of the settlements along the Papaloapan River. From 1962 until his death in 1986, he worked as an editor for the National Institute for Indigenous People.

Personal life

Template:Unreferenced section Rulfo married Clara Angelina Aparicio Reyes (Mexico City, 12 August 1928) in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on 24 April 1948; they had four children, Claudia Berenice (Mexico City, 29 January 1949), Juan Francisco (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 13 December 1950), Juan Pablo (Mexico City, 18 April 1955) and Juan Carlos Rulfo (Mexico City, 24 January 1964).

Legacy

Gabriel García Márquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened the way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He noted that all of Rulfo's published writing, put together, "add up to no more than 300 pages; but that is almost as many and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Jorge Luis Borges considered Pedro Páramo to be one of the greatest texts written in any language.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The Juan Rulfo Foundation, which was established by Rulfo's family after his death,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> holds more than 6,000 negatives of his photographs. A selection of Rulfo's photographs, accompanied by essays by Carlos Fuentes and others, has been published under the title of Juan Rulfo's Mexico.Template:Citation needed

Awards, scholarships and recognitions

1952: Scholarship from the Mexican Center of Writers<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Books

El llano en llamas (1953). Translated by George D. Schade as The Burning Plain (University of Texas, 1967);<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Ilan Stavans and Harold Augenbraum as The Plain in Flames (University of Texas, 2012);<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Stephen Beechinor as El Llano in Flames (Structo, 2019);<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Douglas J. Weatherford as The Burning Plain (University of Texas, 2024).<ref name="weatherford">Template:Cite web</ref>
Pedro Páramo (1955). Translated by Lysander Kemp (Grove Press, 1959); Margaret Sayers Peden (Grove Press, 1994); and Douglas J. Weatherford (2023).
El gallo de oro (1980; revised 2010). Translated by Douglas J. Weatherford as The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings (Deep Vellum, 2017).

Notes

References

Janney, Frank (ed.) (1984). Inframundo: The Mexico of Juan Rulfo. New York: Persea Books.
Interview with Teresa Gómez Gleason, in: Juan Rulfo (1985). Jorge Ruffinelli, ed. Obra completa (2nd ed.). Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho. p. 214.
Soler Serrano, Joaquín, "Entrevista con Juan Rulfo" in A Fondo ( TV show ), RTVE2, April 17, 1977.

External links

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¡Diles que no me maten! – Sound recording of reading ¡Diles que no me maten! read by Juan Rulfo
"Asombro por Juan Rulfo" – Transcription of a speech given by Gabriel García Márquez on the 50th anniversary of El Llano en llamas, 18 September 2002.

Template:Prince of Asturias Award for Literature Template:Authority control

Juan Rulfo

Contents

Early life

Career

Personal life

Legacy

Awards, scholarships and recognitions

Books

Further reading

Spanish

Photography

Notes

References

External links

Navigation menu

Juan Rulfo

Early life

Career

Personal life

Legacy

Awards, scholarships and recognitions

Books

Further reading

Spanish

Photography

Notes

References

External links

Navigation menu

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