Leopoldo Lugones

Leopoldo Lugones
Born	(1874-06-13)June 13, 1874 Villa de María del Río Seco, Córdoba, Argentina
Died	February 18, 1938(1938-02-18) (aged 63) San Fernando, Buenos Aires
Occupation	Polymath
Spouse	Juana González
Children	Leopoldo "Polo" Lugones
Writing career
Period	1893–1938
Genres	Short story, poetry, essay, novel
Movement	Modernism
Signature

Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Argüello (Villa de María del Río Seco, Córdoba (Argentina), June 13, 1874 – San Fernando, Buenos Aires, February 18, 1938) was an Argentine modernist writer and polymath. He was at once a narrator, poet, journalist, historian, librarian, pedagogue, teacher, translator, biographer, philologist, theosophist, diplomat, politician and a nationalist sympathizer.

He was the principal exponent of Argentine modernism, and his poetic work is considered the inauguration of all modern poetry in the Castilian language, as well as the beginning of all the experiences and experiments of modern poetics in the Spanish language. He was the first writer to make use of free verse in Hispanic literature, and with his short stories he became the precursor and one of the pioneers of fantasy literature and science fiction in Argentina, in addition to having been one of the first Spanish-speaking writers to produce microfiction.

In Argentina, the date of his birth is celebrated as Writer's Day.

Biography

Early years

Leopoldo Antonio Lugones was born on June 13, 1874, in the town of Villa de María del Río Seco, in the north of the Province of Córdoba, Argentina. He was the firstborn of Santiago M. Lugones and Custodia Argüello. His father, son of Pedro Nolasco Lugones, was returning from the city of Buenos Aires to Santiago del Estero when he met Custodia Argüello while stopping in Villa de María, a town that was then disputed between the provinces of Santiago del Estero and Córdoba.

Lugones learned his first letters and received a very strict Catholic upbringing thanks to his mother, which he later vehemently rejected.

When he was six years old, and after the birth of his brother, Santiago Martín Lugones, he and his family moved to the City of Santiago del Estero and, later, to Ojo de Agua, a small town in the south of the Province of Santiago del Estero near the border with the Province of Córdoba, where his two younger brothers were born: Ramón Miguel Lugones, and the youngest of the four brothers, Carlos Florencio Lugones.

Lugones was sent by his parents to study for his secondary diploma at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, in Córdoba, where he lived with his maternal grandmother Rosario Bulacio. In 1892 his family moved to that city, and it was also at that time that he began his first experiences in the fields of journalism and literature.

Lugones married Juana Agudelo in the City of Córdoba, and in 1896 he moved with her to Buenos Aires. In 1897 his first and only son, Leopoldo "Polo" Lugones, was born.

In 1898, Mariano de Vedia introduced Lugones to the then President Julio Argentino Roca, who was beginning his second term as President. In 1906 and 1911 he traveled to Europe.

Literary career

Lugones (third from the left, standing) together with other intellectuals at the founding in 1928 of the Argentine Society of Writers.

Lugones began his literary and political activity in the City of Córdoba, with his foray as a journalist into the publication El Pensamiento Libre, considered atheist and anarchist. In addition, he took part in the founding of the first socialist center of the City of Córdoba. At that time he published poetry under the pseudonym "Gil Paz".

Shortly afterward, now in Buenos Aires, he joined the socialist group whose members included, among other writers, José Ingenieros, Alberto Gerchunoff, Manuel Baldomero Ugarte and Roberto Payró, and he wrote sporadically for several outlets, among them the socialist newspaper La Vanguardia and the Roquista newspaper Tribuna. In Buenos Aires at that time, Lugones generated constant controversy, not so much for his literary work as for his political prominence, which underwent sharp ideological shifts over the course of his life: he passed through socialism, liberalism, conservatism and fascism. At that time he met Rubén Darío, who had an important influence on his work and whose prestige facilitated his entry into the newspaper La Nación.

In 1897 Lugones published his first book, Las montañas del oro, in a style inspired by French Symbolism. Some chapters of this book had previously been published in a magazine directed by Paul Groussac called La Biblioteca. In 1898 he joined the Theosophical Society, in the so-called "Rama Luz" ("Light Branch"), a section of which he was elected secretary general two years later. His interest in occultism and theosophy had begun years earlier, when he was living in Córdoba. Between that same year and 1902 he wrote four essays (Acción de la teosofía, Nuestras ideas estéticas, Nuestro método científico and El objeto de nuestra filosofía) for the magazines Philadelphia (Buenos Aires) and Sophia (Madrid), in which he set out the main theosophical ideas about science, art and philosophy.

On November 13, 1899, Lugones joined Freemasonry upon being initiated into the Libertad Rivadavia Lodge No. 51. In 1903 he was expelled from socialism for having supported the conservative candidacy of Manuel Quintana for the presidency of the Nation.

In 1905 he published Los crepúsculos del jardín, a work close to modernism that gathered the tendencies of French literature, in particular Symbolism. He experimented with mystery stories in 1906 with his work Las fuerzas extrañas, which also shows Lugones's fondness for occultism and theosophical ideas.

In 1911 Lugones published his essay Historia de Sarmiento. In 1913, he delivered at the Teatro Odeón a series of lectures titled El Payador, in the presence of, among other illustrious figures, the then President Roque Sáenz Peña; the main subject of the lectures (compiled and published in 1916 under the same title) was the gauchesque poem Martín Fierro and the exaltation of the figure of the gaucho as a paradigm of nationhood. In the work of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and of José Hernández, Lugones found what he called "the formation of the national spirit": "Facundo and Recuerdos de provincia are our Iliad and our Odyssey. Martín Fierro our Romancero."

In 1915 he took office as director of the National Teachers' Library, a post he held until his death. In 1920, a turn toward the nationalist ideas of the time began to be noticeable in him with the publication of a book of political doctrine: Mi beligerancia. The following year, he published a work that can be considered popular science, El tamaño del espacio, and, in 1922, in a return to Symbolism, he published Las horas doradas. In 1923 he delivered a lecture at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, titled Ante la doble amenaza, which earned him the repudiation of the democratic political spectrum of the time. On that occasion the socialist leader Alfredo Palacios called him a chauvinist.

In 1924 he received the National Prize for Literature and, in 1928, he presided over the Argentine Society of Writers. At that time, Lugones was a promoter of the fascist tendencies that were beginning to gain support in Argentine society. Although he did not take part in its preparation, Lugones was an important propagandist for the military coup led by José Félix Uriburu on September 6, 1930, which overthrew Hipólito Yrigoyen from the presidency. His enthusiasm for the regime installed that year earned him the rejection of the intellectual circles of Buenos Aires.

Despite his adherence to authoritarian nationalism from the 1920s onward, Lugones opposed antisemitism. In 1935 he wrote the prologue to the Argentine edition of the book La mentira más grande de la historia: los protocolos de los sabios de Sion by Benjamin W. Segel, a work that denounces as a fraud the famous antisemitic pamphlet known as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Around that time he also abandoned his intolerant stance toward Christianity, which he had always despised, and shortly before dying he declared himself reconciled with the Catholic religion.

Suicide

On February 18, 1938, Lugones took his own life at a riverside resort in the San Fernando Delta called "El Tropezón", by ingesting potassium cyanide mixed with whisky. One of the hypotheses about the cause of his suicide is that Lugones was in love with a young woman, María Alicia Domínguez, whom he had met at one of his lectures at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, and with whom he had maintained a passionate romantic relationship. Having been discovered and pressured by his son, who urged him to leave her, Lugones plunged into a depressive decline. Although in the note he left he asked to be buried in the earth without a coffin and without any marking of his grave, and forbade his name being given to public places, his wake was held at his home at 1391 Santa Fe Street, in the City of Buenos Aires, and he was buried in the Recoleta Cemetery, where he remained until 1994, when his remains were taken to his hometown, where they rest at the foot of the Cerro del Romero.

Writer's Day

In Argentina, June 13 is considered Writer's Day. The date was instituted by the Argentine Society of Writers in homage to the anniversary of Lugones's birth.

Works

Novels

• 1926: El ángel de la sombra

Short stories

Cuentos fatales.

• 1905: La guerra gaucha
• 1906: Las fuerzas extrañas
• 1924: Cuentos fatales

Poetry

• 1893: Los mundos
• 1897: Las montañas del oro
• 1905: Los crepúsculos del jardín
• 1909: Lunario sentimental
• 1910: Odas seculares
• 1912: El libro fiel
• 1917: El libro de los paisajes
• 1922: Las horas doradas
• 1924: Romancero
• 1924: Filosofícula
• 1927: Poemas solariegos
• 1938: Romances del Río Seco

Essays

• 1903: La reforma educacional. Un ministro y doce académicos
• 1904: El imperio jesuítico
• 1910: Didáctica
• 1910: Las limaduras de Hephaestos. Piedras liminares
• 1910: Las limaduras de Hephaestos. Prometeo (un proscripto del sol)
• 1915: El ejército de la Ilíada
• 1916: El problema feminista
• 1917: Mi beligerancia
• 1919: Las industrias de Atenas
• 1919: La torre de Casandra
• 1923: Acción. Las cuatro conferencias patrióticas del Coliseo
• 1924: Estudios helénicos
• 1925: La organización de la paz
• 1928: Nuevos estudios helénicos
• 1930: La grande Argentina
• 1930: La patria fuerte
• 1931: Política revolucionaria
• 1932: El estado equitativo. Ensayo sobre la realidad argentina
• 2010 (posthumous publication): Dogma de obediencia. Biblioteca Nacional, Los raros collection, September 2010, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Biographies

• 1911: Historia de Sarmiento
• 1915: Elogio de Ameghino
• 1938: Roca

Other

• 1916: El payador
• 1921: El tamaño del espacio
• 1944: Diccionario etimológico del castellano usual

Bibliography

• Historia Social de la Literatura Argentina, Volume VII, Yrigoyen, entre Borges y Arlt (1916-1930), David Viñas (Director), Graciela Montaldo and collaborators, Buenos Aires, Editorial Contrapunto, 1989.
• Leopoldo Lugones y los judíos: las contradicciones del nacionalismo argentino, Allan Metz, ISBN 950-9829-35-8.
• Lugones, defensor de los judíos, by Edgardo Cozarinsky (Paris, 1998, for La Nación).
• Contribución a la bibibliografía de Leopoldo Lugones, Miguel Lermon, Buenos Aires, Ediciones MARU, 1969.

External links

• Works of Leopoldo Lugones on Wikilivres (public domain in Canada)
• Biography and works of Leopoldo Lugones
• Biography and poems of Leopoldo Lugones
• The National Teachers' Library presents in its Digital Library a collection with the complete digitized version of the first editions and rare editions of his titles, articles and academic papers.
• Collection of representative poems by this renowned Argentine poet
• Las montañas del oro, on Google Books
• El Payador (PDF), on Internet Archive
• "Modernismo y Teosofía: La visión poética de Lugones a la luz de Nuestras ideas estéticas", by Aníbal Salazar Anglada, in Anuario de Estudios Americanos, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2000)
• Romancero, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018 – first edition: 2012).
• El Payador, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018 – first edition: 2012).
• La misión del escritor and El ideal caballeresco, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018).
• Elogios, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018).
• Estudios esotéricos, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018).
• Cuentos Desconocidos, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018).
• Ensayos sobre Estética y Poética, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2018).
• La lengua que hablamos, by Leopoldo Lugones. Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2019).
• Crítica Literaria, by Leopoldo Lugones (page 26). Critical edition by Pedro Luis Barcia. Editorial Docencia (2019).