Juan Gelman
Born	(1930-05-03)3 May 1930 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died	14 January 2014(2014-01-14) (aged 83) Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Poet

Juan Gelman (3 May 1930 – 14 January 2014) was an Argentine poet. He published more than twenty books of poetry between 1956 and his death in early 2014. He was a naturalized citizen of Mexico,^[1] country where he arrived as a political exile of the Military Junta.

In 2007, Gelman was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most important in Spanish literature. His works celebrate life but are also tempered with social and political commentary and reflect his own painful experiences with the politics of Argentina.

Biography

Juan Gelman Burichson was born on May 3, 1930, in Buenos Aires Villa Crespo neighborhood to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. As a boy he read Russian and European literature widely under the tutelage of his brother Boris. ^[2] His father, José Gelman, was a social revolutionary who participated in the 1905 revolution in Russia; he immigrated to Argentina, went back shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, and then returned to Argentina for good, disillusioned.^[2]

Gelman learned to read when he was three years old, and spent much of his childhood reading and playing soccer. He developed an interest in poetry at a very young age, influenced by his brother Boris, who read to him several poems in Russian, a language that the boy did not know. The experience of reading Dostoevsky's The Insulted and Humiliated (1861) at age eight made a profound impression on him.

As a young man he was a member of several notable literary groups and later became an important journalist. He also worked as a translator at the United Nations. He was always an ardent political activist. In 1975 he became involved with the Montoneros, though he later distanced himself from the group. After the 1976 Argentine coup, he was forced into exile from Argentina. In 1976, his son Marcelo and his pregnant daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia, aged 20 and 19, were kidnapped from their home. They became two of the 30,000 desaparecidos, the people who were forcibly "vanished" without a trace during the reign of the military junta. In 1990 Gelman was led to identify his son's remains (he had been executed and buried in a barrel filled with sand and cement), and years later, in 2000, he was able to trace his granddaughter, born in a backdoor hospital before Maria Claudia's murder and given to a pro-government family in Uruguay. The remains of Maria Claudia have not yet been recovered.

During his long exile, Gelman lived in Europe until 1988, then in United States and later in Mexico, with his wife, Argentine psychologist Mara La Madrid.

In 1997, Gelman received the Argentine National Poetry Prize, in recognition of his life's work, and in 2007 the Cervantes Prize, the most important prize for Spanish-language writers. He also had a long and brilliant career as journalist, writing for the Argentine newspaper Pagina/12 until his death.

Gelman included Uruguayan police officer Hugo Campos Hermida in a legal suit lodged in Spain for the "disappearance" of his daughter-in-law in Uruguay.^[3]

Personal papers

Juan Gelman's archive which includes drafts of writings and a collection of files he kept pertaining to his human rights investigations is available for research at the Manuscripts Division in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University.^[5]

Works

See also

• Argentine literature
• Dirty War

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Juan Gelman.

• Todo sobre la poesía de Juan Gelman (in Spanish)
• La bitácora de Gelman (in Spanish)
• Poemas de Juan Gelman (in Spanish)
• Obras de Juan Gelman, Solo Literatura (in Spanish)
• Speciale di EL MUNDO su Juan Gelman (in Spanish)
• Poeticas de Gelman (in Spanish)
• Juan Gelman por elortiba (in Spanish)
• Juan Gelman a media voz (in Spanish)