El trece de junio/June 13th
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| Photo (of Roa in the year he won the Premio Cervantes, 1989) from a 2017 El País article on his legacy. Click HERE. |
A Paraguayan novelist, poet, screenwriter, and journalist, Augusto Roa was considered one of the most important South American writers of the last century. Born in Iturbe, Paraguay, a provincial town where his father was a sugar plantation administrator, he grew up learning to speak both Spanish and Guaraní, the language of Paraguay's indigenous people. He also witnessed the exploitation and oppression of Paraguay's indigenous and poor, an experience that would influence almost all of his later work. When he was ten years old, his parents sent him 120 miles to the north, to Asunción, for his education. There, he lived with his uncle, the liberal archbishop Hermenegildo Roa, whose huge personal library exposed Roa to Spanish literature. Roa served as a medical auxiliary in Paraguay's Chaco War with Bolivia (1932-1935), an experience he credits with making him a pacifist (he had expected glory, he found instead "maimed bodies" and "destruction"). He then worked as a journalist and in 1944 the British Council awarded him with a nine month journalism fellowship, allowing him to travel extensively in Britain, France, and Africa and witness the destruction and horrors of World War II. Roa was forced into exile in Argentina in 1947 due to the dictatorship of Stroessner in Paraguay. He was then forced into exile from Argentina (to France) in 1976 due to the dictatorship of General Videla. He has said about this: "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." Roa won the Premio Cervantes in 1989 and returned to Paraguay that same year. His 1960 novel Hijo de hombre won him major critical and popular success, while his 1974 novel Yo, el Supremo, an exploration of Paraguay's first dictatorship, is considered one of the milestones of Latin American literature. Click HERE for Roa's New York Times obituary, and HERE for a brief video about his life (in Spanish).
For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.
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