Benedetti, Mario

(1920– )

   Uruguayan poet, novelist, playwright, lyricist, essayist, and journalist. He was born in Paso de los Toros, in the Tacuarembó province in Uruguay. He attended the Colegio Alemán de Montevideo—from which his father withdrew him in the 1930s after the school made the Nazi salute official—and the Liceo Miranda. In 1945, after a three-year residence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he began his journalistic career in the influential weekly Marcha, with which he would collaborate until its closing in 1974. Also in 1945 he published his first volume of poetry. He is grouped among the writers known as “generación crítica” by the influential critic Ángel Rama.

   During the next decade, Benedetti would direct the literary journal Marginalia and collaborate with Número, one of the most prestigious literary journals of its day. In 1954 he became the literary editor of Marcha; his first novel had been published the year before. Two years earlier, in 1952, Benedetti had taken part in protests against the military treaty between Uruguay and the United States—an action that marked the beginning of his political activism. In the late 1950s he made his first trip to Europe, as correspondent for Marcha and El Diario, and later visited the United States for several months. During the 1960s he continued his literary trajectory and became a prominent participant in cultural events in Latin America. He was chosen as a judge of the Casa de las Américas award in Havana, Cuba, in 1966; two years later, he founded and directed the Center for Literary Investigations for the Casa de las Américas editorial board.

   In 1971 Benedetti became one of the founders of the Movimiento de Independientes 26 de Marzo, which would later merge with the leftist coalition Frente Amplio. That same year he was appointed director of the Department of Latin American Literature at the University of Montevideo. The next year, he participated in the Frente Amplio campaign. Following the military coup of 1973, he resigned his university post and went into exile in Buenos Aires. After receiving several death threats from the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA, Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), Benedetti went into exile in Peru and Cuba. In 1980 he settled in Spain. In 1985, with the restoration of democracy in Uruguay, he returned to his native country, although from that point he would divide his residence between Montevideo and Madrid. That year he became a member of the editorial council of the new journal Brecha, a continuation of the editorial project of the weekly Marcha, closed by the military in 1974. A prolific writer—his complete works, first edited in 1994, would eventually comprise 36 volumes—Benedetti is perhaps best known as the lyrical author of nearly 20 books of poetry and song lyrics. He is equally prolific as a novelist and short-story writer. His novel Tregua (1960) has gone through over 75 editions. Several of his works have been adapted for the stage and screen, notably Tregua, directed in 1975 by Sergio Renán and the first Latin American movie nominated for an Oscar. Some Benedetti works associated with the period of the “dirty wars” are the play Pedro y el capitán (1979), an exploration of the psychology of torturers and victims; Primavera con una esquina rota (1982), an examination of two sectors of a nation—Uruguayans under the military dictatorship and Uruguayans in exile—united by a thread of hope; and Recuerdos olvidados (1988), which examines the theme of exile and the eventual reconciliation of a divided nation. He is also the author of El desexilio y otras conjecturas (1985), in which he proposes the term desexilio to denote the experience of those unable or unwilling to go into exile and forced to live under military dictatorship.

   During a literary career spanning over 50 years, Benedetti has been distinguished by several governments and organizations. In 1982 and 1989, respectively, he received the Order Félix Varela and the Haydeé Santamaría medal awarded by the Cuban government. In 1986 he received the Jristo Botev award from the Bulgarian government. In 1987, in Brussels, he received the Golden Flame award from Amnesty International for his novel Primavera con una esquina rota. He was invested Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Valladolid (Spain) and the University of Alicante (Spain) in 1997. Two years later, the University of Alicante created the Mario Benedetti Center for Latin American Studies. In 1999 he also received the VIII Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, awarded by the Spanish government.