Leopoldo Marechal

Leopoldo Marechal (June 11, 1900 — June 26, 1970) was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century.

Biographical notes

Born in Buenos Aires into a family of French and Spanish descent, Marechal became a primary school teacher and a high school professor after obtaining his degree despite enormous economic difficulties. During the 1920s he was among the poets who rallied around the movement represented by the literary journal Martín Fierro. While his first published works of poetry, Los aguiluchos (1922) and Días como flechas (1926), tended towards vanguardism, his Odas para el hombre y la mujer showed a blend of novelty and a more classical style. It is with this collection of poems that Marechal obtained his first official recognition as a poet in 1929, the Premio Municipal de Poesía of the city of Buenos Aires.

He traveled to Europe for the first time in 1926 and in Paris met important intellectuals and artists such as Picasso, Basaldúa and Antonio Berni. On his second visit to Paris in 1929, he settled in Montparnasse and widened his circle of friends, which now included artists Aquiles Badi, Alfredo Bigatti, Horacio Butler, Juan del Prete, Raquel Forner, Victor Pissarro and the sculptor José Fioravanti, who later sculpted the poet's bust in bronze. It is during this second Parisian experience that Marechal wrote the first two chapters of his novel Adam Buenosayres, which he did not publish until 1948. Some of its protagonists are based on his friends of the Martin Fierro group, including artist Xul Solar (as the astrologer Schultze), poet Jacobo Fijman (as the philosopher Samuel Tesler), Jorge Luis Borges (as Luis Pereda) and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (as "el petiso" Bernini).