Leopoldo Marechal

Topics: Argentine novelists, Argentine poets

Leopoldo Marechal was one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century.

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 20's he was among the poets who rallied around the movement represented by the literary journal Martin Fierro. While his first published works of poetry, Los aguiluchos (1922) and Dias como flechas (1926) tend towards vanguardism, his Odas para el hombre y la mujer shows a blend of novelty and a more classical style. It is with this collection of poems that Marechal obtains his first official recognition as a poet in 1929, the Premio Municipal de Poesia of the city of Buenos Aires.

He travels to Europe for the first time in 1926 and in Paris meets important intellectuals and artists such as Picasso, Basaldua and Antonio Berni. In his second visit to Paris in 1929, he settles in Montparnasse and widens his circle of friends, which now include artists Aquiles Badi, Alfredo Bigatti, Horacio Butler, Juan del Prete, Raquel Forner, Victor Pissarro and the sculptor Jose Fioravanti, who would later sculpt the poet's bust in bronze. It is during this second Parisian experience that Marechal writes the first two chapters of his novel Adan Buenosayres, which he would publish only in 1948. Some of its protagonists are based on his friends of the Martin Fierro group, like artist Xul Solar and poet Jacobo Fijman, portrayed as the astrologer Schultze and the philosopher Samuel Tesler.