Juan Rulfo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Juan Rulfo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Juan Rulfo (Spanish: [!xwan !rulfo] audio ; 16 May 1917[1] 7 January 1986) was a Mexican writer, screenwriter and photographer. One of Latin America's most esteemed authors, Rulfo's reputation rests on two slim books, the novel Pedro Pramo (1955), and El Llano en llamas (1953), a collection of short stories. Fifteen of these seventeen short stories have been translated into English and published as The Burning Plain and Other Stories. This collection, includes his admired tale "Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not to Kill Me!"). The Fundacin Juan Rulfo, formed by the author's family after his death,[2] holds more than 6,000 negatives of his photographs.

Juan Rulfo

Contents
1 Early life 2 Major works 3 Later life 4 Further reading 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links
Born Died Occupation Nationality Notable work(s) May 16, 1917 Sayula, Jalisco, Mexico January 7, 1986 (aged 68) Mexico City, Mexico Writer, screenwriter, photographer Mexican El Llano en llamas, Pedro Pramo

Early life

Rulfo was born as Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Prez Rulfo Vizcano in Apulco, Jalisco (although he was registered at Sayula, Jalisco), in the home of his paternal grandfather. After his father was killed in 1923 and after his mother's death in 1927, his grandmother raised him in the town of San Gabriel, Jalisco. Their extended family consisted of landowners whose fortunes were ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War of 1926-1928, a Roman Catholic integralist revolt against the government of Mexico following the Mexican Revolution. Rulfo's mother died from cardiac arrest in November 1927, when he was ten; his two uncles died a year later. Juan Rulfo had just been sent to study in the Luis Silva School, where he lived from 1928 to 1932. He completed six years of elementary school and a special seventh year from which he graduated as a bookkeeper, though he never practiced that profession. Rulfo attended a seminary (analogous to a secondary school) from 1932 to 1934, but did not attend a university afterwards both because the University of Guadalajara was closed due to a strike and because he had not taken preparatory school courses. Instead, Rulfo moved to Mexico City, where he rst entered the National Military Academy, which he left after three
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months and then he hoped to study law at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico. In 1936, Rulfo was able to audit courses in literature there because he obtained a job as an immigration le clerk through his uncle, David Prez Rulfo, a colonel working for the government, who had also gotten him admitted to the military academy.

Major works
It was there that Rulfo rst began writing under the tutelage of a coworker, Efrn Hernndez. In 1944 Rulfo had cofounded the literary journal Pan. Later he was able to advance in his position and he traveled Mexico as an immigration agent. In 1946 he started as a foreman for Goodrich Euzkadi, but his mild temperament led him to prefer working as a wholesale traveling sales agent. This obligated him to travel throughout all of southern Mexico, until he was red in 1952 for asking for a radio for his company car. He married Clara Angelina Aparicio Reyes (Mexico City, August 12, 1928) in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on April 24, 1948; they had four children, Claudia Berenice (Mexico City, January 29, 1949), Juan Francisco (Guadalajara, Jalisco, December 13, 1950), Juan Pablo (Mxico City, April 18, 1955) and Juan Carlos Rulfo (Mxico City, January 24, 1964). Juan Rulfo obtained a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. There, between 1952 and 1954, he was able to write the two books that would make him famous. The rst book was a collection of harshly realistic short stories titled El Llano en llamas (1953). The stories centered around life in rural Mexico around the time of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. Among the best-known stories are "Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me!"), about an old man, set to be executed, captured by orders of a colonel who happens to be the son of a man he killed about forty years ago; and "No oyes ladrar los perros" ("You Don't Hear the Dogs Barking"), about a man carrying his estranged, adult, wounded son on his back to nd a doctor. The second book was Pedro Pramo (1955) a short novel about a man named Juan Preciado who travels to his recently deceased mother's hometown, Comala, to nd his father, only to come across a literal ghost townpopulated, that is, by spectral gures. Initially, the novel met with cool critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the rst four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed. Pramo was a key inuence of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garca Mrquez. Pedro Pramo has been translated into more than 30 different languages and the English version has been sold more than a million times in the United States. The book went through several changes in name. In two letters written in 1947 to his ance Clara Aparicio he refers to the title of this work he was writing then as Una estrella junto a la luna ("A Star Next to the Moon"), saying that it was causing him some trouble. During the last stages of writing, he wrote in journals that the title would be Los murmullos (The Murmurs). With the assistance of a grant from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, Rulfo was able to nish the book between 1953 and 1954; it was published in 1955. Between 1956 and 1958 Rulfo worked on a novella entitled El gallo de oro ("The Golden Cockerel"), which was not published until 1980. A revised and corrected edition was issued posthumously in 2010.[3] The Fundacin Rulfo possesses fragments of two uncompleted novels, La cordillera and Ozumacn.[4] Rulfo told interviewer Luis Harss that he had written and destroyed an earlier novel set in Mexico City.[5]

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Gabriel Garca Mrquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his rst four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Pramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He noted that all of Rulfo's published writing, put together, "add up to no more than 300 pages; but that is almost as many and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles". A selection of Rulfo's photographs, accompanied by essays by Carlos Fuentes and others, has been published under the title of Juan Rulfo's Mexico.

Later life
From 1954 to 1957, Juan Rulfo collaborated with "La comisin del rio Papaloapan", a government institution in charge of helping the socioeconomic development of the settlements along the Papaloapan River and from 1962 until his death in 1986, he worked as editor for the National Institute for Indigenous People.

Further reading
Spanish: Lecturas rulanas / Milagros Ezquerro, 2006 Trptico para Juan Rulfo : poesa, fotografa, crtica / Vctor Jimnez, 2006 La recepcin inicial de Pedro Pramo / Jorge Zepeda (Editorial RM-Fundacin Juan Rulfo, Mxico, 2005. ISBN 84-933036-7-4) Entre la cruz y la sospecha : los cristeros de Revueltas, Yez y Rulfo / Angel Arias Urrutia, 2005 Estructura y discurso de gnero en Pedro Pramo de Juan Rulfo / Alba Sovietina Estrada Crdenas, 2005 Voces de la tierra : la leccin de Rulfo / Felipe Garrido, 2004 Mito y poesa en la obra de Juan Rulfo / Mara Luisa Ortega, 2004 La ccin de la memoria : Juan Rulfo ante la crtica / Federico Campbell, 2003 Juan Rulfo / Nria Amat, 2003 Anlisis de Pedro Pramo, Juan Rulfo / Csar Prez P, 2003 Homenaje a Juan Rulfo / Dante Medina, 2002 Perl de Juan Rulfo / Sergio Lpez Mena, 2001 Revisin crtica de la obra de Juan Rulfo / Sergio Lpez Mena, 1998 Juan Rulfo / Alberto Vital Daz, 1998 La sociedad en la obra de Juan Rulfo / Magdalena Gonzlez Casillas, 1998 Rulfo en su lumbre : y otros temas latinoamericanos / Jaime Meja Duque, 1998 Juan Rulfo, el eterno : caminos para una interpretacin / Anita Arenas Saavedra, 1997 Juan Rulfo : la naturaleza hostil / Antonio Aliberti, 1996 Recopilacin de textos sobre Juan Rulfo / La Habana, Cuba : Centro de Investigaciones Literarias, 1995 Los caminos de la creacin en Juan Rulfo / Sergio Lpez Mena, 1994 Juan Rulfo : la lengua, el tiempo y el espacio / Gustavo C Fares, 1994 Juan Rulfo, del Pramo a la esperanza : una lectura crtica de su obra / Yvette Jimnez de Bez, 1994 Juan Rulfo y el sur de Jalisco : aspectos de su vida y obra / Wolfgang Vogt, 1994 El laberinto y la pena : ensayo sobre la cuentstica rulana / Rafael Jos Alfonzo, 1992 Imaginar Comala : el espacio en la obra de Juan Rulfo / Gustavo C Fares, 1991 Rulfo y el dios de la memoria / Abel Ibarra, 1991
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Rulfo, dinmica de la violencia / Marta Portal, 1990 Photography: Mexico: Juan Rulfo Fotgrafo, 2001 : The Spanish language edition of his photographs with essays by the same authors as the volume above, but written in Spanish. Inframundo: El Mxico de Juan Rulfo / 1st ed. 1980, 2nd ed. 1983 / Versions in Spanish and English with essays. Published in 1980/83 by Ediciones del Norte in Hanover, NH Juan Rulfo: Letras e imgenes, RM, 2002. The book is outlined in: http://www.clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/clubescritores/juanrulfo/letrasimagenes01.htm http://www.guiarte.com/noticias/juan-rulfo-fotografo.html http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/ojos/Pedro/Paramo/elpepuint/20070903elpepicul_2/Tes http://www.elangelcaido.org/2005/11/200511jrulfo/200511jrulfoe.html http://ldsmag.com/article/1164?ac=1

Notes
1. ^ Rulfo's date of birth is under dispute. His ofcial web site (Clubcultura.com (http://www.clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/clubescritores/juanrulfo/cronologia2.htm/)) gives his year of birth as 1917; after 1937, however, it was often listed as 1918 because he had given the wrong date to get in the military academy that his uncle directed. [1] (http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/rulped) [2] (http://www.literatura.us/rulfo/) [3] (http://www.library.txstate.edu/SWWC/WG/EXHIBITS/sacabo.html) 2. ^ http://www.clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/clubescritores/juanrulfo/fundacion.htm 3. ^ es:El gallo de oro (novela) 4. ^ http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=85353 5. ^ Harss, Luis and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers.

he was cool

References
Janney, Frank (Ed.) (1984). Inframundo: The Mexico of Juan Rulfo. New York: Persea Books. Interview with Teresa Gmez Gleason, in: Juan Rulfo (1985). Jorge Rufnelli. ed. Obra completa (2nd ed.). Fundacin Biblioteca Ayacucho. p. 214.

External links
Works by or about Juan Rulfo (http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n50-22117) in libraries (WorldCat catalog) Diles que no me maten! (http://www.archivosonoro.org/?id=251) - Sound recording of reading Diles que no me maten! with Juan Rulfo Voice "Asombro por Juan Rulfo" (http://www.premura.com/archivos/rulfo.htm) - Transcription of a speech given by Gabriel Garca Mrquez on 50th anniversary of El Llano en llamas, 18 September 2002. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Juan_Rulfo&oldid=599521877" Categories: 1917 births 1986 deaths Deaths from lung cancer Mexican novelists Magic realism writers Mexican screenwriters People from Jalisco Cancer deaths in Mexico 20th-century Mexican writers

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