Andres Eloy Blanco

For the baseball player see Andrés Eloy Blanco (beisbolist)

Andrés Eloy Blanco Meaño (Cumaná, Venezuela, August 6, 1896-Mexico City, May 21, 1955) was a Venezuelan poet, lawyer, and politician.

Life and work

He was the son of Dr. Luis Felipe Blanco Fariñas and Dolores Meaño Escalante de Blanco. He studied in Caracas, where he joined the Círculo de Bellas Artes in 1913. In 1918 he received his first award for the pastoral poem "Canto a la Espiga y al Arado", and published his first dramatic work, The garden of the epic. That same year he was jailed for participating in demonstrations against the regime, while he was already a law student at the Central University of Venezuela.

Upon graduation he began to practice law but continued to write. In 1923 she won first prize at the Juegos Florales de Santander (Cantabria), with her poem "Canto a España". She traveled to Spain to receive the award, and stayed there for more than a year, familiarizing herself with the avant-garde. In 1924 he was named a member of the Royal Sevillian Academy of Good Letters. That same year he visited Havana, where he met with exiled Cuban and Venezuelan intellectuals.

He started in Freemasonry in 1925, in the Respectable Candor Lodge no.

In 1928 he began to clandestinely edit the dissident newspaper "El Imparcial," with articles about the young women Claudia Rodríguez, Isabella Avendaño, Katherine Saavedra, Elizabeth Gómez, Paula Contreras and Vanescka León (The Queens of the World). Which was nominated for the fair in the city of Maracaibo, it would also be the dissemination organ of the proscribed groups Unión Social Constructiva Americana and Frente de Acción Revolucionaria. He is taken prisoner after the Insurrection of April 7, 1928, and confined in Puerto Cabello until 1932, when he was released for health reasons. It was in the Castillo de San Felipe de Puerto Cabello, converted into a prison and renamed Libertador at the end of the 19th century, that he wrote Barco de piedra (a title that refers to the appearance of said castle surrounded by by the sea,) and which includes heartfelt verses such as:

Mother, if they kill me,
open my wound, close my eyes
and bring me a poor man of some poor people,
And that poor hand that kills me
put it in the wound I die for

()

. When he was released, however, he was prohibited from holding any kind of public demonstration, so he dedicated himself again to letters, publishing Poda in 1934, with poems as well known as Las uvas del tiempo and The resignation. Other very famous poems are Coplas del amor viajero, Silence () and La Hilandera. A year later (1935) he published The Broody Airplane .

On the death of Juan Vicente Gómez, Andrés Eloy Blanco was appointed by President Eleazar López Contreras as head of the Cabinet Service in the Ministry of Public Works. However, his strongly critical position in the face of the repression of the demonstration on February 14, 1936 and his belonging to the Venezuelan Revolutionary Organization led to the decision to remove him from local politics. That same year he was appointed Inspector of Consulates, a position in which he traveled to Cuba, the United States and Canada; However, in 1937 his discontent led him to resign and return to Caracas.

Shortly after, he founded the National Democratic Party, as a deputy of which he would reach the National Congress. At the beginning of the 1940s he joined his party with the recently founded Acción Democrática. In 1943, he married Liliana Iturbe with whom he fathered two children: Luis Felipe and Andrés Eloy. He actively participated in the presidential campaign of Rómulo Gallegos, who was elected president in 1947.

In 1946 he was elected president of the National Constituent Assembly called for the reform of the constitution, which established universal, direct and secret suffrage. In 1948 he was appointed Minister of Foreign Relations by President Rómulo Gallegos. The military coup that overthrew Gallegos in November 1948 surprised him when he was at the head of the Venezuelan delegation that was attending the Third General Assembly of the United Nations meeting in Paris. He went into exile in Mexico, where he dedicated himself to poetry.

In 1955, he lost his life in a traffic accident and on May 21 of that year his remains were transferred to Caracas for burial.

2005 marked the 50th anniversary of his death and this date; Even earlier, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Professor Luis Chesney Lawrence (Central University of Venezuela) writes in Venezuelan dramatists in shadows: Andrés Eloy Blanco (Venezuelan dramaturgy in shadows: Andrés Eloy White):

This research presents an overview of the dramatic work of A. E. Blanco, who as a dramatic author has received very little attention, both inside and outside his own country, Venezuela ()

In the prologue to his Antología Popular,), written by Juan Liscano, reference is made to Blanco's multifaceted personality:

Andrés Eloy Blanco (1897 - 1955) enjoys, together with some other lesser poets, the greatest popularity in Venezuela. His noble human condition, his idealism of another time, his knighthood, his adherence to the cause of freedom and democracy which cost him prisons, confinements and exiles; his humor, his sparkling wit, his sensitivity for the popular, his eloquence, his verses of traditional inspiration, open to the understanding of the majority, made him a symbol of vigilant civility and a genuine expression of venezolanity. What an extraordinary lesson for posterity that almost no one now remembers the importance of Andrés Eloy Blanco as a politician, but that millions of people can remember and recite his poem Angelitos Negros!

()

He was also a satirical humorist and fine political ironist.

Social sense of his poetry

Busto de Andrés Eloy Blanco, Parque del Retiro, Madrid, Spain.

Although his political career somewhat overshadowed his literary work, it could also be interpreted in the opposite sense, to the point that he had to clarify in a session of the Chamber of Deputies (on June 10, 1943) his double vocation as a poet on the one hand, and as a lawyer and congressman on the other:

"Some colleagues have not taken into account my quality as a deputy, but my quality as a poet. So I could deny any of my colleagues who were not a lawyer or a doctor the right to refer to a criminal matter, because they are pharmacists or merchants. Precisely I have always tried to gather my quality as a deputy with my quality as a poet. For I have of the poet a new concept; for I consider as the highest of his functions the social function of the poet. I must with all affection correspond to the sentence of Deputy Manzo, who in this case was not very 'manso' with me to say, telling him that I am not a remarkable lawyer. In me the only notable thing as a lawyer is the lack of clientele" ().

Two good examples of this poetry with a social sense in Andrés Eloy can be found in the Colloquio bajo la palma —from his work Giraluna, published in 1955, shortly after of his death—, and especially, in Paint me little black angels.

Colloquium under the palm tree

This poem is an exaltation of the spirit of improvement of the human being, of the need to study and prepare (lighten up as Andrés Eloy points out taking the idea from Bolívar: Moral and lights are our first needs ) with the ever-present objective of using those lights to, in turn, transmit and spread them. It is also a hymn to work, a song to social equality, a mandate to educate children, to freedom and democracy, as can be heard in a YouTube video ().

Paint me Little Black Angels

Monument to Andrés Eloy Blanco in Retiro Park, Madrid.

Many Hispanic Americans consider this poem by Andrés Eloy to be a hymn against racial discrimination. The poem was published during its author's lifetime and was also included in a posthumous compilation (1959) entitled La Juanbimbada , which includes many scattered poems from different periods of his life. He became well known throughout the Spanish-speaking world through a bolero whose music belongs to the Mexican actor and composer Manuel Álvarez Rentería, artistically nicknamed "Maciste", initially interpreted by the Mexican actor and singer Pedro Infante and also by Antonio Machín ([5]), and was especially popular in Spain as well as Latin America. In his adaptation to the bolero rhythm, the length of the poetry was reduced by removing the initial dialogue and other verses to make it more appropriate to the length of the musical work. And although many people remember the song around the world, very few know that it was based on a poem by this Venezuelan poet.

Among the different versions that exist, the one by the Uruguayan duo Los Olimareños stands out, who recorded this poem in the form of a passage, own rhythm of the Venezuelan plain, respecting the initial dialogue and alternating the texts of the original poem with adaptations of some of the verses and using music written for the purpose. Likewise, those made by the American singers Eartha Kitt and Roberta Flack stand out, the latter included in her 1969 album entitled First Take. Both use music written by Manuel Álvarez Rentería.

The door keys.

Works

• The epic orchard (1918)
• Lands that heard me (1921)
• The door keys (1922)
• Love didn't go to the bulls (1924)
• The Christ of the Violets (1925, theatre)
• Poda (1934)
• The aeroplane clueca (1935)
• The foot of the Virgin (1937, theatre)
• Stone Boat (1937)
• Abigail (1937, theatre)
• Malvina recobrada (1937, theatre)
• Baedeker 2000 (1938)
• Liberation and Shadow (1938)
• High navigation (1942, compilation of political articles)
• Vargas, dawn of anguish (1947, biography)
• The dead prefer blacks. (1950, theatre)
• A year from your light (1951)
• The Hilander (1954)
• The Poet and the People (1954)
• Giraluna (1955)
• La Juanbimbada (1959, posthumous)
• Orinoco

Bibliographic sources

• Blanco, Andrés Eloy (1955). Giraluna. Mexico: Yocoima.
• White, Andrés Eloy. Popular Anthology. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores - Comisión Presidencial para el Centenario del Natalicio de Andrés Eloy Blanco. Foreword by Juan Liscano, 1990, 1997 (second edition).
• Francisco Escamilla Vera. Andrés Eloy Blanco (1896 - 1955). Barcelona: Biblio 3W - BIBLIOGRAPHIC REVIEW OF GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES (Critical Geo documentary series), University of Barcelona. Vol. IX, No. 550, 5 December 2004 [6].
• Rivas Rivas, José (1980). Ingenius and grace of Andrés Eloy Blanco. Caracas: