Carmen Martin Gaite
Carmen Martín Gaite (Salamanca, December 8, 1925 – Madrid, June 23, 2000) was a Spanish writer, one of the most important figures in Hispanic letters of the XX. She received, among others, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 1988.
Biography
Childhood and adolescence in Salamanca
Carmen [second daughter of José Martín López (Valladolid, 1885) and María Gaite Veloso (Orense, 1894), who had married in 1923] was born on December 8, 1925 on the first floor of number 3 of the square de los Bandos (Salamanca), a building now demolished. Her parents had met in Salamanca, where José Martín practiced as a notary. Her maternal grandparents were from Orense and her mother was also born in this province. Her grandfather had been a Geography professor and her great-uncle was the founder of the Ateneo de Orense, director and editor of the newspaper El Orensano . The family used to spend every summer on a farm owned by his maternal grandparents in San Lorenzo de Piñor (Barbadás), five kilometers from Ourense. These trips were the basis of his links with Galicia and his interest in the culture of the earth, which serves as the setting for some of his works such as Las ataduras and Retahílas.
In her childhood she did not attend any school since José Martín, with liberal ideas, did not want her to be educated in a religious institution, so she received classes from private teachers and from her father, a great fan of history and history. Literature, which served as an initiator for Carmen and her sister Ana in these disciplines.
The start of the Spanish Civil War prevented Carmen from completing her baccalaureate at the Instituto-Escuela in Madrid, as her sister Ana had already done, so she had to do her secondary studies at the Instituto Feminino in her city native, whose environment he would later reflect in his novel Entre visillos. There she had Rafael Lapesa and Salvador Fernández Ramírez as teachers, two future members of the Royal Spanish Academy who marked her literary vocation.
University
In 1943, he began his studies in Philosophy and Letters at the University of Salamanca, where he was taught by Francisco Maldonado, Antonio Tovar, Manuel García Blanco and Alonso Zamora Vicente. In the first course he coincided with Ignacio Aldecoa and Agustín García Calvo, in those years he collaborated in the magazine Trabajos y días , where his first poems appeared. She also became interested in theater and participated as an actress in several plays. During the summer of 1946, she received a scholarship at the University of Coimbra, where she strengthened her interest in the Galician-Portuguese culture.
In the summer of 1948, after finishing her degree in Romance Philology, she received a scholarship to further her studies abroad, at the Collège International de Cannes. There he perfected the French language, began learning contemporary French literature and got to know a more open and cosmopolitan type of society. That same year, when he returned from France, he moved to Madrid with the intention of preparing his doctoral thesis on the Galician songbooks. Portuguese during the XIII century, which would not come to an end. In Madrid, she meets Ignacio Aldecoa, who introduces her to the literary circle of some of the members of the so-called Generation of the 50s, among whom were Medardo Fraile, Alfonso Sastre, Mayrata O'Wisiedo, Jesús Fernández Santos, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Josefina Rodríguez Álvarez and Carlos Edmundo de Ory.
Literary career
Little by little, her doctoral thesis project was diluted and her dedication to literature gained weight. She published stories and articles in magazines and worked for a time making records for a dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, she also worked as a teacher in a girls' school and as an employee of her father's notary's office who had moved to Madrid.
In 1953 she began collaborating with the literary magazine Revista Española, and in October she married another writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio —son of the prominent Falangist writer and former Franco minister, Rafael Sánchez Mazas—, whom he had met when he arrived in the capital in 1950. After the wedding, the couple spent a few months in Rome, at the home of Sánchez Ferlosio's maternal grandparents, as well as visiting other Italian cities such as Naples, Florence and Venice. This Italian period led him to contact the contemporary literature of that country; Among her main influences are Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo and Natalia Ginzburg. In October 1954, her first child, Miguel, was born, who died of meningitis in May of the following year, when he was only 7 months old. Her daughter Marta was born in 1956. Carmen Martín Gaite would separate from Sánchez Ferlosio fourteen years later, in 1970, to go live with her daughter Marta, who died in 1985 at the age of 29, a victim of AIDS, a disease she contracted while injecting heroin with needles infected with this virus.
In the spring of 1954 he won the Café Gijón Award for his short novel El balneario. His consolidation as a novelist came with the Nadal Prize that she obtained in January 1957 for his first long novel, Entre visillos . The second was Ritmo lento, which was a finalist for the Biblioteca Breve de Narrativa prize in 1962.
He also cultivated youth literature, especially in some of his stories ("The Castle of the Three Walls", 1981, or "The Devil's Pie", 1985) and in his novel Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan (1990).
In 1988, she received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and in 1978, she was the first woman (the first edition was from 1977) to obtain the National Literature Award for her work The back room, an award that he received again in 1994 for his body of work. She had the habit of putting an end to her books in a room in a luxurious Madrid hotel, which she reserved when she sensed that she was about to finish a work.
He also did literary criticism, especially in Diario 16, and collaborated in the scripts of series for Televisión Española as Santa Teresa de Jesús (1982) and Celia (1989), a children's series based on the stories of the Madrid writer Elena Fortún (1886-1952), of whom she declared herself a great follower. She translated Madame Bovary , Wuthering Heights , Jane Eyre , and works by Primo Levi, Virginia Woolf, Natalia Ginzburg, and C. S. Lewis.
In the 1990s he published two novels that were great critical and public successes, Lo raro es vivir in 1997 and Leave home in 1998.
Since his arrival in Madrid, he always lived in the Retiro neighborhood, where he liked to walk. In 2000 he was diagnosed with the cancer that ended his life on July 23.
Years later, on May 27, 2019, her sister Ana María, who served as executor, custody and memory of Carmen's work, died in Villalba (Madrid). In fact, in 2016 he launched the Carmen Martín Gaite Narrative Prize, to avoid the possible oblivion that could weigh on Carmen and her contemporaries of the generation of the 50s. He also created a Center for Studies of Carmen Martín Gaite, where the library, the archive and the furniture and objects that Carmen had in Madrid are located. There lie the remains of both sisters.
Passion for history
In the 1960s, she put fiction writing aside for a bit and, attracted by history, she spent more than ten years without publishing any novels. The result of this work are The process of Macanaz: history of a wallpapering (1970) about the politician of the XVIII century , Melchor de Macanaz, and The Count of Guadalhorce, his time and his work (1976). In this line of research, he built his doctoral thesis with the title Language and style of love in the texts of the Spanish 18th century, which he read on June 11, 1972, at the age of forty-six, before a court composed of by his former teachers Rafael Lapesa, Alonso Zamora Vicente, and also composed by José María Jover and Emilio Lorenzo. The work, which analyzes curious disappeared phenomena such as the "chischiveo", was published in 1973 under the title Amorous uses of eighteen in Spain.
Other essays
The Never Ending Story was one of his most personal essay books in which Martín Gaite, with his clear way of narrating the everyday, shows us behind the scenes of his writing but also reflects on coherence, life, childhood, love, lies, the fleeting. It makes an inventory of its existence until 1982, when it was published. He talks about his love for literature and for life, for the clouds, for contemplation. They are reflections that he wrote over the course of nine years and that he wanted to collect as his vision of his world. Curiously for someone who wrote so naturally, what prevails over the years in this work is the coherence and strength of his writing style.
Literary style
Regarding her experience as a writer, she said in an interview in 1998:
“There are three types of satisfaction. One is when you write. What I like is writing. I don't handle the subject until I have it well grasped. With my notes, my notes, and my memory I compose that theme. You know how I allude in my texts to sewing, to threads, to taking things off and putting them back on, to composing them... Not telling everything at once, that is the essential thing to keep the reader's interest...
»Another is the satisfaction of the criticism that is made to you. I read them and I receive them well. Sometimes, I think that they have not noticed something to which I attach importance, but other times I see that the critics have made points that surprise me because of their accuracy, sometimes they notice things that I did not see in the same way, and that they are good. In fact, the book is already in the hands of others. And it is the moment of the work of the critics.
»Another satisfaction is given by the reader. I note that quite a lot of people like me, I'm not going to say anything else. And they don't see me as a writer who has thrown in the towel, an established writer. This gratification of the sale, let's say, is not in itself, if one is not happy with himself. What I have done I have done the best I know how. With the limitation that I have in the topics, because I write from what I know, and I don't have much of a tendency to explain how I do what I do. The reader will understand. That is why I qualify reality, and I do not give all the information at once. I am satisfied that the reader appreciates that he reads by siding with him.
»I have lived my forty years with the luck of being able to do what I like, writing, and with the luck that what I write is liked by my readers, and encourages critics. I see it as a miracle."
And in another interview from 1999 he says about the style of his novel Leave home:
“Oral narration, which Russian writers have mastered like no other, is the fundamental aspect of my work. That 'it seems to me that I am deviating, but wait for me that now I come' I have learned it in Chekhov. I like to warn the reader that this or that character is going to be of interest. Because I really like that the reader follows me. I think a lot about the one who is going to read to me, I am very considerate of him, he does me quite a favor by reading to me. The fact that a story is credible does not mean that it is realistic, nor does it need to be credible.»
From his essayistic facet, Professor José Teruel highlights The never-ending tale: “a reflection on the fundamentally narrative essence of our existential project and its credibility. Everything for her was a story that had to be well told: reading, politics, love, her own life and that of others, history.»
The critic Santos Sanz Villanueva says about her personality: «Martín Gaite's narrative reflected her concern as a woman "window girl" (as she used to say about herself with Spanish colloquialism) transcribing observations of interior landscapes and looking for a "interlocutor" (another keyword of her poetics) an accomplice with whom to share her experience of the world. That she was that of a good girl, daughter of a notary, shaken by life several times with unbearable harshness. We are not speaking, however, of a pure writer but of a complete intellectual. She also dedicated efforts to history and sociology, fields that connect with the rest of her work. Her studies of the unhappy enlightened Macanaz or of the love practices of the 18th century and of the postwar period contain appeals against intransigence and dogmatism, against the constraints on women's freedom. In short, and indirectly, they constitute liberal and progressive bets in favor of a rational and fairer world without falling into the frequent political obedience in the people of the anti-Franco promotion.»
Works
Novel
- «El balneario» (1955), Premio Café Gijón 1954, a short novel published in a homonymous volume together with the stories «The reports», «One day of freedom» and «The girl below».
- Between minks (1958), Premio Nadal 1957
- Slow rhythm (1963), finalist of the Breve Library Award 1962
- Remove them (1974)
- Fragments of interior (1976)
- The back room (1978), National Narrativa Award (Spain)
- The Back Room (1983)
- Hood in Manhattan (1990)
- Variable number (1992)
- The queen of the snow (1994)
- The weird thing is to live (1997)
- Go home (1998)
- Parenting (2001), inconclusive
Story
- «One Day of Freedom» (1953), in Revista Española.
- The spa (1955)
- The bonds (1960)
- The castle of the three walls (1981)
- The devil's cake (1985)
- Two fantastic stories (1986)
- «Retired» (1995), in the anthology Tales of this century. 30 contemporary narrators.
- «From his window to mine» (1996), in the anthology Mothers and daughters.
- «The Girls Below» (2009), in the Anthology Friendly stories.
- Two wonderful stories (2009)
Essay
- The Macanaz Process: History of an Appeal (1970)
- Lovely uses of 18 in Spain (1973)
- The count of Guadalhorce, his time and his work (1976)
- Lovely uses of the Spanish Postwar (1981)
- The story of never ending (notes about narration, love and lying) (1983)
- From the window: female approach to Spanish literature (1987)
- Daily life in Goya times (with Natacha Seseña and Gonzalo Anes) (1996)
Poetry
- Straight. (1973)
- It's all a broken story in New York. (1986)
- After all. Poetry to streaks (1993). Anthology with a prologue of Jesus Munarriz
- Poems (2001)
Epistolary
- Correspondence (2011), with Juan Benet
Other genres
- The search for interlocutor and other searches (1974), articles
- Past water (Articles, Prologues and Speeches) (1993), miscellaneous
- Waiting for the future. Tribute to Ignacio Aldecoa (1994), conferences
- Little sister (1999), theatre
- Cuadernos de todo (2002)
- Closed quote from my memoryed. de Charo Ruano, Consorcio de Salamanca, 2002
- I ask for the word (2002)
- New York Vision (2005), daily
- Throwing of the thread: (articles 1949-2000) (2006), articles
- The book of fever (2007)
Awards
- Café Gijón Prize in 1954 for his novel The spa.
- 1957 Nadal Prize for his novel Between minks.
- National Literature Prize in the Narrativa modality in 1978 for his novel The back room.
- National Prize for Child and Youth Literature in 1984.
- Anagram Test Prize, 1987, by Lovely uses of the Spanish postwar.
- Golden book of the Spanish bookshops Essay by Lovely uses in 1987.
- Acebo Award of Honor in 1988.
- Prince of Asturias Award for Spanish Letters in 1988.
- Women Progressives Award in 1990.
- Castilla y León de las Letras Award in 1991.
- Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas en 1994.
- Gold Medal of the Fine Arts Circle in 1997.
- Silver Pen of the Scripture Circle in 1999.
- Gold Medal of the Villa de Madrid in 2000.
Accommodations
- Between minks was adapted as a series of 15 chapters by Radio Televisión Española, directed by Miguel Picazo and transmitted between February and March 1974.
- The story "A High in the Way" of the Volume The bonds was taken to the cinema in 1976 as Emilia, stop and fonda under the direction of Angelino Fons.
- The novel Fragments of interior was adapted as a TV series in 4 chapters by the Spanish Television, directed by Francisco Abad in 1984
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