Julio Correa

Julio Arístides Correa Myzkowsky (Asunción, August 30, 1890 - Luque, July 14, 1953), was a Paraguayan poet who wrote verses in the Guarani language.

Biography

Correa was born in Asunción (Paraguay) on August 30, 1890. His maternal grandfather, named Myzkowsky, was Polish. His mother, the Paraguayan Amalia Myzcowsky, daughter of the Polish colonel Luis Mizcowsky; and his father Eleuterio Correa Portuguese. He left school very young. He began publishing his poems in 1926.

Encouraged by the poet Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, he began to write in a section entitled “Dialoguitos callejeros” in the Guaraní newspaper, run by Facundo Recalde.

Her creativity exploded with the Chaco War. His pieces in the Guaraní language were received with great success and in them he stood out as an author, actor and director. From 1934 to 1936, he published his poems in the Guarania magazine, by Natalicio González, which later became part of the book Cuerpo y Alma (1943). In 1947, he was arrested for his writings. The civil war of that year had a negative effect on the author and he fell into decay and disappointment. He secluded himself in a farm in the city of Luque where he died on July 14, 1953.

Childhood and youth

From a wealthy family made less by the ups and downs of the post-war period from 1864 to 1870 and its incidence in the Paraguayan society of his time, Correa is, unquestionably, the maximum expression, in terms of the creation of Paraguayan dramatic art and the highest exponent of the theater in Guaraní, more than inspired poet of net social cut. He is of Portuguese descent. His father fought in the war of the Triple Alliance and, once the fight was over, he stayed on his wife's land, like so many other patricians. Once again, Paraguay would see the phenomenon of colonial miscegenation repeat itself. The boy grew up among the Guarani-speaking people, peasants and workers, and from that time on, he began to feel the craving for him, to see his titanic struggles to survive. When he became a man, he discovered himself an interpreter for these people, both in theater and in social action poetry.

He was a close friend of the Rosario sculptor Erminio Blotta, an honorary citizen of the Republic of Paraguay.

Her family

Married to Georgina Martínez, a notable actress, he founded a theater company with which he toured every corner of Paraguay, taking his message of denunciation of the injustices generated by unproductive large estates and exploitations from time immemorial and its logical consequence, the lack of land for the peasants and the humiliation to which they were subjected by employers, foremen and authorities.

His trajectory

Walter Wey, an excellent and well-documented Brazilian researcher, paints a marvelous portrait of the versatile Correa: “Who doesn't know and admire Julio Correa, poet, playwright, businessman, auctioneer, businessman, teller of anecdotes and number one distiller of political poisons? and literary? Perhaps the victims, men and women who were not respected for their talent as improvisers of satirical verses, which were never published, but which everyone knows by heart. Hearing Correa recite them on a wheel, at the corner of Calle Palma or in his country house in Luque, was one of the most beautiful spectacles of our lives... That is why he has suffered persecution and not infrequently went to jail, for satisfaction of the viciousness of revenge of his enemies. Meanwhile, the applause and admiration of the people stimulate him, and Julio Correa continues incorrigibly.

He was the creator of Guarani theater, its greatest author, and probably its best actor. With formidable intuition he felt that Paraguay's greatest problem was the distribution of land, since as Justo Pastor Benítez wrote, the Paraguayan is a mere occupant of his own land.

Correa, sensing that truth, became a champion of this fight, fighting foreign and national latifundia with enormous courage. In his enormous house in Luque, we did not see a single book. Whoever goes through the door topped by three huge red F's (Faith in Franco and February) and by the portrait of the head of the party, one of the few people he respects, can find chickens pecking or pigs snouting in the corners of the room, but nothing. that remembers the house of a poet.

Julio Correa is a poet without culture and, what makes it more interesting, without the slightest desire or concern to acquire it. The poems in Spanish that he collected in 1945, under the title of Body and Soul, closed an era and opened a new path, which will be widened by Hérib Campos Cervera, with the introduction of "avant-garde literature" 3. 4;.

It is precisely Campos Cervera, Correa's generational partner, who completes this vision of the great playwright: "Correa continues to be the great creator of images of our social environment and our problems; dramas of misery, land, blood and jealousy".

Rough tragedies that our people live every day, while they search giving hands tones in the shadows, the path to freedom. Our people interpret Correa in this way: as a mirror of his most unwavering hopes; as an interpreter of his deepest pains and his deepest joys; Otherwise, the kind of idolatry that his figure inspires when he is on the scene, in the midst of his other offspring, cannot be explained. Because Correa has not been satisfied with creating characters; he also embodies them by enjoying or dying the drunkenness and moral falls of his human beings. Julio's transfigured picture takes all the nuances that passion has, all the fury of hatred, all the kindness of compassion; his voice trembles or curses, roars or cries, adjusting to the exact measure of the feeling that he dresses in the clothing of art to survive.

Work

The vast dramatic output of Julio Correa includes:

• "Karai Eulogio" (Mr. Eulogio)o

• "Ñane mba’era’y" (“What cannot be ours”)

• "War aja" (“During the War”)

• "Tereho jevy fréntepe" (“Go back to the front”)

• "Pleito rire" (“After the lawsuit”)

• "Péicha guarante"

• "Sandía yvyguy" (“Entered Sandía”)

• "Karu poka" (“Comer Poco”)

• “Honorio Causa” (“A causa de Honorio”)

• "Po’a nda ja jokoi" (“Lucky doesn’t stop it”)

• "Ka'a Hat" (Guraní-castellana expression that designates a person's lover), among others.

He also wrote Yvy yara, Toribio, Yuaijhugui reí, Po'a rusuva and La good guy's fault.

Her short stories include Nicolasita del Espíritu Santo (1943), El Padre Cantalicio, El borracho de la casa, and The man who stole a kettle (unfinished), all of these published posthumously.

Last years

He died on July 14, 1953 in the city of Luque, Paraguay, a city near the capital where he had settled decades ago. The "huge house" that Wey refers to is currently the "Julio Correa Museum."