Mary mercedes carranza

María Mercedes Carranza (Bogotá, May 24, 1945-ibid., July 11, 2003) was a Colombian poet and journalist.

She was one of the members of the National Constituent Assembly of 1991, which gave Colombia the 1991 constitution, integrating the bench of the ADM-19.

Biography

She was the second daughter of Rosa Coronado and Eduardo Carranza, a poet of great prestige, who moved to Spain in 1952 as a cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy in Madrid.

Childhood

The writer lived in Madrid between the ages of six and thirteen, with periods in Paris, and under the influence of the great intellectual activity of her father and her maternal great-aunt, the poet Elisa Mújica (1918-2003)., who also lived in Spain during those years: “The fable of my childhood is woven with its legends and stories; with her I discovered the power of the word" (Carranza in an interview with Carlos Jáuregui).

The family returned to the Colombian capital in 1958, where the young María Mercedes experienced a difficult period of readaptation to her native country: "When I returned, I was still playing with dolls and did not know how babies were born. I had left Spain and my childhood, and I felt a terrible cultural nostalgia that I faced with the decision to belong to Colombia". There he finished his secondary studies with a bilingual secretariat, to later study Philosophy and Letters, first in Madrid, and then, intermittently between 1965 and 1978, at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, where he graduated with a thesis on his father's work. The result of his research, which would become over the years one of the most authoritative studies on Eduardo Carranza, is the introduction to the anthology Carranza por Carranza (Bogotá: Procultura, Editorial La Rosa, 1985, ISBN 9789589083017).

In 1965, at the age of twenty, she was appointed director of & # 34; Vanguardia & # 34;, literary page of the Bogota newspaper El Siglo . From there she spread the work of authors who would later become very significant, such as Juan Manuel Roca and Nicolás Suescún, among many others. In 1970 she decides to live with the writer Fernando Garavito, sub-director of the Colombian Institute of Culture, whom she marries civilly, defying the predominant Catholic norms in her family circle. With Garavito she co-directed the cultural magazine & # 34;Estravagario & # 34; of the Cali newspaper El Pueblo in 1975. Shortly after, she was appointed editor-in-chief of the magazine Nueva Frontera, which had been founded in 1974 by former Liberal president Carlos Lleras Restrepo, a position which he held for thirteen years, and in which he had an active participation in national political opinion.

As early as 1965, he had begun to publish cultural criticism (for example, an interview with Vicente Aleixandre) and poems and short stories (for example, "Uno se muere y zás"). But his literary trajectory became notable from the 1970s: in 1971 he edited and prefaced the anthology Nueva poesía colombiana , which disseminated the work of eight young poets in a popular and popular edition. pocket; the same is done by contemporary narrators in 7 young storytellers, published in 1972; and that same year his first collection of poems Pods and other poems (1968-1972) appeared.

Maturity

Since 1986 he directed the Casa de Poesía Silva in Bogotá. She was elected to the 1991 National Constituent Assembly by the M-19 Democratic Alliance. After months of anguish over the kidnapping of her brother, she decided to commit suicide with an overdose of antidepressants on July 11, 2003 in Bogotá.

Work

In his analysis of the lyric poetry of the 1970s in Colombia, critic James J. Alstrum highlights the "destroying poetic work but healthy and necessary to direct the poem towards unusual paths" de Carranza. His literary and cultural contribution is also measured by having contributed to founding the Casa de Poesía Silva in Bogotá in 1986, which he directed until his death and from where he dedicated himself to supporting poetic production with recitals, workshops, awards, and a specialized library and magazine. His was like that, in the words of the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco, "a fair and necessary work that extended to other ways of loving poetry and believing in it".

María Mercedes Carranza managed to unite the philosophy of her life in poetry. In each of his productions, important philosophical and, even more, existential problems can be evidenced, since both love and death surrounded his life and various sections of his work, where he addressed them in depth and in detail. His poetic search through the existential orbit has led some scholars to relate her to two other great poetesses of the continent: Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik. "According to Harold Alvarado Tenorio, in Colombia -in the nineties- there were several poets who the theme of love, of the intimacy of a couple, of perpetual dedication to the loved one; but none dared to capture the passionate and carnal affection as directly as María Mercedes Carranza did in her writings. In fact, those enthusiasms that are shared with the loved one materialized in her collection of poems De amor y desamor; However, towards the middle of the text, a passionate disappointment gradually arises that begins the process of change towards true love: her profession as a writer. Thus, the change between sexual love and love of writing are transitional states that are expressed with a spontaneous and frank discourse, which becomes more evident as the reader progresses through the work and interprets the succession of the poems. Therefore, De amor y desamores is a collection of poems in which the poetic voice conjectures a state of transition between these two feelings, to the extent that it establishes an order of presentation for each of the twenty-one poems".

As summed up by critic Lucía Tono, the "playful and ironic effect" of Carranza's poetry can be read as testimony to what it meant to be a woman in 19th-century Colombia XX. But it is also located within the skepticism that Carranza herself pointed out as characteristic of the so-called "post-Nadaísta poetry" and that others, such as the aforementioned Alstrum or the writer Harold Alvarado Tenorio, consider a trait hallmark of the "Disenchanted Generation". Other reading directions that Carranza's aesthetics have inspired include satire of the national and Western civilization, and an ecological perspective, especially in her latest collection of poems.

The creation magazine Palimpsesto no. 19 (Carmona-Sevilla, 2004) devoted an extensive dossier on his life and work (pp.31-50).

Poems

• Vains and other poems (1972)
• I'm scared. (1983)
• Maneras desamor (1993)
• Hello, loneliness (1987)
• The singing of flies (1997)
• The Homeland and other ruins (anthology, selection of Francisco José Cruz, interview by Sandra Martínez León, col. Palimpsesto, Carmona-Sevilla, 2004)

Other books

• New Colombian poetry (1972)
• Seven young people (1972)
• Strange (1976)
• Anthology of Colombian child poetry (1982)
• Carranza by Carranza (on his father Eduardo Carranza) (1985).