Memories

The memoirs are those stories that more or less reliably describe the facts and events that the author has experienced as a protagonist or witness.

Cover of Benjamin Franklin's memories.

The distinction between "memoir" and "autobiography" is unclear. The Dictionary of the Spanish language defines both terms in a similar way, so that they could be understood as synonyms; Some authors suggest that in the memoirs the writer makes a narration part of his life, while in the autobiography what he seeks is to refer to his life trajectory in its entirety.^{[citation required]} Thus, for For example, Teresa de Jesús narrates, sometimes in detail, in the Book of her life her first forty years of life, while in the memoirs the interest is focused, rather, on recalling the experience of the self of a certain period or of an entire era (for example, Karen Blixen's Out of Africa, better known by her pseudonym Isak Dinesen, narrates the period that this writer lived in Kenya).

In Spanish, works written in the second half of the xix century can be mentioned as the Memories of a seventy-year-old by Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. But as a literary genre they began to stand out in the first half of the xx century, as evidenced by works such as the four volumes of Los pasos contados (A Spanish life on horseback in two centuries (1887-1957), written by Corpus Barga, or the popular collection of select memories of Pablo Neruda, in I confess that I have lived; or by Rafael Alberti, also a poet, in the two volumes of La arboleda perdida. Memoirs written by politicians such as Winston Churchill (Memories of the War), or by actors such as Charles Chaplin (Story of my life), for not to mention the films Memoirs of a Mexican and Memories of Africa by Karen Blixen; Faced with deeper reflections but with a much more discreet commercial reflection in works such as the Loose Ends by Professor Enrique Tierno Galván, among numerous other possible examples.

In the preface to the 1957 edition of his memoirs, and quoting Miguel de Cervantes from El colloquio de los perros, the memorialist Corpus Barga concludes:

Dogs hurt death; lives, it is true, are lost — so that life passes. Memories want to tell what happens in life. As insignificant as a life, you never just told what's going on with her.

Corpus Barga, Lima, June 1957