Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (September 14, 1895-November 4, 1964) was an Argentine writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic. An admired biographer and critic, he was often political in his writings, and was a confirmed anti-Peronist. While in his middle years he was identified with the ideas of Nietzsche or Kafka, in his last years he was closely identified with the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro. September 14 is the 257th day of the year (258th in leap years). ... 1895 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... November 4 is the 308th day of the year (309th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 57 days remaining. ... 1964 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Juan Domingo Perón ( October 8, 1895 – July 1, 1974) was an Argentine military officer and the President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and from 1973 to 1974. ... Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a highly influential German philosopher. ... Franz Kafka approximately 1917 Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 in Prague - June 3, 1924 in Vienna) was one of the major German language writers of the 20th century most of whose work was published posthumously. ... Cuban President Fidel Castro waves the Cuban flag during May Day celebrations, 2005 Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926), has led Cuba since 1959, when, leading the 26th of July Movement, he overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista. ...

Life

Originally from rural Argentina, Martínez Estrada was born in San José de la Esquina, in Santa Fe province and grew up until the age of twelve there and in Goyena, a village in the southern reaches of Buenos Aires province. (In 1937, he would buy a farm in Goyena.) In 1907, his parents separated, and he went to live with his aunt Elisa in Buenos Aires, and to study at the Colegio Avellanda. It appears that his formal studies were cut short due to poverty. By 1914 he was working at the central post office in Buenos Aires; he would remain in Buenos Aires until retiring in 1946. 1937 was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1907 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... Buenos Aires (Good Winds in Spanish, but more akin to Fair Winds, as in navigation) is the capital of Argentina and its largest city and port, as well as one of the largest cities in South America. ... 1914 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ...

Within a few years, he began to establish a reputation as a poet; he also published a few short essays. In 1921 he married the Italian-born artist Agustina Morriconi, who definitely subordinated her career and unquestioned talents to his; she was, by all accounts, the muse of much of his poetry. 1921 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ...

Beginning in 1924, Martínez Estrada taught literature at the Colegio Nacional of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. He would continue this for decades, losing the job only when Juan Domingo Perón rose to power in 1945 (and returning briefly after Perón fell from power in 1956). 1924 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Juan Domingo Perón ( October 8, 1895 – July 1, 1974) was an Argentine military officer and the President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and from 1973 to 1974. ... 1945 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ...

In 1933, responding to the 1930 Argentinian coup by José Félix Uriburu, Martínez Estrada published Radiografía de la pampa, the first of a series of rather pessimistic sociological-psychological-historical essays that would make his reputation. That year, Martínez Estrada received the first of what were to be a series of national literary prizes. It is also about that time that he began travelling abroad; his generally favorable impressions during a U.S.-government-sponsored 1942 visit to the United States are recounted in his posthumously published Panorama de los Estados Unidos; his impressions on this visit apparently contrasted sharply with his earlier and later anti-Americanism. 1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1930 is a common year starting on Wednesday. ... Anti-Americanism is a term referring to hostility towards or disapproval for the government, culture, history, and/or people of the United States of America. ...

In 1946 Martínez Estrada became a regular contributor to the Argentine magazine Sur, edited and published by Victoria Ocampo. His contributions to Sur included poems, essays, and Kafkaesque short stories. 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... Victoria Ocampo (April 7, 1890? - January 27, 1979) was an Argentine intellectual, described by Jorge Luis Borges as la mujer más argentina (the most Argentine woman). Best known as an advocate for others and as publisher of the magazine Sur, she was also a writer and critic in her...

During the Perón years, Martínez Estrada suffered from an extremely disabling form of neurodermatitis, quite possibly psychosomatic. After the fall of Perón, his health regained, but still feeling himself a bit of a voice crying in the desert, he embarked on a series of writings he called his "catilinarias" (after Cicero's Catiline Orations), a series of acerbic writings directed at the Argentine elite, both in government and among the intellectuals, predicting that Argentina faced a century of "Pre-Peronism, Peronism, and Post-Peronism." During this time, he returned briefly to the Colegio Nacional, then was appointed as an Extraordinary Professor at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, in Bahía Blanca. A psychosomatic illness is one with physical manifestations and supposed psychological cause, often diagnosed when any known or identifiable physical cause was excluded by medical examination. ... Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) was an orator and statesman of Ancient Rome, and is generally considered the greatest Latin prose stylist. ... In 63 BC Marcus Tullius Cicero (106_43 BC), orator, statesman and patriot, attained the rank of consul and in that capacity exposed to the Roman Senate the plot of Lucius Sergius Catilina (approx. ... Bahía Blanca is a city in eastern Argentina in Buenos Aires Province and a seaport at the head of the Bahía Blanca (White Bay - an arm of the Atlantic Ocean). ...

Beginning in mid-1959, Martínez Estrada began what became a semi-exile lasting nearly to the end of his life. First he went on a lecture tour of Chile, then to a peace conference in Vienna, where he met the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. In September 1959, he went on to Mexico, where he remained for a year at the Institute of Political Science at the Universidad Autónoma de México and wrote Diferencias y semejanzas entre los países de América Latina (Differences and resemblances among the Latin American countries), a long essay even broader than its title might suggest, in that it also drew parallels to Asia and Africa, and generally cast his lot with the emerging Third World-ist view, condemning imperialism and colonialism and expressing his admiration for the revolution then in progress in Cuba, which proved to be his next destination (although with some brief trips back to Argentina). 1959 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... Vienna (German: Wien [viːn]) is the capital of Austria, and also one of Austrias nine federal states (Bundesland Wien). ... Nicolás Guillén (10 July 1902 – 16 July 1989) was a Cuban poet. ... For the Jamaican reggae band, see Third World (band). ... A cartoon portraying the British Empire as an octopus, reaching into foreign lands Imperialism is a policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics... World map of colonialism circa 1945. ...

From September, 1960 until November 1962, Martínez Estrada served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies of Cuba's Casa de las Américas. There, he became very much a part of the heady intellectual atmosphere of the first years of the revolution: above all, he studied the life and works of José Martí. He also edited two books of Fidel Castro's speeches, and numerous propagandistic writings and pamphlets including El nuevo mundo, la isla de Utopía y la isla de Cuba (The New World, the Island of Utopia, and the Island of Cuba), in which he saw Cuba has having a manifest destiny, under which the indigenous Taínos of Cuba were linked to the "Amaurotos" of Thomas More's Utopia and Castro's Cuba to the ideal Cuba of Martí. 1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... José Julián Martí y Pérez (January 28, 1853 – May 19, 1895) was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as an esteemed poet and writer. ... Cuban President Fidel Castro waves the Cuban flag during May Day celebrations, 2005 Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926), has led Cuba since 1959, when, leading the 26th of July Movement, he overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista. ... Manifest Destiny, meaning obvious (or undeniable) fate was a belief originally held by Democratic Republicans, specifically Warhawks during the presidency of James Madison, that stated the United States had a divinely-inspired mission to expand itself and its system of government from ocean to ocean and to the western frontier. ... The Taíno are the pre-colombian Amerindian inhabitants of the Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Hispaniola ( Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the Bahamas. ... Portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478–6 July 1535), posthumously known also as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and politician. ... See Utopia (disambiguation) for other meanings of this word Utopia, in its most common and general meaning, refers to a hypothetical perfect society. ...

Martínez Estrada left Cuba shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. With his health beginning to fail, with Cuba expelled from the OAS, and with a need to attend to his own economic affairs, he decided that he "would better serve the revolution from abroad." After a brief stop in Mexico he returned to Argentina, to Bahía Blanca, and to his status as a voice in the wilderness. He completed his three books on Martí (none of which were published in his lifetime and one of which remains unpublished as of 2001), wrote a work on Balzac, and continued to write poems (notably his Tres poemas del anochecer -- Three Poems at Dusk -- the last work he published in Sur). He spoke of returning to Cuba; it is not entirely clear whether his failure to do so was entirely a matter of his health or related to traces of disillusionment with the revolution that are evidenced in his correspondence. He died November 4, 1964 in Bahía Blanca. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. ... The Organization of American States (OAS; OEA in the other three official languages) is an international organization, headquartered in Washington, D.C., USA. Its members are the 35 independent nations of the Americas. ... 2001 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and also: The International Year of the Volunteer The United Nations Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations Events January January 1 - A black monolith measuring approximately nine feet tall appears in Seattles Magnuson Park, placed by an anonymous... Honoré de Balzac Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850), was a French novelist. ...

Works

The themes of Martínez Estrada's work can largely be gleaned from his choices of whom to write about. The names Nietzsche, Montaigne, and Kafka presumably speak for themselves, but there is also a specifically Latin American theme of skepticism about certain aspects of modernity to be found in his writings. In looking at the works of Domingo Sarmiento, he picked up Sarmiento's themes of "civilization" and "barbarism", but with a greater ambivalence about the virtues of civilization than were found in the earlier writer. Writing about nineteenth-century naturalist Guillermo Enrique Hudson, Martínez Estrada showed himself to be in sympathy with the idea of a return to a more paradisical natural world. He shared with his older contemporary Horacio Quiroga a concern for the mediocrity, injustice, and dehumanization of contemporary industrial / technological society. Like Sarmiento and José Martí, he believed that as a writer he could not only comment upon the world, but influence it. Towards the end of his life, this led to his support for the Cuban revolution and to his "catilinarias", acerbic writings on Argentine politics and culture. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a highly influential German philosopher. ... Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 - September 13, 1592) was an influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay. ... Franz Kafka approximately 1917 Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 in Prague - June 3, 1924 in Vienna) was one of the major German language writers of the 20th century most of whose work was published posthumously. ... Categories: People stubs | 1811 births | 1888 deaths | Presidents of Argentina | Argentine writers ... Uruguayan short story writer 1878-1937. ... José Julián Martí y Pérez (January 28, 1853 – May 19, 1895) was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as an esteemed poet and writer. ...

1918 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... 1922 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... 1924 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1927 was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1929 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1929 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... The pampas (from Quechua for plain) are the fertile lowlands that extend across c. ... 1940 was a leap year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... The young Hebrew David hoists the head of the Philistine Goliath This page is about a Biblical figure. ... 1944 was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1945 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Victoria Ocampo (April 7, 1890? - January 27, 1979) was an Argentine intellectual, described by Jorge Luis Borges as la mujer más argentina (the most Argentine woman). Best known as an advocate for others and as publisher of the magazine Sur, she was also a writer and critic in her... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... Categories: People stubs | 1811 births | 1888 deaths | Presidents of Argentina | Argentine writers ... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... 1947 was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1947 was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1947 was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a highly influential German philosopher. ... 1948 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1951 was a common year starting on Monday; see its calendar. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ... 1956 was a leap year starting on Sunday. ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Uruguayan short story writer 1878-1937. ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1958 was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 - September 13, 1592) was an influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay. ... Honoré de Balzac Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850), was a French novelist. ... 1959 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1959 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1963 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1963 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1963 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1964 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Honoré de Balzac Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850), was a French novelist. ... 1964 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1966 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ... Nicolás Guillén (10 July 1902 – 16 July 1989) was a Cuban poet. ... 1966 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ... José Julián Martí y Pérez (January 28, 1853 – May 19, 1895) was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as an esteemed poet and writer. ... 1966 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... Franz Kafka approximately 1917 Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 in Prague - June 3, 1924 in Vienna) was one of the major German language writers of the 20th century most of whose work was published posthumously. ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... Leopoldo Lugones (13 June 1874 - 1938) was an Argentine writer and journalist. ... 1969 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1969 calendar). ... 1975 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... 1985 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1942 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ...

Honors

• 1933 -- (Argentine) National Prize for Literature (for his poems)
• 1933 - 1934 -- President of Argentine Society of writers (SADE)
• 1937 -- (Argentine) National Prize for Letters for Radiografía de la pampa
• 1942 - 1946 -- President of SADE, again
• 1948 -- SADE's highest honor, the "Gran Premio de Honor"
• 1949 -- SADE puts forward his name as a candidate for a Nobel Prize, but he does not receive it.
• 1957 -- President of the Argentine League for Human Rights ("Liga Argentina por los Derechos del Hombre")

1933 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1934 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1937 was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1942 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... 1948 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1949 is a common year starting on Saturday. ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ...

External links

• Extensive Spanish-language site about Martínez Estrada (http://ensayo.rom.uga.edu/filosofos/argentina/eme/) including his autobiographical letter to Victoria Ocampo (http://ensayo.rom.uga.edu/filosofos/argentina/eme/eme6.htm)
• Martínez Estrada's essay on Nietzsche, in Spanish (http://www.nietzscheana.com.ar/martinez_estrada.htm)
• Spanish-language biographical essay (http://ar.geocities.com/clescudero2003/eme.htm)