GRGR(12)NOTES (5)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

GR.263.18 Leopoldo Lugones
Argentine poet, literary and social critic, and
cultural ambassador, considered by many the
outstanding figure of his age in the cultural life of
Argentina. He was a strong influence on the younger
generation of writers that included the prominent
short-story writer and novelist Jorge Luis Borges.
His influence in public life set the pace for national
development in the arts and education. 

Lugones began as a socialist journalist, settling in
Buenos Aires, where in 1897 he helped found La
montaña ("The Mountain"), a socialist journal, and
became an active member of the group of Modernist
experimental poets led by the Nicaraguan Rubén
Darío. Lugones' first important collection of
poems, Las montañas del oro (1897; "Mountains of
Gold"), reveals his affinity with the goals of
Modernism in its use of free verse and exotic
imagery, devices that he continued in Los
crepúsculos del jardín (1905; "Twilights in the
Garden") and Lunario sentimental (1909;
"Sentimental Lunar Almanac"). 

Between 1911 and 1914 Lugones lived in Paris,
editing the Revue Sudaméricaine ("South American
Review"), but he returned to Argentina at the
outbreak of World War I. A change in his political
outlook from the radical socialism of his youth to an
intense conservative nationalism was paralleled in
his art by a rejection of Modernism in favour of a
treatment of national themes in a realistic style.
This change, already foreshadowed in the prose
sketches of La guerra gaucha (1905; "The Gaucho
War"), was fully revealed in the poems of El libro
de los paisajes (1917; "The Book of Landscapes"),
which extolled the beauty of the Argentine
countryside. Lugones continued to develop native
themes in such prose works as Cuentos fatales
(1924; "Tales of Fate"), a collection of short
stories, and the novel El ángel de la sombra (1926;
"The Angel of the Shadow"). 

Lugones was director of the National Council of
Education (1914-38), and he represented Argentina
in the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the
League of Nations (1924). He was also noted for
several volumes of Argentine history, for studies of
Classical Greek literature and culture, and for his
Spanish translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. 

An introverted man who thought of himself
primarily as a poet, Lugones was genuinely uneasy
about the prominence that he had achieved and the
public responsibilities that it entailed. He became a
fascist in 1929. Under great emotional strain in
later years, he committed suicide.

GR.263.20 Uriburo Revolution
Sept. 6, 1930, Uriburu seized power after the Radical party
failed to resolve problems of the economic depression.

GR.263.24 Graciela Iamgo Portales
 
Her name means Graciela "Window Image," and she has hijacked
the German submarine at the Argentine port city of Mar del
Plata.

GR.263.33 Rivadavia
At 46 degrees southern latitude, a port city that is
southernmost of Argentina's populous cities.

GR.263.34 "with Peron on his way"
Juan Domingo Peron. In 1943 he joined a clique of military
plotters that
overthrew the ineffective civilian government of
Argentina. The military regimes of the following
three years came increasingly under the influence of
Perón, who had shrewdly requested for himself
only the minor post of secretary of labour and
social welfare. By 1945 he had also become vice
president and minister of war. Clearly, he was
bidding for undisputed power, based on the support
of the underprivileged labourers (the
descamisados, or "shirtless ones") and on his
popularity and authority in the army. He was sentenced to
two years imprisonment 
by Ramirez, on the island of Martin Garcia, where he
remained until Oct. 1945.