Rufino Blanco Fombona

In this Spanish name, the family name is Blanco.

Rufino Blanco Fombona
Photograph by Kaulak (before 1915)
Born	(1874-06-17)17 June 1874 Caracas
Died	Buenos Aires

Rufino Blanco Fombona (17 June 1874 – 16 October 1944) was a Venezuelan literary historian and man of letters who played a major role in bringing the works of Latin American writers to world attention. He is buried in the National Pantheon of Venezuela. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.

Biography

From an illustrious family (descended from Spanish conquistadors, independence heroes, jurists, diplomats and writers), he was the son of Rufino Blanco Toro and Isabel Fombona Palacio. Blanco Fombona attended elementary school in Caracas and obtained his bachelor's degree in 1889. He began Law and Philosophy at the Central University of Venezuela, but decided to enter the Military Academy and with barely eighteen years old he intervened in the Legalist Revolution (1892) and that same year he was named consul in Philadelphia. There he began to cultivate poetry and upon his return to Caracas in 1895 he participated in the magazines El Cojo Ilustrado and Cosmópola.

He was assigned to the Venezuelan Embassy in Holland, where he remained during 1896 and 1897. In 1898 he was briefly imprisoned for having fought a duel with an aide of the president of the Republic contrary to his ideas; once free he went to New York to teach Spanish language and from there he moved to the Dominican Republic, where he worked as a journalist and was appointed consul in Boston of that country (1898-1899). In 1899 he published Caracas Trovadores y trovas, a mixture of verse and prose, his first book. This was followed by Cuentos de poeta (1900), Cuentos americanos (1904) and Pequeña ópera lírica (1904), a mature book of verses whose prologue is signed by Rubén Darío, because, in fact, it is inscribed within the aesthetics of modernism, although later it will be oriented more towards postmodernism. He reprinted part of his verses in a bilingual edition (Au-delà des horizons. Petits poèmes lyriques (Paris, 1908) and simultaneously published a collection of articles Letras y letrados de Hispanoamérica.

He went to jail in Ciudad Bolívar for having killed the colonel who tried to arrest him for fighting against the rubber monopoly in his position as governor of the federal territory of Amazonas, in the middle of the Amazon region; this served as inspiration for his first novel, El hombre de hierro (1907), in which the influences that would mark his narrative are already visible: French realism (Honoré de Balzac) and the naturalistic pessimism of Guy de Maupassant. He also wrote against his enemy the pamphlet De cuerpo entero; el negro Benjamín Ruiz (1900) and also attacked the government with another pamphlet of the same year, Una página de historia; Ignacio Andrade y su gobierno, where he blamed the politician of that name for having rigged the elections that made him president and provoked a civil war in Venezuela. At that time he fought against the coup d'état of Juan Vicente Gómez as secretary of the Chamber of Deputies and that earned him a banishment that kept him away from the country for twenty-six years.

He lived in Paris (1910–1914) and then in Madrid (1914–1936) in a period of his life especially fertile in literary aspects. He began with the antigomecista libel Judas capitolino (1912); the poetry collections Cantos de la prisión y del destierro (1911) and Cancionero del amor infeliz (1918), written on the occasion of the tragic suicide of his young wife, who had learned of his infidelity; the books of short stories Dramas mínimos (1920) and Tragedias grotescas (1928), and the novels El hombre de oro (1915), La mitra en la mano (1927), La bella y la fiera (1931) and El secreto de la felicidad (1933). He also directed Editorial América for almost twenty years. Among his projects of this period, his edition of part of Simón Bolívar's work stands out: the Letters (1913, 1921, 1922) and the Speeches and Proclamations (1913). In his essays, on the other hand, he proposes a "pan-Hispanistam² project" to the American "pan-Americanism" and exalts the work of the Spanish conquistadors, founders of a community from which the new republics emerged. He also collected and printed a series of studies on Bolivar by Juan Montalvo, José Martí and José Enrique Rodó, among others (1914). His friends in Spain and Latin America unsuccessfully proposed him in 1925 for the Nobel Prize for Literature and, opposed to the dictatorship in Spain of Miguel Primo de Rivera, with the support of the Republicans of the Radical Party, he was appointed civil governor of the provinces of Almeria (1933) and Navarra (1933–1934).

When he returned to his country he joined the National Academy of History (1939) and was appointed president of the state of Miranda (1936–1937) and minister plenipotentiary of Venezuela in Uruguay (1939–1941). He did not try to meddle again in politics: he dedicated himself to historical research, poetry and writing his Diary (about a thousand pages long and published in three parts: Diario de mi vida. La novela de dos años (1904–1905) 1929; Camino de imperfección, 1933, and Dos años y medio de inquietud (1942); the third part was not published as it was apparently stolen by Gómez's agents in Madrid. His heart condition worsened, his last book was a book of poetry: Mazorcas de oro, a compilation of old poems with some new ones, and he died of a heart attack during a trip to Buenos Aires.

Works

Diaries

• Diario de mi vida. La novela de dos años, 1904-1905 (Madrid: Compañía Iberoamericana de Publicaciones, 1929)
• Camino de imperfección. Diario de mi vida, 1906-1913 (Madrid: Ed. América, 1933)
• Dos años y medio de inquietud (Caracas: Impresores Unidos, 1942)

Fiction

• El hombre de hierro (Caracas: Tipografía Americana, 1907)
• El hombre de oro (Madrid: Ed. Renacimiento, 1915)
• Cuentos de poeta (Maracaibo: Imprenta Americana, 1900)
• Cuentos Americanos (1904; 2.ª ed. aumentada París: Ed. Garnier, 1913)
• Dramas mínimos (Madrid: Ed. Biblioteca Nueva, 1920), relatos.
• La espada del samuray (Madrid: Ed. Mundo Latino, 1924)
• Tragedias grotescas (Madrid: Ed. América, 1928; short stories)
• La mitra en la mano (1931)
• La bella y la fiera (Madrid: Ed. Renacimiento, 1931)
• El secreto de la felicidad (Madrid: Ed. América, 1933)

Poetry

• Trovadores y trovas (1899)
• Pequeña ópera lírica (1904)
• Au-delà des horizons... Más allá de los horizontes; petits poèmes lyriques (1908; second selected edition with French version of the two previous books)
• Cantos de la prisión y del destierro (París: Librería P. Ollendort, 1911)
• Cancionero del amor infeliz (Madrid: Ed. América, 1918)
• Mazorcas de oro (Caracas: Impresores Unidos, 1943)

Political pamphlets

• De cuerpo entero; el negro Benjamín Ruiz (1900)
• Una página de historia; Ignacio Andrade y su gobierno (1900)
• Judas capitolino (Chartres: Imprenta de Edmond Garnier, 1912)
• La máscara heroica (Madrid: Ed. Mundo Latino, 1923)

Essays

• La americanización del mundo (1902).
• La evolución política y social de Hispano-América (Madrid: Ed. B. Rodríguez, 1911)
• Grandes escritores de América (Madrid. Ed. Renacimiento, 1917)
• El conquistador español del siglo XVI (Ensayo de interpretación) (Madrid: Ed. Mundo Latino, 1921)
• El modernismo y los poetas modernistas (Madrid: Ed. Mundo Latino, 1929)
• Motivos y letras de España (Madrid: Ed. Renacimiento, 1930)
• El espejo de tres faces (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Ercilla, 1937)
• Mocedades de Bolívar (Buenos Aires: Ed. Inter-Americana, 1942)
• Bolívar y la guerra a muerte. Época de Boves, 1813–1814 (Caracas: Impresores Unidos, 1942)
• El espíritu de Bolívar. Ensayo de interpretación psicológica (Caracas: Impresores Unidos, 1943)
• Bolívar (1984)

Travel books

• Más allá de los horizontes (Madrid: Casa Editorial de la Vda. de Rodríguez Serra, 1903)
• Por los caminos del mundo (Madrid: Ed. Mundo Latino, 1926)

Articles

• Letras y letrados de Hispanoamérica (París: Sociedad de Ediciones Literarias y Artísticas, 1908)
• La lámpara de Aladino (Notículas) (Madrid: Ed. Renacimiento, 1915)

As editor

• Simón Bolívar, Cartas de Bolívar (1799-1822) (1913)
• Simón Bolívar, Discursos y proclamas de Simón Bolívar (1913)

External links

• Works by Rufino Blanco Fombona at Open Library
• Works by Rufino Blanco Fombona at Biblioteca Nacional de España