Pablo de Rokha Author

Pablo de Rokha was born Carlos Diaz Loyola in 1894 in Licanten, Chile. The eldest of 19 children, he attended school in the nearby city of Talca. As a young man, he studied at a seminary, sold agricultural products, wrote for local newspapers, and attended the University of Chile in Santiago, though he did not graduate. In 1916, he married Luisa Anabalon Sanderson, who later took the name Winett de Rokha and would go on to be an esteemed poet in her own right as well as his life companion and collaborator. In 1922, he published Los gemidos (The Moans), one of the first books of Latin American avant-garde poetry. He would go on to publish such groundbreaking works as Suramerica (Southamerica, 1927) and Escritura de Raimundo Contreras (Raimundo Contreras's Writing, 1929), two experiments in folk surrealism and automatic writing. He founded a number of magazines and periodicals, including the Revista de Arte Libre with Vicente Huidobro in 1913, and the avant-garde Agonal with Winett de Rokha in 1924. Also with Winett de Rokha, he founded the more politically engaged Multitud in 1939; this morphed into a press that would publish much of his later work. Initially active in anarchist internationalism, he would later join and be expelled from Chile's Communist Party, where he served as president of its cultural organ, the Casa America. In the 1940s, upon being named cultural ambassador, de Rokha began a long period of travel across the Americas that inspired his 1949 epic Carta Magna de America. His later works include Fuego negro (Black Fire, 1953), a book-length elegy for Winett de Rokha, who had died of cancer in 1951, and Acero de invierno (Winter Steel, 1961), which contains his well-known `Canto del macho anciano' (Old Man's Song). He received Chile's National Literature Prize in 1965, and died from a self-inflicted gunshot in 1968.