Jaime Sáenz
Jaime Sáenz Guzmán (8 October 1921 – 16 August 1986) was a Bolivian poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in the city of La Paz, he lived his entire life there. The rough topography and harsh climate of this Andean city had a powerful effect on much of his work. His poetry, though individual to the point of being difficult to classify, bears some similarities with surrealist literature.
Jaime Sáenz | |
|---|---|
| Born | 8 October 1921 La Paz, Bolivia |
| Died | 16 August 1986 (aged 64) La Paz, Bolivia |
| Occupation | Writer, poet, dramatist, journalist, professor |
| Language | Spanish |
Throughout his life, Sáenz struggled with alcoholism, a struggle which he frequently wrote about in his poems. Accordingly, he is often viewed as a poète maudit, or "cursed poet". Sáenz was openly, "unashamedly", bisexual.[1]
Biography
Jaime Sáenz Guzmán was born on 8 October 1921 in La Paz, Bolivia to Lieutenant Genaro Sáenz Rivero and Graciela Guzmán Lazarte. In 1926, his parents sent him to Muñoz school, and then to the American Institute. He ended his schooling in 1937. In 1938, he traveled to Germany with classmates to return in 1939. This trip was crucial to his work as he was strongly influenced by the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.
In 1941, he started to work in the Bolivian Department of Defense, then in the Bolivian Treasury. In 1942, he joined the United States Information Service and worked with them until 1952. In 1943, he married a German citizen, Erika Käseberg and in 1947 they had a daughter, Jourlaine. A year after the birth of their daughter, Erika left Sáenz.
After this, Sáenz struggled with alcoholism. Carlos Alfredo Rivera, a close friend of Sáenz, had attempted to persuade him to stop drinking and sought medical advice for his friend, however, intervention was futile as Sáenz died of delirium tremens.
Works
- El escalpelo (1955)
- Aniversario de una visión (1960)
- Muerte por el tacto (1967)
- Recorrer esta distancia (1973)
- Al pasar un cometa (1982)
- Los cuartos (1985)
- Vidas y Muertes (1986)
- La piedra imán (1989)
- Felipe Delgado -novela- (1989)
- La noche (1984), - The Night: A Poem by Jaime Saenz (bilingual edition), Princeton UP 2007, ISBN 0-691-12483-3
- Obras inéditas (1996)
- Obra dramática (2005)
- La bodega de Jaime Saenz (2005)
- Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, University of California Press, 2002, ISBN 0-520-23048-5
- Tocnolencias (2009) [2]
See also
References
- Johnson, Kent (2008), "Jaime Saenz", Almost Island, archived from the original on 2009-02-07
- "Veneno lundico: Tocnolencias de Jaime Saenz".