Roberto Arlt

Roberto Arlt (Buenos Aires, April 2, 1900 – July 26, 1942) was an Argentine short-story writer, novelist, and playwright.

Arlt was born in poverty to his father Karl Arlt and his mother Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer. After being expelled from school at the age of eight, he learned what he could about literature and life on the streets. He worked at various times as a bookstore clerk, an apprentice to a tinsmith, a painter, a mechanic, a vulcanizer, a brick factory manager and a port worker before managing to get a job on a local newspaper. Arlt's talents for polemical journalism quickly revealed themselves, and he was soon writing a controversial daily column for a national newspaper. Given his background it was natural for Arlt to become attracted to left-wing causes, and the vague (but exciting) rumours coming from the Soviet Union led him to take an interest in Marxism.

His first novel, "El juguete rabioso" (1926) (trans. "Mad Toy"), was the semi-autobiographical story of Silvio, a school dropout who goes through a series of adventures trying to "be somebody." Narrated by Silvio's older self, the novel reflects the energy and chaos of early-20th-century Buenos Aires. The narrator's literary and sometimes poetic language contrasts sharply with the street-level slang of Mad Toy's many colorful characters.

Arlt's second novel, the popular "Los siete locos" (trans. "The Seven Madmen") was rough, brutal, colloquial and surreal, a complete break from the polite, middle-class literature more typical of Argentine literature (as exemplified, perhaps, by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, however innovative his work was in other respects). "Los lanzallamas" (trans. "The Flame-Throwers") was the sequel, and these two novels together are thought by many to be his greatest work.

After this Arlt turned to short stories and the theatre, where he pursued his vision of bizarre, half-mad, alienated characters pursuing insane quests in a landscape of urban chaos.

During his lifetime, however, Arlt was best known for his "Aguafuertes" (trans. "Etchings"), the series of columns--several thousand of them--published in the Buenos Aires daily "El Mundo" between 1928 and 1943. Arlt used these columns to comment, in his characteristically forthright and unpretentious style, on the peculiarities, hypocrisies, strangeness and beauty of everday life in Argentina's capital and its neighborhoods. Such columns included occasional exposés of public institutions, such as the juvenile justice system ("Escuela primaria de delincuencia," 26-29 Sept. 1932) or the public health system. From March to May of 1930, he wrote a series of "Aguafuertes" as a foreign correspondent from Rio de Janeiro. In 1935 he spent nearly a year sending in columns as he travelled throughout Spain and North Africa, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. At the time of his death, Arlt was hoping to be sent to the United States as a correspondent.

Worn out and exhausted by a lifetime of hard living, he died from a stroke in 1942. His coffin was lowered from his apartment by an operated crane, an ironic eulogy considering his bizarre stories.

Arlt has been massively influential on Argentine literature. Analogues in English literature are those who avoid literary 'respectability' by writing about the poor, the criminal and the mad: writers like William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, and Irvine Welsh. Arlt, however, predated all of them.

References

Aynesworth, Michele Mckay. "Mad Toy", a translation of Roberto Arlt's "El juguete rabioso", with Introduction and Notes. Duke UP, 2002. ISBN 0-8223-2940-9.

Novels

* El diario de un morfinómano (1920) "(Diary of a Morphimaniac)"
* El juguete rabioso (1926) "(Mad Toy)"
* Los siete locos (1929) "(Seven Madmen)"
* Los lanzallamas (1931) "(The Flame-Throwers)"
* El amor brujo (1932) "(The Love Witch)"

hort Story Collections

* El jorobadito (1933) "(The Little Hunchback)"
* El criador de gorilas (1941) "(The Gorilla Handler)"

Journalism

* Aguafuertes porteñas (1933) "(Etchings from Buenos Aires)"
* Aguafuertes españolas (1936) "(Etchings from Spain)"
* Nuevas aguafuertes españolas (1960) "(New Etchings from Spain)"

External links

* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8615421 Profile Page for Roberto Arlt] at Find A Grave

* [http://www.planetalibro.com.ar/ebooks/eam/ebook_view.php?ebooks_books_id=16 El juguete rabioso] (Spanish pdf)

* [http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=22393518801&Bmain.item_option=1&Bmain.item=5374 Mad Toy]