Miró, César (1907–1999)
Miró, César (1907–1999)
César Miró (b. 1907, d. 8 November 1999), Peruvian novelist, poet, composer, and essayist. A professor of art history at San Marcos University for many years and a graduate in journalism, Miró began his literary career with a revolutionary book of poetry, Cantos del arado y de las hélices (1929). While he was influenced by the romance of Federico García Lorca's work—especially by its short, eight-syllable verse, vivid imagery, and narrative style—his poetry maintained a Peruvian perspective. In Nuevas voces para el viento (1948), the romance evolved to include new themes and language. Miró entered the political arena with such novels as Teoría para la mitad de una vida (1935), El tiempo de la tarántula (1973), and La masacre de los coroneles: Sinfonía barroca en tres tiempos (1982), which deal with themes of political oppression and rebellion. At age twenty, Miró, imprisoned because of political protest, declared a hunger strike, which demonstrated his commitment to fighting political dictatorship. The tarantula symbol in his work represents world threats against humankind: atomic explosions, the war in Vietnam, cataclysm in Peru. Miró stands out for his journalism and critical essays. Mariátegui: El tiempo y los hombres (1989) is a collection of essays that reconstruct the political world during and after which José Carlos Mariátegui, the first Latin American essayist to use a Marxist framework of analysis, lived (1894–1930), from Pablo Neruda to the Sendero Luminoso. Miró also wrote travel literature describing the city of Lima. La ciudad del río hablador (1944) captures from a modern perspective the mystique and nostalgia of Lima during colonial times. He was 92 years old when he died on November 8, 1999.
See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gloria Videla De Rivero, "La convergencia de indigenismo y vanguardia poética en dos poemas de César Alfredo Miró Quesada," in Revista chilena de literatura 34 (November 1989): 43-53.
Additional Bibliography
Miró, César. Mariátegui, el tiempo y los hombres. Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1989.
Rivara de Tuesta, María Luisa. La intelectualidad peruana del siglo XX ante la condición humana. Lima: s.n., 2004.
Dick Gerdes