Josefina Plá
(María Josefina Plá; Fuerteventura, Spain, 1909-Asunción, Paraguay, 1999) Paraguayan writer and artist of Spanish origin, considered one of the main representatives of the Generation of 40 and a of the precursors of feminism in Paraguay.Her innovative personality brought modernity to 20th century Paraguayan art and literature and guided generations of writers and artists.
Josefina Plá
When she was very young, she traveled to Paraguay to marry the artist and member of the Asunción aristocracy Julián de la Herrería (1888-1937) , whom he had met in 1924 in Alicante, Spain.She was not very well received: they called her an "upstart gypsy", and for decades she was marginalized from the city's social circles, provincial and conservative, who disapproved of the way she carried herself.But that did not prevent him from a rich artistic and intellectual production.
At the beginning of her career she dedicated herself to journalism; during Paraguay's war with Bolivia she managed to direct a magazine for the trenches.Shortly before she had started in poetry.Critics consider that, together with the poet H.Campos Cervera, Josefina Plá is the initiator of a new stage in the history of Paraguayan literature.Although written under the influence of the modernism of Rubén Darío (who had also marked the production of her compatriot Manuel Ortiz Guerrero), the first poems of Plá already denote a new aesthetic that goes beyond this movement to register in the contemporary world.Her poetry managed to summon the writers of the Generation of 40, especially those who made up the group called Vyá raity.Her verses are of great sensual and evocative power.
In the middle of the civil war she returned to Spain and supported the Republican side.The death of her husband supposed her economic ruin and the sale of a collection of Paraguayan stamps was necessary so that the passage to Paraguay could be paid for.There she resumed her work as a journalist, writer and theater director, while investigating new artistic fields, such as engraving and ceramics.
Josefina Plá was a prolific author: more than sixty books published, including several unique investigations of its kind; about thirty plays (the radio drama began), such as the successful comedy Nothing has happened here (Premio Ateneo Paraguayo 1942); Twenty collections of poems, including the aforementioned The Dream Prize (1934), The Root and the Dawn (1960) and Faces in the Water (1963); hundreds of short stories, among which La mano en la tierra (1963), her most internationally known story; as well as essays on bilingualism, theater, plastic arts and crafts, or on blacks and the British in Paraguay.
The whole of her production has earned her a unanimous estimation and a prominent position in the Paraguayan letters of the 20th century, only comparable to that of her most international figure, Augusto Roa Bastos.As a visual artist, she created engravings, murals and ceramic pieces, in which she explored folk motifs and indigenous techniques.She was one of the founders of the group of artists Arte Nuevo and received several distinctions, such as that of doctor honoris causa from the National University.Before her death, she was honored on several occasions by the cultural and literary circles of Paraguay and abroad, in which she was known as La dama de la cultura , for her great work in the formation of various generations of artists.
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