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Claribel Alegria (1924–2018)

Author of Flowers from the Volcano

41+ Works 393 Members 5 Reviews

About the Author

Clara Isabel Alegría Vides was born in Esteli, Nicaragua on May 12, 1924. Her family moved to El Salvador when she was a baby. She received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and letters at George Washington University in 1948. That was also the year her first book of poetry, Anillo de Silencio show more (Ring of Silence), was published. In 1947, she married American journalist and diplomat Darwin J. Flakoll. Alegría's collections of poetry included Flowers from the Volcano and Saudade/Sorrow. She also wrote children's books. She and Flakoll wrote several books together including Tunnel to Canto Grande and Death of Somoza. She died on January 25, 2018 at the age of 93. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:

"No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadorena en lucha" (1983) and "They won't take me alive: Salvadorean women in struggle for national liberation" (1987 English trans) are the same work.

Image credit: Photo by Jorge Mejía peralta / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.

Works by Claribel Alegria

Flowers from the Volcano (1656) 51 copies
Luisa in Realityland (1987) 42 copies
They Won't Take Me Alive (1901) 34 copies
Ashes of Izalco (1966) 34 copies
Fugues (1993) 30 copies
Sorrow (1999) 27 copies
Death of Somoza (1996) 18 copies
Casting Off (2003) 13 copies
Sobrevivo 4 copies

Associated Works

Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) — Contributor — 332 copies
The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (1996) — Contributor — 304 copies
Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (1684) — Contributor — 68 copies
These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women (2000) — Contributor — 39 copies
A Line of Cutting Women (1998) — Contributor — 14 copies
Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (2018) — Contributor — 9 copies
Queremos tanto a Julio: 20 autores para Cortázar (1984) — Contributor — 4 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Canonical name
Alegria, Claribel
Legal name
Alegria, Claribel Joy
Birthdate
1924-05-12
Date of death
2018-01-24
Gender
female
Nationality
Nicaragua
Birthplace
Esteli, Nicaragua
Places of residence
El Salvador
USA
Managua, Nicaragua
Education
George Washington University (BA)
Occupations
poet
novelist
essayist
journalist
Awards and honors
Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2006)
Cenizas de Izalco was a finalist in the Seix Barral competition, Barcelona, Spain, 1964
honorary doctorate from Eastern Connecticut State University
Short biography
Claribel Alegría was the pen name of Clara Isabel Alegría Vides, born to Nicaraguan-Salvadoran parents in Estelí, Nicaragua. After her father was sent into exile for protesting human rights abuses, she was raised in her mother's hometown of Santa Ana, El Salvador. She began writing as a child and she published her first poems at age 17 in Repertorio Americano, a Central American cultural supplement. In 1943, she moved to the USA for her education. She received a B.A. in Philosophy and Letters from George Washington University in 1948. In 1985, she returned to Nicaragua to aid in the country's reconstruction. She has published numerous collections of poetry, including Casting Off (2003); Sorrow (1999); Umbrales (1996); and La Mujer del Rio/Woman of the River, bilingual, 1989). She also wrote novels and children's books. In 2006, she won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Disambiguation notice
"No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadorena en lucha" (1983) and "They won't take me alive: Salvadorean women in struggle for national liberation" (1987 English trans) are the same work.

Members

Reviews

I have no idea how or where I got this book, but I was looking for something to read and it was on my bookshelf. I'm glad fate put it there, because I enjoyed the story. It's probably the type of book I'll completely forget about within a few months, but who cares.
 
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bookonion | 1 other review | Mar 10, 2024 |
The poems in this short collection were written after the death of Alegría's husband. Many of the poems are quite short, but they focus on grief, loneliness, loss, life alone as an older woman who knows she will join her husband relatively soon.

This is a bilingual edition, and it was fascinating to compare the Spanish and English versions. I do not know enough Spanish to read the Spanish edition, but I do know enough to see the changes in word order and obviously the splitting/joining of lines. This is what fascinates me about translated poetry--how much does the form matter? The cadence and syllables? These poems are, I think, all about the meaning and not the form/cadence.… (more)
 
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Dreesie | Aug 26, 2021 |
This is a collection of three novellas first published in Spanish between 1977 and 1985. The 1990 Women's Press edition has an absolutely fabulous cover image by Susan Alcantarilla!

1. The first novella, The Talisman, is mostly set in a Los Angeles convent school, with memories of childhood in Key West. It's told via the experiences, memories, and imaginings, of a girl, through the framing device of encounters with the nun who is her spiritual advisor. The style is elliptical, and readers who dislike having multiple characters introduced by name and then alluded to repeatedly before their identities become clear will hate this, lol. I thought it worked well, and I wouldn't have known it was a translation (props to translator Amanda Hopkinson and the commissioning editor at The Women's Press). Warnings for child sex abuse, domestic abuse, and animal abuse (yes, the dog dies), although more of this is implied than graphic depictions.

There's a clever magical realist scene change from the girl protagonist at boarding school to herself as an older woman:

"Next day she said she was feeling ill and didn't go down to the dining room at breakfast time. She began furiously brushing her hair in front of the mirror above the washbasin. Then she took a comb, made a centre parting and pulled locks of hair down over her eyes.
Great, she said to herself, now I need to paint two rings around my eyes and add some crows' feet. She took a piece of charcoal and began drawing. Brilliant, now I only need the glasses and books to complete the image.
She helped herself to Susan's glasses, put three books under each arm and regarded herself triumphantly in the mirror."

2. The second novella, Family Album, is mostly set in Nicaragua and France, and is told through the memories of the daughter of a large extended wealthy Central American family. It uses family anecdotes, through both current experience and memories, to show Nicaraguan society divided into "market forces" driven "Conquistador" type people who take advantage of even their closest family members, and exploited "Indian" type people who care more about families and communities and society, in more conventional terms those who "take" and those who "give". The author also employs a traditional magical realist trope to make "the disappeared" literally disappear within the story. The present day here is 1978, although it was published with hindsight in 1982, i.e. after the tyrannicide of Somoza but before the USA-backed Contra terrorists were fully active and assassinating members of the legitimate FSLN government (also mild historical before Eden Pastora changed sides and was bombed by either the CIA or an FSLN faction depending on who you choose to believe).
Warnings for description of the torture of political prisoners (although the description is mild compared to reality).

A girl sneaks into her grandmother's bedroom:

"She knelt breathlessly at her bedside, and, taking the old lady's withered and yellow hand in her own, whispered, 'Mamita Rosa, you're a saint, and now you're about to die I want you to ask the Virgin to grant me three wishes.'
'What are they?'
'That I get away from here, that I love my husband very much, and that I become a writer.'
'I'll ask for the first two, but not for the last. I don't like the way poets live.' "

3. The third novella, Village of God and the Devil, is set on the Spanish island of Mallorca, and features a wide cast of locals and especially incomers as characters, including "Robert" implied to be author Robert Graves. There's an early reference to The White Goddess embedded in this series of vignettes about the lives of ex-pats, in which increasingly extreme supernatural explanations are appended to ordinary events. Each tale, and especially the build-up of tales, ought to be disturbing but because they're presented as an anthropological study of ex-pats they seem prosaic. Perhaps the contrast between Robert's poetic responses and the protagonist Marcia's prosaic responses is deliberate as Alegria was an accomplished poet who also wrote fiction and journalism. From the anecdotes one might get the impression that ex-pats are a bunch of drug-addled weirdos. Ahem. And then there's a plot twist or two, bringing whole new layers of weirdness, which at this point seems normal for this milieu. I understand this story as an examination, with anthropology used as a semi-satirical medium, of the reactions of a specific class of privileged people to the threat of an extinction event caused by humans, in this case an analogy of nuclear war (although a search and replace for climate change would also fit), but the magical realist ending didn't work for me, which is, of course, a subjective perspective.

Not necessarily the compliment one wants from a corpse dresser at a wake:

" 'Since I turned twenty I've been dressing the dead and now I'm over seventy. You can figure it out for yourself.'
'Would you like cup of coffee?'
'I wouldn't mind.'
Marcia got up to pour her one, then the two of them went to sit down in a corner of the dining room.
'Do you know something?' the dresser looked at Marcia with tenderness. 'Up until now I've only dressed Majorcans, but I've taken a liking to you, and I'm going to dress you too.' "
… (more)
½
 
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spiralsheep | Feb 27, 2021 |

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Works
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Rating
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ISBNs
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