Content area
Full text
Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Leyla Perrone-Moises. Lautreamont Austral. Montevideo. Brecha. 1995.122 pages. $10.
With Pedro Henriquez Urena, Alfonso Reyes, Mariano Picon Salas, Angel Rosenblat, and Alceu Amoroso Lima, Emir Rodriguez Monegal (1921-85) was one of the most lucid and influential Latin American humanists of his time. Born in Cerro Largo, Uruguay, he lived in Rio de Janeiro and learned Portuguese during his adolescence. The last twenty-five years of his life he spent in Europe and the United States. During the sixties, he became chief editor of Mundo Nuevo in Paris, a review which consistently popularized many Latin American authors of different generations, writing in Spanish as well as in Portuguese, whose internationalism and popularity during the decade became known as the "boom" of Latin American literature.
Editing is a notoriously thankless task, and Rodriguez Monegal's active, outspoken role in the enterprise won him as many loyal friends as implacable enemies. After teaching at Cambridge University, the Colegio de Mexico, and Harvard, he went to New Haven, where he became chairman of the Latin American Studies Council and a professor of contemporary Latin American literature at Yale University. Among his best-known works are El juicio de los...