El gran teatro

by Luigi Speranza

'El gran teatro' is possibly Manucho's best.

Manuel Mujica Láinez was born on 11 September 1910 in Buenos Aires, Argentina (died 21 April 1984, Cruz Chica, La Cumbre, Córdoba). A fiction writer, librettist, ensayist and art critic.

Manucho's parents belonged to old and aristocratic families, being descended from the founder of the city, Juan de Garay, as well as from notable men of letters of 19th century Argentina, such as Florencio Varela and Miguel Cané.

As was traditional at the time, the family spent protracted periods in Paris and London so that Manucho could become proficient in French and English.

He completed his formal education at the Colegio Nacional de San Isidro, later dropping out of Law School.

In spite of their proud ancestry, the Mujica-Laínez family was not notably well-off by this time, and Manucho went to work at Buenos Aires' great newspaper La Nación as literary and art critic.

This permitted him to marry in 1936, his bride being a beautiful patrician girl, Ana de Alvear, descended from Carlos María de Alvear.

Manucho and Ana had two sons: Diego and Manuel, and a daughter, Ana.

1936 was also the year of the 25-year-old's first publication, "Glosas castellanas"" (Castillian Glosses).

Manucho was a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters and the Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1982 he received the French's Legion of Honor.

He died at his Villa "El Paraíso" in Cruz Chica, Córdoba Province, in 1984.

He was preeminently a narrator and enumerator of Buenos Aires, from its earliest colonial times to the present.

The society of Buenos Aires, especially high society, its past triumphs and present decadence, its quirks and geographies, its language and lies, its sexual vanities and dreams of love: he relished bringing all this to his elegantly written, quietly ironic, subtly subversive page.

"El gran teatro" (The opera house) was his testimony of that.

Manucho was also a great translator.

He translated Shakespeare´Sonnets and works by Racine, Moliére, Marivaux, and others.

A bibliography of his work includes:

Glosas Castellanas (1936) -- Castillian Glosses

Don Galaz de Buenos Aires (1938)

Miguel Cané (padre) (1942) -- a biography of the author of "Juvenilia".

Canto a Buenos Aires (1943)

Vida de Aniceto el gallo (1943)

Estampas de Buenos Aires (1946)

Vida de Anastasio el pollo (1947)

Aquí vivieron (1949)

Misteriosa Buenos Aires (1950)

Los Ídolos (1952)

La casa (1954)

Los viajeros (1955)

Invitados en "El Paraíso" (1957)

Bomarzo (1962) -- set to music by Ginastera, to whom, along with Jeanette Arata de Erize, he dedicates "El gran teatro".

Cincuenta sonetos de Shakespeare (1962)

El unicornio (1965)

Crónicas reales (1967)

De milagros y de melancolías (1969)

Cecil y otros cuentos (1972) -- a biography of Manucho as told by his whippet, Cecil -- which was presented to him the day he met Cecil Beaton.

El laberinto (1974)

El viaje de los siete demonios (1974)

Sergio (1976)

Los cisnes (1977)

El gran teatro (1980) -- a chronicle of a performance of Wagner's parsifal in wartime Buenos Aires. With British Council 'dandy' accompanying zoologist Sir Gregory and his actress wife, Vicky --. Manucho organises the novel in terms of the opera. The main characters being occupants of boxes 18 (Maria de Zuniga's clan) 8 (Amalia de Zuniga, her cousin -- who is organising a party -- the talk of the town.

El brazalete (1981)

El escarabajo (1982)

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Cuentos inéditos (1993)

Manucho adapted his novel "Bomarzo for the operatic stage, writing the libretto set to music by Alberto Ginastera and premièred in 1967.

"Bomarzo" was banned but eventually opened "at" [sic] Colon (not "the" Colon) to great glory.

In fact, the writer himself spelled his surnames without accents, as all his books published during his lifetime show.

References include:

Carsuzán, María Emma: Manuel Mujica Laínez. Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, Biblioteca del Sesquicentenario, Serie "Argentinos en las Letras", Ministerio de Cultura y Educación, Buenos Aires, 1962

Cruz, Jorge: Genio y figura de Manuel Mujica Laínez. Buenos Aires, EUDEBA, 1978

Font, Eduardo: Realidad y fantasía en la narrativa de Manuel Mujica Laínez (1949-1962)

I: "Mujica Laínez y su obra literaria"
II: "Aquí vivieron y Misteriosa Buenos Aires: Estructura y género" - III: "Estructura, tiempo e imaginación en Los ídolos"
IV: "La estructura de La Casa"
V: Bomarzo: El género literario y el narrador"
VI: "Bomarzo: La narrativa y la temática"). Madrid, Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1976

Roberto Yahni & Pedro Orgambide, Ed: Enciclopedia de la literatura argentina. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1970