penyair mati muda kerana...

kutipan daripada http://www.cipherjournal.com/html/allen_gu_cheng.html

Translating Gu Cheng
by Joseph R. Allen

This essay is modified from the “Introduction” to Sea of Dreams: The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng (New York: New Directions, 2005). Unless otherwise noted, all quoted materials are from that volume.

In October, 1993 readers across the world were shocked when they heard that one of China’s most celebrated contemporary poets, Gu Cheng 顧城, had assaulted his wife and then hanged himself, leaving her to die in the hospital a few hours later1. He was thirty-seven years old; she was thirty-five; their son was five. Some would see this as a desperate act by a romantic and naïve genius who had been victimized and abandoned by the women he loved; others would see it as the final event in a life of an immature, self-obsessed impostor who had taken advantage of those around him. Gu Cheng had always been seen as an eccentric figure in the contemporary literary scene; with his death everyone seemed to take sides—he was either a child of nature or a monster. Gu Cheng’s peripatetic life mirrored the dramatic changes in Chinese society in the late twentieth century, and those changes, both personal and political, contributed to the range, richness and variation in his work.

Life and Work

Gu Cheng’s literary career rose from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution and plotted the reawakening of lyricism in China during the 1980s. Born (1956) into privilege, if not wealth (his father was a well-known writer and party member), the first few years of Gu Cheng’s life in Beijing must have been relatively comfortable. A family anecdote captures those early years:

One night after dinner, the family went out for a walk together. As he walked along, Gu Cheng looked up at a large willow tree that stood on the side of the road and said, “Losing an arm, I open wide an eye.” Father was sort of startled by this; he laughed and asked Gu Cheng if the tree preferred to have an eye or an arm? Gu Cheng, who seemed to be suddenly shocked by the thought, did not reply. After returning home, he worked on the poem, asking his older sister how to write the characters. The poem was saved by his mother [and became one of the first two poems in his collected works]2.

Here one senses that the young Gu Cheng was surrounded by a devoted and attentive family: father as critic, sister as tutor and scribe, and mother as anthologist. He seems to be their literary project as well as their child.

That world quickly shattered however. When he was twelve, Gu Cheng accompanied his family to the barren reaches of Shandong province, where they had been “sent down” when the Cultural Revolution cranked up its anti-bourgeoisie machine. While not the harshest of treatments of those troubled times, the exile reduced their lives to that of peasants, and ended Gu Cheng’s formal education. It is here we get the seminal vision of natural innocence to which Gu Cheng clung throughout his life. Viewed in retrospect, the years in Shandong become a haven for innocence: “He was all alone, only able to commune with selfless nature; in this way he escaped from the turmoil of the human world.”

Gu Cheng’s discovery of this “selfless nature” is one of the most common tropes in the construction of his aesthetic sensibility; he says that he learned poetry from the natural world, direct and unmediated: from raindrops, lavender, and hermit crabs. Later, it would be dreams, hallucinations, and visions that functioned as this extra-literary engine. This is, of course, simply a conceit used to characterized his disenchantment with the everyday world; “art is made of art” and Gu Cheng no doubt learned much about writing poetry from other poetries. During this time he was fascinated with a 19th century book of entomological drawings, one of their few cultural possessions; indeed, the line drawings that he produced throughout his life have an illustrative, bizarre natural history quality to them: like scientific drawing seen through a kaleidoscope. In terms of poetry, I think we can assume two early influences: classical Chinese poetry and his father. Classical poetry is central to the ubiquitous culture of memorization in China, contributing substantially to the common conception of what constitutes poetry. We witness Gu Cheng’s early familiarity with this poetry in the small corpus of classical-style poems that he wrote, as in this example from his first year in Shandong when he was thirteen:

You sir, walk the dike midstream
the two banks white with frozen snow
A spring wind brushes across one’s face
and spring waters in torrents flow3

君行流中堤
兩岸冰雪白
春風拂面過
純水滾滾來

In its structure, language and affective scene, this is a respectable version of classical Chinese poetics, which is characterized by a sensibility that merges the mundane scene with the mental world of an “I” narrator in a vignette of occasionality. We wonder if perhaps the classical “sir” (jun 君) refers to his father? That would make sense, since, in many ways, the stories that come from those years are “father and son” tales—they were said to have herded pigs together during the day, writing poems in the sand, and on scraps of paper to be burned in the cooking fire so that “only flames were their readers.”

In 1974 that pastoral idle gave way to a new life in the city when Gu Cheng and his family moved back to Beijing. Like many of the “educated youth” sent down to the countryside, Gu Cheng had to learn to live in a radically altered world: he became an urban laborer and budding intellectual— carpenter, painter, illustrator, and editor. In 1976 he participated in the Tian’anmen demonstrations, which jump-started a new youth culture in China focused on “democracy” and from which the underground journal Today was born. In late 1978 he was befriended by a group of somewhat older writers associated with that journal. Later, he, along with other Today poets, became identified with a new poetry, called menglong 朦朧 by the critics—a term commonly translated as “misty,” but whose meaning is closer to “hazy.” This poetry offered an equivocal, symbolic, and introspective literary vision to young readers who were bone weary of decades of simple didacticism, or what Gu Cheng called “rhyming editorials.” Sometimes this new poetry was filled with political innuendo; sometimes it offered the reader only an essential, slightly ambiguous, imagistic moment. The best combined the two. Gu’s small lyric of 1979, “A Generation,” became the slogan for his time:

Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night
I go to seek the shining light

黑夜給了我黑色的眼睛
我卻用它尋找光明

The early 1980s were heady days for the young people of China as the country emerged out of decades of political lunacy and social dislocation toward a promise of freedom, comfort, and stability. These were Gu Cheng’s most prolific years; he frantically wrote poem after poem, sending them out over the country for publication in the emerging literary venues. He writes: “It was like being a real poet—on the road with a group of editors from The Poet magazine. We swaggered through the streets, bullshitting with each other and looking for a bathroom.” In just a few years, Gu Cheng rose to become one of China’s celebrity personalities, instantly recognizable in his signature stove-pipe headwear—a leg cut from a pair of jeans. It was a time when everyone was reading and discussing the new literature, especially the “misty poetry.” Celebrated and censured in a range of popular and official media, the poetry captured the “shared journey, shared reality, and shared ideals” of the lost generation of young people of China. For the older generation, including Gu’s father, it was a poetry that was just beyond the pale of comprehension, “just too difficult to understand.” The young writers in Beijing became “rock stars” of China, with fans that cut across all social groups; they were Springsteen, Sting, and Paul Simon, all in one, performing their poetry to adoring crowds. The central government even dispatched them into the countryside on goodwill visits where “the guests from on high were treated not just like deities descending to earth, but even like the Kitchen God returning to his palace in heaven.”

In the 1990s, after the brutal events of June 4th 1989, the lyricism of the post-Mao era gave way to a more mercantile, jaded urban society, where television replaced newspaper boards and cell phones replaced poems. Political dissent was suppressed or traded in for material goods of a consumer culture that emerged from the economic reforms of the 1980s. By the time of the June 4th mayhem, Gu Cheng was already living abroad enjoying an international reputation; yet he also faced other personal demons as he struggled to re-establish the simpler times of his life. Following visits to Europe, the United States, and Hong Kong, Gu Cheng and his wife, Xie Ye, moved to New Zealand in 1987 where he taught Chinese at the University of Auckland. He had entered a new type of isolation, living in an international society with which he could not easily communicate or understand—he never learned any other language beside Chinese despite his long residences in Europe and New Zealand.

Then in 1988 he and Xie Ye bought a small, dilapidated house on an island in Hauraki Gulf of the coast of Auckland. Here they took up an impoverished Thoreau-like existence with their newly born son: sort of a self-imposed “sending down.” The house, which is featured undisguised in his novel, Ying’er 英兒, became nearly an obsession for Gu Cheng. Of their first night there, he writes:
Lei [Xie Ye] wrapped the baby in a small blanket and placed him on the only sofa we had, and then she got down to work. That night was filled with wind and rain and we lit a candle. I looked at Lei and said, “This is the place I have been looking for for 20 years. I have been looking for it ever since I left school when I was twelve.”

And later in poem, on a brighter day, he wrote, “Listen / this house is our sunshine.”

Their friend and the object of his infatuation, Li Ying, joined them on the island in 1990:

I had dreamed about it so often, and then finally she got her passport. On the telephone I listened to her speak softly about getting the passport, the fights, the visas. Her voice had seemed different then. I looked at Lei; she seemed somewhat hesitant, but then quickly agreed to buy the airplane ticket.

Thus began the ménage à trois that haunts his novel and much of his later poetry. In the novel that is spelled out in graphic terms: “All I had to do was thrust a little, and she would cry out in pleasure.” In the poetry, things come to us through a lyrical filter that veils the occasionality of the work:

THE SOUND OF A WINDOW OPENING

You hear
The sound of a window opening
In the distance is the sea

The glistening boat
Lies in the dunes
In the distance is the deep blue sea

Listen
That whisper you hear is sound of the sea

The boat lies in the dunes
In the distance stretches the deep blue sea

打開窗子的聲音

打開窗子的聲音
你聽見了
遠處是海

光滑的船
伏在沙丘上
遠處是 藍藍的海

你聽
最小的聲音 是海

船伏在沙丘上
遠處是藍藍的一片

This relationship became the fodder for the much of the critical literature that appeared after their death. Often that criticism, both positive and negative, plumbed his poetry for the currents of death that became so seemingly clear in hindsight. Yet, what really is significant about Gu Cheng’s later poems is their deepening complexity, which stands in such contrast to the search for a simple life on his island. It is as if the island were his physical defense against the emotional complications of the adult world. In the end, even the house seemed to have turned on him: a few months before he died he wrote to a friend:

When you read my book [Ying’er] you will know how completely sick I am, only my hands are normal. I have spread pieces of our ruined garden everywhere, spread pieces of myself everywhere. See how the world has meant so little to me, but so much to her. I want to preserve those times together in that white cottage; she abandoned it, and so did I. The cottage did me harm. I should not have left Beijing in the first place; I should not have lived so long. The most beautiful days should be those just before the end.

His life on the island, and the poetry produced in those years, seem to have been complicated by two seminal events: the Tian’anmen tragedy in 1989, and his return to Germany in 1992 – 1993. The massacre in Beijing, when the hopes of the 1980s came crashing down, haunted Gu Cheng’s dreams throughout the following years, as if he suffered from “survivor’s guilt.” At the same time, the months in Berlin broke his moorings to house and home—Li Ying remained behind on the island, but left with another man before Gu Cheng returned. These complications, tensions, and even the mental anguish seem to have produced the best of his poetry, as it struggled to draw his innocence and experience into one consideration. Those complexities are best seen in the long poetic sequences that occupy the last part of his corpus, especially “The City: A Dream Sequence.” Of this he wrote:

In my dreams I often go back to Beijing, but it has nothing to do with Beijing of today. It is a place that is heaven-sent just for me. Peace Lake and China Gate are now gone; also gone are the bricks in the bright sunlight, the cinder road along the hillside, and the wild jujube trees. And yet, I still move above them, looking down on all below and on days to come.

In this sequence, originally titled, “The City: June 4th,” Gu Cheng creates a bewildering pastiche of nostalgia for his old city, friends and the tragedy befell them, all filtered through the medium of his recalled dreams.4

We should not think, however, that Gu Cheng was completely consumed by angst during those final years. In both his letters and his poems we find moments of the old, untroubled innocence: at the very end, he writes to his parents, “By nature I am not a happy person, but right now I am very much at peace, just playing with Little Chubs [his son] and his toy cars . . .” This was also the time when he wrote the playful prose-poem sequence “Classical Tales,” which is filled with puns and written in tongue-in-cheek faux-classical Chinese. It begins with the island, the sea, and the slight hint of tragedy:

The lord of the island dwells on his isle, scanning the skies. In days past he bid his time in the mountains, yearning for the sea. Then, quite unexpectedly, above the South Pole the ozone layer was breached, and, with the melting of glacial peaks, the ocean waters rose. Thus came baleful bother to the one of his desires.

On Translation and Language

In the earliest stages of Chinese literary criticism there is a canonical formula of poetics: shi yan zhi 詩言志: “poetry puts into words that which occupies the mind,” or more simply, “poetry verbalizes intent.”5 Ignoring for the moment the problem of how phenomena come to “occupy our minds,” this formula asks us see poetry as “translation,” in which one strives to represent psycho-phenomena in language, which in turn becomes what “occupies the mind” of the reader. Thus, we can place literary translation at the end of a chain of such representations; it is a translation, another representation, of what “occupies the mind,” but this time it is the mind of the reader, not of the writer. While I recognize the generative status of the phenomena that become a writer’s occupation, when we translate we are unlikely to be able to recover / represent those phenomena because they are already veiled behind a series of representations formulated within the limits of language. Rather we are more likely to recover and translate more accurately the occupations of the reader’s mind, which we share in our immediate contemporary condition. Discussions with my collaborators, Zhang Jing and Chou Changjen (both highly competent and informed readers) often focused on what “occupied their minds,” when they read these poems, instead of what might have been Gu Cheng’s intent.

Through the two decades of his writing, Gu Cheng explored the limitations of language to represent the emotions that seemed to take possession of him, his zhi. In general, he worked within a relatively simple vocabulary and mode of presentation. While there are important exceptions, such as his prose poems in “Classical Tales” sequence, Gu Cheng’s language is usually relatively mundane and his presentation much in the psycho-affective shi yan zhi mode. Gu Cheng is indeed very concerned about “what occupied his mind.”

Experimentation in language of Gu Cheng’s early poems is primarily in terms of metaphorical substitution. While the images and the metaphors in these poems are often new and fresh, even bizarre, the language itself remains relatively commonplace. We might note that this writing in “substitutions” was a social-political condition of the times—the highly euphemistic language of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution began that newspeak, and it quickly became embedded in the daily language of the government controlled media, which the reader learned to decipher. (Some sense of this language is seen in Gu’s satirical pieces “With a TV Mounted on the Wall” and “Eating at Desert Creek.”) In his poetry Gu Cheng exploits that method by writing in metaphorical language that straddles the political and personal, the mundane and the mythical. His most famous epigraphic poems (such as “One Generation” and “Impression”) are obvious examples of this use of the single metaphor to represent the blend of the mental and phenomenal world. Rhyme and rhythms in these poems are also rather simple and direct, as “Generation” and “Impression” attest. Translating this language into English presents no great obstacles, although adjustments are always necessary. In my experience these adjustments are most often necessary in interrupting the commonly repetitive language, which works better in Chinese than English (often working for more assonance and alliteration in its place) and in toning down the sentimentality of the poems, which often comes with an emotional climax in the closing lines of the poem or stanza; in English these seem to strike rather false notes.

In Gu Cheng’s later and longer poems these metaphors are often extended, either by agglutination or elaboration. The “agglutinative poems” string out a series of metaphors in relatively unintegrated layers, while the elaborative poems draw the metaphor out into a conceit of its various manifestations. Gu Cheng’s two most common extended metaphors of his early and middle poems are those of the sea and the dream (or fantasy). In the most complex of these extended metaphors we have long, integrated constructions, such as in “Life’s Fantasy” and “Wind Dreams.” At the extreme, these extended metaphors yield the early poetic sequences, both of the elaborative and agglutinative kinds, such as “An Ancient Boat” and “Eulogy to the World.” The “Bulin’s File” sequence uses these techniques within an extended narrative, producing a very special set of poems. The challenges and opportunities in translating these sequences are necessarily multiplied but not substantially different from those in the shorter poems.

As we move into the later poems we sense that the metaphor, epigraphic or extended, can no longer fully represent what is occupying Gu Cheng’s mind. In these poems a fragmentation of the language sets in and the tentative logic of syntax and metaphors begin to implode. This is accompanied by his diminishing use of punctuation and the increasing use of the broken and elliptical line structure.

Chinese language lends itself to this type of syntactic manipulation. The lack of number, inflection, and tense allows a wide range of indeterminacy in the relations between words. This is particularly so in poetic forms that tend to weaken the word-order dependent grammar of Chinese—if your object, for what ever reason, floats away from its syntactic position in the sentence, there is no way for it to maintain its “case.” On one level this means that the Chinese reader does not sense ambiguity in the same places as the reader of English—since there is no marked tense, a verb that can refer to past, future and present actions is not ambiguous unto itself. This is ambiguity that should not be translated, or at least not given special notice. Yet on another level it is clear that Gu Cheng’s later poems exploit the particularities of Chinese language to create conspicuous ambiguity—that is, an ambiguity that needs to be translated.

Small signs of this fragmentation are visible even in the early, simpler metaphors where imagistic disjunctures are introduced (eyes for arms, dark eyes seeking light, colors in the grayness). Those disjunctures spread slowly throughout the later poems producing two new complexities: one at the syntactic level, and the other at more multiple levels. With syntactic fragmentation come nonsequitor structures in verse and stanza. Multivalent readings seep away in two directions from a given phrase into the poem, such as in “Sea Basket Blues.” The more fragmentary poems, such as “Walled Dreams, and an Awakening,” interweave the agglutinative metaphor with this fragmentary syntax to become highly disruptive. While the vocabulary of these poems remains relatively unadorned, they are wracked with juxtapositions defying semantic integration, sometimes appearing to be a jumble of words on the page—words are sometimes even fragmented within themselves, such as separating the two characters of the fixed binome for “sala / mander” (rong / yuan 蠑螈) onto adjacent lines in his Ghosts Enter the City sequence. Often we sense that we are listening to broken and half-heard conversations sense; as if we are indeed listening to a dream. Translating the language of these more disruptive, playful poems has been the special difficulty (and pleasure) of my work.

The most important task of any translator is to find a voice for the poet in the translated language; one has to imagine what the poet would have sounded like if he or she had written in another language. We do not want to “translate away” the distinctiveness of Gu Cheng’s poetry; we need to hear the language, rhythms and constructions that are distinctly his, but in this case, as manifested English. At times this means ignoring the specific formulations of the original poem that fall oddly accurate into English; but at other times this means finding new forms of expression in the target language that would not come without the pressure of translation. On this later point, Rudolf Panniwitz argues that “the basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” But Talal Asad also warns of the “person who is satisfied with an absurd-sounding translation on the assumption that the original must have been equally absurd.”6 In that tension between fluidity and innovation lies the illusive Janus-faced language of translation. When we find that liminal place, then can we be a successful part of the chain of representations that began back in the first step of shi yan zhi.

Bei Dao...penyair China terlarang

Bei Dao

Zhao Zhenkai was born on August 2, 1949 in Beijing. His pseudonym Bei Dao literally means "North Island," and was suggested by a friend as a reference to the poet's provenance from Northern China as well as his typical solitude.

Dao was one of the foremost poets of the Misty School, and his early poems were a source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. He has been in exile from his native China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

His books of poetry include Unlock (2000); At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 (1996), for which David Hinton won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets; Landscape Over Zero (1995); Forms of Distance (1994); Old Snow (1991); and The August Sleepwalker (1990). His work has been translated into over 25 languages.

He is also the author of short stories and essays. In 1978 he and colleague Mang Ke founded the underground literary magazine Jintian (Today), which ceased publication under police order. In 1990 the magazine was revived, and Bei Dao serves as the Editor-in-Chief.

In his foreword to At the Sky's Edge, Michael Palmer writes: "Anointed as an icon on the Democracy Wall and as the voice of a generation by the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and thereby also fated to exile, Bei Dao has followed a path of resistance that abjures overt political rhetoric while simultaneously keeping faith with his passionate belief in social reform and freedom of the creative imagination."

His awards and honors include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was elected an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the request of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, he traveled to Palestine as part of a delegation for the International Parliament of Writers.

Bei Dao was a Stanford Presidential lecturer and has taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Beloit College in Wisconsin. In 2006, Bei Dao was allowed to move back to China.

daripada http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/774

Penyair Palestin Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

daripada http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1062

Mahmoud Darwish was born on March 13, 1942 in Al Birweh, Palestine, into a land-owning Sunni Muslim family. During the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, his village was destroyed and his family fled to Lebanon. They returned the following year, secretly re-entering Israel.

As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his political activism and for publicly reading his poetry. He joined the official Communist Party of Israel, the Rakah, in the 1960s. In 1970, he left for Russia, where he attended the University of Moscow for one year, and then moved to Cairo. He lived in exile for twenty-six years, between Beirut and Paris, until his return to Israel in 1996, after which he settled in Ramallah in the West Bank.


Considered Palestine's most eminent poet, Darwish published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, when he was 22. Since then, Darwish has published approximately thirty poetry and prose collections which have been translated into more than twenty-two languages.

Some of his more recent poetry titles include The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), Mural (2000), Bed of the Stranger (1999), Psalms (1995), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1994), and The Music of Human Flesh (1980).

Darwish was an editor for a Palestine Liberation Organization monthly journal and the director of the group's research center. In 1987 he was appointed to the PLO executive committee, and resigned in 1993 in opposition to the Oslo Agreement.

About Darwish's work, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, "Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging...."

His awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Lotus prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France's Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal in 1997, the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, the Moroccan Wissam of intellectual merit handed to him by King Mohammad VI of Morocco, and the USSR's Stalin Peace Prize.

He is currently the editor-in-chief and founder of the literary review Al-Karmel, published out of the Sakakini Centre since 1997.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

photo : www.picassomio.com

Biographical Sketch

Here is a biographical sketch and a simple timeline for Gabriel García Márquez. While the biography is fairly complete, the timeline focuses more on his early life and the publishing dates of his works. All quotes in the biography are the direct words of García Márquez.

Gabriel Gárcia Márquez

Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts. But in order to get a better grasp on García Márquez's life, it helps to understand something first about both the history of Colombia and the unusual background of his family.

Colombia

Colombia won its independence from Spain in 1810, technically making it one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but the sad fact is that this "democracy" has rarely known peace and justice.

In the beginning, there was of course Spain and the Indians, happily hating each other as the Spaniards tore the land up in quest for gold, El Dorado, religious converts, and political power. The English, too, played their part, with Drake attacking Riohachi in 1568 and the countless colonial squabbles of the next few centuries. Declaring itself independent from Spain when Napoleon ousted the Spanish King in 1810, the new country experienced a brief period of freedom and then was quickly reconquered in 1815 by the unpleasant and bloody campaigns of General Murillo. So much did their internal bickering allow their fledgling country to fall to the sword of Murillo, the period is immortalized in Colombia's history with the colorful name of la Patria Boba, or "The Booby Fatherland." Round two, however, fell to the Colombians, when Simón Bolívar reliberated the country in 1820 and became its very first president. In 1849, the country was sufficiently advanced to concretize their squabbling in the form of two political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, which exist to this day. These two parties form the political framework for much of García Márquez's fiction, and understanding their true natures is both a key to his writing and, unfortunately, an important insight to Latin American politics in general.

Although initially forming around the nucleus of two distinct and different ideologies, long years of bloody conflict have served to erode significantly the distinctions between the parties. The Conservatives and the Liberals are more like warring factions or clans than any parties with firmly established or radically opposing ideologies. Both tend to be repressive, both are corrupt, and both terribly abuse power when it falls into their hands; and throughout the sad history of Colombia, both parties have been more or less at war. It has often been said of Colombia's parties that you do not join them, you are born into them; and indeed they act more as territorial and familial units than as peacefully functioning parties with distinct political platforms. In addition, the country is split into two main regional groups -- the costeños of the coastal Caribbean, and the cachacos of the central highland. Both groups use those terms as pejorative of the other, and both occasionally view the other with disdain. The costeños tend to be more racially mixed, verbally outgoing, and superstitious. They are primarily the "descendants of pirates and smugglers, with a mixture of black slaves," and as a whole are "dancers, adventurers, people full of gaiety." The cachacos, on the other hand, are more formal, aristocratic, and racially pure, who pride themselves on their advanced cities such as Bogotá and on their ability to speak excellent Spanish. Traditionally, the tropical Caribbean coast has been a Liberal bastion, and the cool mountains and valleys of the interior tend to the Conservative side. García Márquez has often remarked that he views himself as a mestizo and a costeño, both characteristics enabling his formation and development as a writer.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Colombia was wracked by rebellions, civil wars of both the local and national variety, and several coups d'etat.This century of bloodshed had its culmination in 1899, when the War of a Thousand Days began -- Colombia's most devastating civil war, a conflict that ended in late 1902 with the defeat of the Liberals. The war claimed the lives of over 100,000 people, primarily peasants and their sons. García Márquez's grandfather fought in that war, and many of its veterans would eventually find their way into immortalization as fictional characters in his work.

Another element that would influence his work was the Banana Strike Massacre of 1928. Although coffee is generally considered Colombia's main export, for the first few decades of the twentieth century, bananas were also of crucial importance to the economy. The banana trade had its principal manifestation in the United Fruit Company, an American outfit that had a virtual monopoly on the banana industry, which at the time was the only source of income for many of the costeño areas, including Aracataca. One of the more lamentable examples of Western Imperialism veiled as prosperity, the UFC had unlimited economic power and tremendous political clout, but it was a corrupt and amoral company that exploited its Colombian workers terribly. In October of 1928, over 32,000 native workers went on strike, demanding, among other such unreasonable things, hygienic working conditions, medical treatment, functioning toilets, and payment in cash rather than inflated company scrip. Indeed, the workers were denied their very existence as employees; although they labored seven days a week for little pay, they were defined as "subcontractors," and were therefore exempted from Colombian labor laws and safety regulations. The response of the Yankees was essentially to ignore their demands; shortly after the strike began, the Colombian government occupied the banana zone and employed the military as strikebreakers. One night in December, a huge crowd gathered in Ciénaga (30 miles north of Aracataca) to hold a demonstration. In order to quell the incident, the Conservative government sent in the troops, who fired on the unarmed workers, killing hundreds. Over the next few months, more people simply vanished, and finally the whole incident was officially denied and struck from the history books. García Márquez would later incorporate the incident in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The next significant event that would eventually affect his writing was a period of time that he himself would live through, a horrible episode of Colombian history called la violencia, or "the Violence." The Violence had its roots in the banana massacre. At that time, one of the only politicians courageous enough to take a stand against government corruption was a man named Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a young Liberal member of congress who convened meetings to investigate the incident. Gaitán began to rise in prominence, a champion of the peasants and the poor, but an annoyance to the powerful members of both parties, who viewed him with something akin to fear and loathing. Using radio as his medium, he heralded a time of change, a time when the people would take part in a true democracy and corporations would be forced to act responsibly. By 1946, Gaitán was powerful enough to cause a split in his own party, which had been in power since 1930. The split caused a Conservative return to power and, fearing a reprisal, they began organizing paramilitary groups whose ultimate purpose was to terrorize Liberal voters; which they did admirably, killing thousands of them by the end of the year. In 1947 the Liberals gained control of the Congress, putting Gaitán in charge as party leader. (Despite the Conservative's efforts, the voter turnout was at a record high.) Tensions rose, and on April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated in Bogotá.

The city was convulsed by lethal riots for three days, a period called el Bogotázo and responsible for 2500 deaths. La violencia then shifted into an even more deadly phase. Guerrilla armies were organized by both parties, and terror swept through the land. Towns and villages were burned, thousands -- including women and children -- were brutally murdered, farms were confiscated, and over a million peasants emigrated to Venezuela. In 1949, Conservatives even gunned down a Liberal politician, in the middle of giving a speech in the very halls of Congress! The Conservatives finally dissolved Congress, declared the country to be in a state of siege, and Liberals (now conveniently branded "communists") were hunted, persecuted, and murdered. The country was ripped apart; la violencia would claim the lives of some 150,000 Colombians by 1953. The Violence would later become the backdrop to several of García Márquez's novellas and stories, most notably In Evil Hour.

His Family

The most important relatives of García Márquez were undoubtedly his maternal grandfather and grandmother. His grandfather was Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, a Liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days. He lived in Aracataca, a banana town by the Caribbean, a village which he helped found. The Colonel was something of a hero to the costeños, for among other things, he refused to stay silent about the banana massacres, delivering a searing denunciation of the murders to Congress in 1929. A very complex and interesting man, the Colonel was also an excellent storyteller who had lead quite an intriguing life -- when he was younger he shot and killed a man in a duel, and it is said that he had fathered over sixteen children. He would speak of his wartime exploits as if they were "almost pleasant experiences -- sort of youthful adventures with guns." The old Colonel taught the young Gabriel lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first one who introduced his grandson to ice -- a miracle to be found at the UFC company store. He also told his young grandson that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later put into the mouths of his characters.

His grandmother was Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, and would be no less an influence on the young García Márquez than her husband. She was impressively filled with superstitions and folk beliefs, as were her numerous sisters, and they filled the house with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents -- all of which were studiously ignored by her husband, who once said to young Gabriel, "Don't listen to that. Those are women's beliefs." And yet listen he did, for his grandmother had a unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, her grandson would adopt for his greatest novel.

García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life, and the reason behind this is quite interesting. His mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, was one of the two children born to the Colonel and his wife. A spirited girl, she unfortunately fell in love with a man named Gabriel Eligio García. "Unfortunately," for García was something of an anathema to her parents. For one thing, he was a Conservative as well as la hojarasca, a derogatory term applied to the recent residents of the town drawn by the banana trade. (La hojarasca means "dead leaf," as in something that descends in useless flurries and is best swept away.) García also had a reputation as a philanderer, the father of four illegitimate children. He was not exactly the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter -- and yet he did, wooing her with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters -- and even telegraph messages. They tried all they could to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious that their daughter was committed to him. Finally they surrendered to his Romantic tenacity, and the Colonel gave her hand in marriage to the former medical student. In order to ease relations, the newlyweds settled in the Colonel's old home town of Riohacha. (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.)

Early Life

Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, although his father contends that it was really 1927. Because his parents were still poor and struggling, his grandparents accepted the task of raising him, a common practice at the time. Unfortunately, 1928 was the last year of the banana boom in Aracataca. The strike and its brutal reprisal hit the town hard; over one hundred strikers were shot one night in Aracataca and dumped into a common grave. It was a sad start to his life, one that would later resurface in his writing.
Nicknamed Gabito, "little Gabriel" grew up as a quiet and shy lad, entranced by his grandfather's stories and his grandmother's superstitions. Aside from the Colonel and himself, it was a house of women, and García Márquez would later remark that their beliefs had him afraid to leave his chair, half terrified of ghosts. And yet all the seeds of his future work were planted in that house -- stories of the civil war and the banana massacre, the courtship of his parents, the sturdy practicality of the superstitious matriarch, the comings and goings of aunts, great aunts, and his grandfather's illegitimate daughters.... Later García Márquez would write: "I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents."

His grandfather died when he was eight years old, and due to his grandmother's increasing blindness, he went to live with his parents in Sucre, where his father was working as a pharmacist. Soon after he arrived in Sucre, it was decided that he should begin his formal schooling. He was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city at the mouth of the Magdalena River. There, he acquired a reputation as being a shy boy who wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons. So serious and non-athletic was he that he was nicknamed "the Old Man" by his classmates.
In 1940, when he was twelve, he was awarded a scholarship to a secondary school for gifted students, run by Jesuits. The school -- the Liceo Nacional -- was in Zipaquirá, a city 30 miles to the north of Bogotá. The journey would take a week, and in that time he came to the conclusion that he did not like Bogotá. Exposed to the capital city for the first time, he found it dismal and oppressive, and his experience helped confirm his identity as a costeño.

In school, he found himself growing quite stimulated by his studies, and in the evening, he often read books aloud to his companions in the dormitory. And much to his amusement, even though he had yet to write anything significant, his great love of literature and his cartoons and stories helped him acquire a reputation as a writer. Perhaps this reputation provided him with a star by which to steer the ship of his imagination; and he would need it, for after graduation in 1946, the eighteen year old "writer" followed his parents' wishes and enrolled in the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá as a law student rather than as a journalist.

It was during this time that García Márquez met his future wife. While visiting his parents, he was introduced to a 13 year old girl named Mercedes Barcha Pardo. Dark and silent, of Egyptian decent, she was "the most interesting person" he had ever met. After he graduated from the Liceo Nacional, he took a small vacation with his parents before leaving for the University. During that time, he proposed to her. Agreeing, but first wishing to finish school, she put off the engagement. Although they wouldn't be married for another fourteen years, Mercedes promised to stay true to him.

The Hungry Years

Like many great writers attending college for a subject they despised, García Márquez found that he had absolutely no interest in his studies, and he became something of a consummate slacker. He began to skip classes and neglect both his studies and himself, electing to wander around Bogotá and ride the streetcars, reading poetry instead of law. He ate in cheap cafés, smoked cigarettes, and associated with all the usual suspects: literate socialists, starving artists, and budding journalists. One day, however, his life changed -- all from reading just a simple book. As if all the lines of fate suddenly converged in his hands, he was given a copy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The book had a profound affect on García Márquez; making him aware that literature did not have to follow a straight narrative and unfold along a traditional plot. The effect was liberating: "I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago." He also remarked that Kafka's "voice" had the same echoes as his grandmother's -- "that's how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice."

One of the first things he set out to do was "catch up" on all the literature he had been missing. He began reading voraciously, devouring everything he could get his hands on. He also began writing fiction, and to his surprise, his first story, "The Third Resignation," was published in 1946 by the Liberal Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. (The enthusiastic editor even hailed him as "the new genius of Colombian letters!") García Márquez entered a period of creativity, penning ten more stories for the newspaper over the next few years.

As a humanist from a Liberal family, the 1948 assassination of Gaitán had profound effect on García Márquez, and he even participated in the rioting of el Bogotázo, having his own quarters partially burned down. The Universidad Nacional was closed, precipitating his move to the more peaceful North, where he transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. There he half-heartedly pursued law while writing a daily column for El Universal, a Cartagenan newspaper. Deciding finally to abandon his attempts at law in 1950, he devoted himself to writing, moving to Barranquilla. Over the next few years, he began associating with a literary circle called el grupo de Barranquilla, and under their influence he began to read the work of Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf, and most importantly, Faulkner. He also embarked on a study of the classics, finding tremendous inspiration in the Oedipus Rex cycle by Sophocles.
Faulkner and Sophocles would become his two biggest influences throughout the late forties and early fifties. Faulkner amazed him with his ability to reformulate his childhood into a mythical past, inventing a town and a county in which to house his prose. In Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha, García Márquez found the seeds for Macondo; and from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone he found the ideas of a plot revolving around society and the abuses of power. García Márquez began to grow dissatisfied with his earlier stories, believing them to be too abstracted from his true experiences. They were "simply intellectual elaborations, nothing to do with my reality." Faulkner taught him that a writer should write about what is close to him; and for years García Márquez had been struggling with his muse -- what did he really want to say?

These thoughts would find form when he returned with his mother to his grandfather's house in Aracataca. Preparing it for sale, they found the house in ill repair, and yet the "haunted house" evoked such a swirl of memories in his head that he was overwhelmed. Indeed, the whole town seemed dead, frozen in time. He had already been sketching out a story based on his experiences there, a tentative novel to be called La casa, and although he felt that he was not yet ready to perfect it, he had found part of what he was after -- the sense of place. Inspired by his visit, upon returning to Barranquilla he wrote his first novella, Leaf Storm. With a plot device adapted from Antigone and relocated to a mythical town, the book was completed in an energetic rush of inspiration. He bestowed the name of "Macondo" on his Latin American Yoknapatawpha, the name of a banana plantation near Aracataca that he used to explore as a child. (Macondo means "banana" in the Bantu language.) Unfortunately in 1952 it was rejected by the first publisher he sent it to, and seized by self-doubt and self-criticism, he tossed it in a drawer. (In 1955, while García Márquez was in Eastern Europe, it was rescued from its hiding place in Bogotá by his friends and sent to a publisher. This time, it was published.)

Despite his rejection and his near poverty, however, he was essentially happy. Living in a brothel, he was surrounded by friends, and he had a steady job writing columns for El Heraldo. In the evening he worked on his fiction and talked with his companions over cigarettes and coffee. Then in 1953, he was seized by a sudden restlessness. Packing up and quitting his job, he set out to sell encyclopedias in La Guajira with a friend. He travelled around a bit, worked on some story ideas, and finally became formally engaged to Mercedes Barcha. In 1954, he moved back to Bogotá and accepted a job on the staff of El Espectador as a writer of stories and film reviews. There, he flirted with socialism, avoided the notice of the current dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, and pondered about his duty as a writer in the time of la violencia.

In 1955, an event occurred which would place him back on the path of literature and eventually lead to his temporary exile from Colombia. That year, the Caldas, a small Colombian destroyer, was swamped in high seas on its return to Cartagena. Several sailors were swept overboard, and all died except one remarkable man, Luis Alejandro Velasco, who managed to survive for ten days at sea by clinging to a life raft. When he was eventually washed ashore, he quickly became a national hero. Used as propaganda by the government, Velasco did everything from make speeches to advertise watches and shoes. Finally he decided to tell the truth -- the Caldas was carrying illegal cargo, and they were swept overboard because of their negligence and incompetence! Visiting the offices of El Espectador, Velasco offered them his story, and after some hesitation, they accepted. Velasco told his tale to García Márquez, who acted as a ghostwriter and recast it into prose. The story was serialized over two full weeks as "The Truth About My Adventure by Luis Alejandro Velasco," and it created quite a sensation. Extremely unhappy, the Government tossed Velasco out of the Navy. Worried that Pinilla might persecute García Márquez directly, his editors sent him on assignment to Italy to cover the imminent death of Pope Pius XII. When the pontiff's untimely survival made this assignment pointless, García Márquez arranged to wander around Europe as a correspondent. After studying film awhile in Rome, he embarked on a tour of the communist bloc; and later that year his friends managed to get Leaf Storm finally published in Bogotá.

García Márquez travelled through Geneva, Rome, Poland and Hungary, finally settling in Paris where he found that he was out of a job -- the Pinilla government had shut down the presses of El Espectador. Settling in the Latin Quarter, he lived off credit, the kindness of his landlady, and money scraped up returning bottles for their deposits. There, influenced by the writings of Hemingway, he typed out eleven drafts of No One Writes to the Colonel and part of Este pueblo de mierda ("This Town of Shit"), the book that would later become In Evil Hour. After finishing Colonel, he travelled to London and finally returned to his home continent -- not to Colombia, but to Venezuela, the favored destination of Colombian refugees. There he finished Este pueblo de mierda, his work which most directly addresses la violencia. Even though it was obvious that he was developing his own unique style, he was still unsatisfied. His early stories were unemotional and abstract. Leaf Storm was too indebted to Faulkner, and No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour were too far away from his imagined goal, the image he had been developing for years. He knew his ultimate work would take place in the mythical town of Macondo, but he had yet to find the right tone in which to tell his tale; he had yet to discover his true voice.
In Venezuela he teamed up with an old friend, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who was by then an editor with Elite, a Caracas newsweekly. Throughout the year of 1957, the pair toured the communist countries of Europe, searching for an answer to Colombia's ills, contributing articles to various Latin American publications. And while they saw something useful in socialism, García Márquez realized with a sense of depression that communism could be just as terrible as la violencia. After a brief stay in London again, García Márquez returned to Venezuela, where Mendoza was working for Momento, and offered his old friend another job. Then, in 1958, he risked a visit back to Colombia. Keeping a low profile, he slipped into his native country and married Mercedes Bacha, who had been awaiting him in Barranquilla for four long years. He and his new bride then slipped back to Caracas, which was having its own share of problems. After publishing pieces aimed at American perfidy and the abuses of tyrants, Momento succumbed to political pressure and took an apologist pro-USA stance after Nixon's disastrous visit in May. Angered by their paper's capitulation, García Márquez and Mendoza resigned. Soon after leaving his position at Momento, García Márquez and his wife ended up in Havana, covering the Castro revolution. Inspired by the revolution, he helped form a Bogotá branch of Castro's news agency, Prensa Latina, and began a friendship with Castro that has lasted until this day.

In 1959 García Márquez's first son, Rodrigo, was born, and the family moved to New York City, where he supervised the North American branch of Prensa Latina. Laboring under death threats from angry Americans, García Márquez resigned his position after a year, becoming disillusioned by the ideological rifts occurring in Cuba's communist party. He moved his family to Mexico City, travelling through the South on a Faulknerian pilgrimage; he would be denied entrance into the USA again until 1971.
In Mexico City he wrote subtitles for films and worked on screenplays, and during this time he beagn to publish some of his fictional novellas. Rescued from moth-eaten oblivion by his friends, No One Writes to the Colonel was published in 1961, and then Big Mama's Funeral in 1962, the same year which saw the birth of his second son, Gonzalo. Finally his friends convinced him to enter the Colombian Esso literary contest in Bogotá; he revised Este pueblo de mierda, changing the title from "This Town of Shit" to La mala hora, or In Evil Hour. He submitted it, and it won. The sponsors of the prize sent the book to Madrid to be published, and it greeted the world in 1962 -- to his immense disappointment. The publication was a travesty; the Spanish publisher purged it of all Latin American slang and objectionable material, bowdlerizing it beyond recognition and making the characters speak precise, dictionary Spanish. Heartbroken, García Márquez was forced to repudiate it -- it would take nearly half a decade until the book would be published, restored to his satisfaction.

The next few years were a time of profound disappointment, producing nothing of much worth except a film script cowritten with Carlos Fuentes. His friends tried to cheer him up in whatever ways they could, but nevertheless, he began to feel like a failure. None of his works had sold over 700 copies. He had never received any royalties. And still, and still, the story of Macondo eluded his grasp.

Success
And then it happened: his epiphany. On January 1965 he and his family were driving to Acapulco for a vacation, when inspiration suddenly struck him: he had found his tone. For the first time in twenty years, a stroke of lightning clearly revealed the voice of Macondo. He would later write:

"All of a sudden -- I don't know why -- I had this illumination on how to write the book.... I had it so completely formed, that right there I could have dictated the first chapter word by word to a typist."

And later, regarding that illumination:

"The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness.... What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face."

He turned the car immediately around and headed home. There, he put Mercedes in charge of the family, and he retired to his room to write.
And write he did. He wrote every day for eighteen months, consuming up to six packs of cigarettes a day. To provide for the family, the car was sold, and almost every household appliance was pawned so Mercedes could feed the family and keep him supplied with a constant river of paper and cigarettes. His friends started to call his smoke-filled room "the Cave of the Mafia," and after a while the whole community began helping out, as if they collectively understood that he was creating something remarkable. Credit was extended, appliances loaned, debts forgiven. After nearly a year of work, García Márquez sent the first three chapters to Carlos Fuentes, who publicly declared: "I have just read eighty pages from a master." Towards the end of the novel, as yet unnamed, anticipation grew, and the buzz of success was in the air. As finishing touches, he placed himself, his wife, and his friends in the novel, and then discovered a name on the last page: Cien años de soledad. Finally he emerged from the Cave, grasping thirteen hundred pages in his hands, exhausted and almost poisoned from nicotine, over ten thousand dollars in debt, and perhaps only a few pages shy of a mental and physical breakdown. And yet, he was happy -- indeed, euphoric. In need of postage, he pawned a few more household implements and sent it off to the publisher in Buenos Aires.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in June 1967, and within a week all 8000 copies were gone. From that point on, success was assured, and the novel sold out a new printing each week, going on to sell half a million copies within three years. It was translated into over two dozen languages, and it won four international prizes. Success had come at last. Gabriel García Márquez was 39 years old when the world first learned his name.

Suddenly he was beset by fame. Fan mail, awards, interviews, appearances -- it was obvious that his life had changed. In 1969, the novel won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy and was named the Best Foreign Book in France. In 1970, it was published in English and was chosen as one of the best twelve books of the year in the United States. Two years later he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the Neustadt Prize, and in 1971, a Peruvian writer named Mario Vargas Llosa even published a book about his life and work. To counter all this exposure, García Márquez simply returned to writing. Deciding that he would write about a dictator, he moved his family to Barcelona, Spain, which was spending its last years under the boot of Francisco Franco. There he labored on his next novel, creating a composite monster, a Caribbean dictator with Stalin's smooth hands and the solipsistic will of an archetypical Latin American tyrant. In the meantime, Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories was published in 1972, and in 1973 he put out a collection of his journalistic work from the late fifties, Cuando era feliz e indocumentado, or "When I Was Happy and Uninformed."

Autumn of the Patriarch was published in 1975, and it was a drastic departure from both the subject and tone of One Hundred Years of Solitude. A labyrinthine book with long, winding sentences, it was initially considered a disappointment by the critics, who were most likely expecting another Macondo. Opinion has changed over the years, however, and many now consider this novel of shifting realities to be a minor masterpiece all on its own right.

Later Life

Living in a dictatorship and getting inside the mind of a tyrant took their emotional toll. By the end of the novel, García Márquez had decided that he would write no more fiction until the American-supported Pinochet stepped down from his control of Chile, a decision he would later rescind. Now a famous writer, he was becoming more aware of his own political power, and his increased clout and financial security enabled him to pursue his interests in political activism. Returning to Mexico City, he purchased a new house and stepped up his personal campaign to influence the world around him. Building on his actions of the last few years, he continued to funnel some of his money into political and social causes. Through his writings and donations, he supported leftist causes in Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Angola. He helped found and support HABEAS, an organization dedicated to correcting the abuses of Latin American power and freeing political prisoners, and he struck up friendships with such leaders as Omar Torrijos of Panama, and continued his relationship with Fidel Castro of Cuba. Needless to say, these activities did not endear him to the hearts of politicians in either the United States or Colombia; all his visits to the US were on a limited visa and had to be approved by the State Department. (This travel restriction was finally lifted by President Bill Clinton.) In 1977 he published Operación Carlota, a series of essays on Cuba's role in Africa. Ironically, although he claims to be quite good friends with Castro -- who even helped him edit Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- he spent the late seventies writing a "very harsh, very frank" book about the shortcomings of the Cuban Revolution and of life under Castro's regime. This book has not yet been published, and García Márquez claims that he is holding it until relations between Cuba and the United States are normalized.
In 1981, the year in which he was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal, he returned to Colombia from a visit with Castro, only to find himself once again in trouble. The Conservative Government was accusing him of financing the M-19, a Liberal group of guerrillas. Fleeing Colombia, he asked for and received political asylum in Mexico, where he maintains a household to this day. Colombia would soon regret their anger at their famous son, however: in 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Embarrassed, and having just elected a new President, Colombia invited him back, and President Betancur personally saw him off to Stockholm.
In 1982 he assisted a friend in publishing El odor de la guayaba, or "The Fragrance of Guava," a book of conversations with his long time colleague Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and in the same year he wrote Viva Sandino, a screenplay about the Sandanistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution. Politics, however, would be far from his mind for his next work of fiction, which would be a love story. Turning again to his rich past for inspiration and material, he reworked his parent's strange courtship into the form of a decades-spanning narrative. The story would be about two frustrated lovers and the long time between their second courtship, and in 1986 Love in the Time of Cholera was unveiled to the anxiously waiting world. It was amazingly well received, even pulling Thomas Pynchon out of seclusion to write a review for the New York Times. There was no question that Gabriel García Márquez had become a writer with universal and lasting appeal.

By now one of the most famous writers in the world, he eased into a lifestyle of writing, teaching, and political activism. With residences in Mexico City, Cartagena, Cuernavaca, Paris, Barcelona, and Barranquilla, he finished the decade by publishing The General in his Labyrinth in 1990, and two years later Strange Pilgrims was born. In 1994 he published his most recent work of fiction, Love and Other Demons. This was followed in 1996 by News of a Kidnapping, a journalistic work detailing the atrocities of the Colombian drug trade. This return to journalism was emphasized in 1999, when he purchased a struggling Colombian news magazine, Cambio. With both a literary bent and a reputation for progressive politics, the newspaper was the perfect vehicle for García Márquez to return to his roots, and today the magazine is a thriving presence in Colombian letters.

El otoño del patriarca
Unfortunately, in 1999 García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and to this day he suffers under a regimen of treatments, often taking him from Cartagena or Mexico City to clinics in Los Angeles, where his son, filmmaker Rodrigo García, lives.
Setting aside fiction for the time being, Gabo is concentrating on writing his memoirs, the first volume of which was published in 2001 as Vivir para contarla, or To Live to Tell It. Instantly selling out its first print run in Latin America, the volume quickly became the best selling book ever in the Spanish-speaking world. (It was recently published in the United States by Knopf, who will bring out an English translation sometime in late 2003.) The first of a promised set of three volumes, Vivir para contarla details Gabo's life up until 1955. He is currently at work on Volume II, which will focus on the writing and publication of his major works, including One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Bibliography

Bell-Villada, Gene. García Márquez: The Man and his Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Bell-Villada, Gene, Editor. Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Bloom, Harold (Editor). Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

Dolan, Sean. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1994

Dryfus, Claudia. "Playboy Interview: Gabriel García Márquez." Playboy 30, No. 3, February 1983. pp. 65-77, 172-78.

Hamill, Pete. "Love and Solitude." (Interview with GGM). Vanity Fair, March 1988. Pp. 124-131, 191-192.

Rutten, Tim. "En Español, por favor." Los Angeles Times, 9 February 2003.

Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Twayne, 1984.

Additional Information

Timeline -- A brief timeline for García Márquez's life and works


--Allen B. Ruch
2 June 2003


daripada : http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.html

Sasterawan Negara A. Samad Said

gambar daripada: esastera.com

A. Samad Said (lahir: 9 April 1935) ialah Sasterawan Negara 1986. Beliau juga pernah dianugerahkan dengan "Anugerah-anugerah Menulis Asia Tenggara" (SEA Write Awards).

Dilahirkan di Kampung Belimbing Dalam, Durian Tunggal, Melaka, A. Samad mendapat pendidikan awalnya di Sekolah Melayu Kota Raja, Singapura (1940-1946) dan Institusi Victoria, Singapura (1956). Seorang yang berminat dalam penulisan sejak di bangku sekolah, beliau telah menulis banyak karya yang terkenal, termasuknya novel-novel berikut:

Salina
Langit Petang
Sungai Mengalir Lesu
Hujan Pagi
Bulan Tak Bermadu di FatehpurSikri.
Adik Datang
Cinta Fansuri
Antara antologi puisinya ialah Suara Dari Dinding Dewan (2003), Dirgahayu Dr. Mahathir dan Rindu Ibu (2004).

Antologi Esei terbaru adalah Ilham Di Tepi Tasik (2006).

Datuk A.Samad Said pernah juga menggunakan nama pena Hilmy, Isa Dahmuri, Jamil Kelana, Manja, Mesra dan Shamsir.

Diperolehi daripada "http://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Samad_Said"

Penyair Pablo Neruda

gambar: poetryconnection.net

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. His father was a railway employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, a teacher. Some years later his father, who had then moved to the town of Temuco, remarried doña Trinidad Candia Malverde. The poet spent his childhood and youth in Temuco, where he also got to know Gabriela Mistral, head of the girls' secondary school, who took a liking to him. At the early age of thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily "La Mañana", among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia - his first publication - and his first poem. In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal "Selva Austral" under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891). Some of the poems Neruda wrote at that time are to be found in his first published book: Crepusculario (1923). The following year saw the publication of Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, one of his best-known and most translated works. Alongside his literary activities, Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile in Santiago.

Between 1927 and 1935, the government put him in charge of a number of honorary consulships, which took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. His poetic production during that difficult period included, among other works, the collection of esoteric surrealistic poems, Residencia en la tierra (1933), which marked his literary breakthrough.

The Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca, whom Neruda knew, affected him strongly and made him join the Republican movement, first in Spain, and later in France, where he started working on his collection of poems España en el Corazón (1937). The same year he returned to his native country, to which he had been recalled, and his poetry during the following period was characterised by an orientation towards political and social matters. España en el Corazón had a great impact by virtue of its being printed in the middle of the front during the civil war.

In 1939, Neruda was appointed consul for the Spanish emigration, residing in Paris, and, shortly afterwards, Consul General in Mexico, where he rewrote his Canto General de Chile, transforming it into an epic poem about the whole South American continent, its nature, its people and its historical destiny. This work, entitled Canto General, was published in Mexico 1950, and also underground in Chile. It consists of approximately 250 poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles and constitutes the central part of Neruda's production. Shortly after its publication, Canto General was translated into some ten languages. Nearly all these poems were created in a difficult situation, when Neruda was living abroad.

In 1943, Neruda returned to Chile, and in 1945 he was elected senator of the Republic, also joining the Communist Party of Chile. Due to his protests against President González Videla's repressive policy against striking miners in 1947, he had to live underground in his own country for two years until he managed to leave in 1949. After living in different European countries he returned home in 1952. A great deal of what he published during that period bears the stamp of his political activities; one example is Las Uvas y el Viento (1954), which can be regarded as the diary of Neruda's exile. In Odas elementales (1954- 1959) his message is expanded into a more extensive description of the world, where the objects of the hymns - things, events and relations - are duly presented in alphabetic form.

Neruda's production is exceptionally extensive. For example, his Obras Completas, constantly republished, comprised 459 pages in 1951; in 1962 the number of pages was 1,925, and in 1968 it amounted to 3,237, in two volumes. Among his works of the last few years can be mentioned Cien sonetos de amor (1959), which includes poems dedicated to his wife Matilde Urrutia, Memorial de Isla Negra, a poetic work of an autobiographic character in five volumes, published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Arte de pajáros (1966), La Barcarola (1967), the play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1967), Las manos del día (1968), Fin del mundo (1969), Las piedras del cielo (1970), and La espada encendida.

daripada: nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-bio.html - 19k -

Pengarah Filem Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa - Biography

The most well-known of all Japanese directors, the great irony about Akira Kurosawa's career is that he is far more popular outside of Japan than he is in Japan. The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a film about the 19th-century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and ju-jitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part II).
Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa's career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas -- among the latter, his Rashomon (1951) became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favor with Western audiences, and simultaneously introduced leading man Toshiro Mifune to Western viewers. It was Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954), however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. Although heavily cut on its original release, this three-hour-plus medieval action drama, shot with painstaking attention to both dramatic and period detail, became one of the most popular of Japanese films of all time in the West, and every subsequent Kurosawa film has been released in the U.S. in some form, even if many -- most notably The Hidden Fortress (1958) -- were cut down in length. At the same time, American and European filmmakers began taking a serious look at Kurosawa's movies as a source of plot material for their own work -- Rashomon was remade as The Outrage, in a western setting, while Yojimbo was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Seven Samurai (1954) fared best of all, serving as the basis for John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (which had been the original title of Kurosawa's movie), in 1960; the remake actually did better business in Japan than the original film did. In the early 1980s, an unfilmed screenplay of Kurosawa's also served as the basis for Runaway Train (1985), a popular action thriller.
Kurosawa's movies subsequent to his period thriller Sanjuro (1962) abandoned the action format in favor of more esoteric and serious drama, including his epic length medical melodrama Red Beard (1965). In recent years, despite ill-health and the problems getting financing for his more ambitious films, Kurosawa has remained the most prominent of Japanese filmmakers. With his Westernized style, Kurosawa has always found a wider audience and more financing opportunities in Europe and America than he has in his own country. A sensitive romantic at heart, with a sentimental streak that occasionally rises forcefully to the surface of his movies, his work probably resembles that of John Ford more closely than it does any of his fellow Japanese filmmakers. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Penyair Usman Awang

Dato' Usman Awang (12 Julai 1929 - 29 November 2001) adalah seorang Sasterawan Negara Malaysia yang dikurniakan gelaran tersebut pada tahun 1983. Terkenal dengan nama penanya Tongkat Warrant, beliau adalah seorang penyair dan ahli drama yang prolifik ketika hayatnya.

Usman lahir di Kuala Sedili, Kota Tinggi, Johor pada 12 Julai 1929. Usman melalui alam kemiskinan semasa alam kanak-kanaknya yang menyebabkan beliau hanya mampu belajar setakat darjah enam sahaja.

Kerjaya

Usman Awang kemudiannya menempuh kerjaya yang bermula sebagai seorang petani di Segamat kepada buruh paksa zaman pendudukan Jepun, sebagai budak pejabat kemudiannya, polis di era British. Daripada perkhidmatan inilah beliau diilhamkan menggunakan nama Tongkat Warrant.

Selepas berhenti daripada pasukan polis, Usman pembaca pruf di akhbar Melayu Raya, editor Utusan Zaman dan wartawan di Utusan Melayu pada 1952. Di sini Usman ikut terlibat dengan mogok Utusan di mana para wartawan membantah campur tangan kuasa politik dalam media.

Usman kemudiannya bekerja di Penerbitan Federal pada tahun 1962. Beliau kemudiannya ditawarkan berkhidmat di Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka sebagai sidang pengarang majalah Dewan Bahasa. Ini diikuti dengan tugasnya sebagai pengarang Dewan Masyarakat, Dewan Sastera dan Dewan Budaya. Beliau bersara dari DBP pada tahun 1985.


Penulisan

Dalam bidang penulisan beliau lebih terkenal dengan lebih 200 puisi dan drama. Antara judul sajak yang sinonim dengan Usman Awang ialah:

Bunga Popi
Gadis Kecil
Ke Makam Bonda
Kekasih
Kurang Ajar
Pak Utih
Suara Dari Pusara
Dramanya yang terkenal ialah:

Matinya Seorang Pahlawan
Tamu Bukit Kenny
Serunai Malam
Malam Kemerdekaan
Drama muzikalnya ialah "Uda dan Dara". Hanya ada satu novel karya Usman Awang iaitu "Tulang-tulang Berserakan".

Datuk Dr. Usman Awang juga pernah menggunakan nama pena Adi Jaya, Amir, Atma Jiwa, Manis, Pengarang Muda, Rose Murni, Setiabudi, U.A., dan Zaini.

Pada tahun 1983, beliau dianugerahkan gelaran "Sasterawan Negara", SEA Write Award 1982 dan Ijazah Kehormat Doktor Persuratan Universiti Malaya 1983 serta Zamalah Sastera 1985.


Sifat

Dato' Usman merupakan seorang penulis yang berani menyatakan sikap dalam hal-hal besar yang menimpa negara. Baginya, seseorang hanya layak digelar penulis bila sudah berani menyatakan sikap. Kalau tak berani tak payah jadi penulis.

Antara lain, Dato Usman pernah berkata “Saya menentang prejudis terhadap bahasa Melayu ini. Saya hampa kerana pemimpin negara sendiri yang tidak percaya kepada kemampuan bahasa kebangsaan.”

Dato' Usman Awang, penyair yang berjiwa rakyat meninggal pada 29 November 2001 pada bulan Ramadan. Jenazah beliau dikebumikan di tanah perkuburan Bukit Kiara Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur di mana bersemadinya dua Sasterawan Negara, Keris Mas dan kini Tongkat Warrant. Penulis-penulis yang mengenali beliau turut hadir, antara lain Dr Anwar Ridhwan, Sutung Umar RS, Dato A. Samad Said, Dato Baha Zain, Dato Shanmugalinggam dan Profesor Muhammad Haji Salleh.

Pemikir Algeria: Malek Bennabi

http://www.answers.com/topic/malek-bennabi

Malek Bennabi
1905 - 1973

Algerian Islamic thinker.

Born in a poor family in Constantine, Malek Bennabi became a leader of modern Islamic thinking in independent Algeria. As a youth, he attended a Quʾranic school in Tebessa. Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, the influential leader of the Islamic Reformist Movement (ulama), persuaded Bennabi to pursue his studies in Paris. There he obtained a diploma in engineering. His writings began appearing during the 1940s. Among the most notable are The Qurʾanic Phenomenon (1946, translated 2001), Les conditions de la renaissance: Problème d'une civilisation (The conditions of the [Islamic] renaissance: A problem of civilization, 1948), and La vocation de l'Islam (The vocation of Islam, 1954). Bennabi joined the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, FLN) during the 1950s and served as one of its representatives abroad. While in Cairo in 1956, he wrote L'Afro-Asiatisme and began Le problème des idées dans le monde musulman (The problem of ideas in the Muslim world), which he gave up because of, in his words, "ideological struggles." The book was eventually published in 1970.

From 1963 to 1967, Bennabi served as director of superior studies at the ministry of education; he was removed because of suspicions that he belonged to al-Qiyam, an Islamist organization opposed to the regime. During the late 1960s, Bennabi's disciples established a mosque at the University of Algiers. Bennabi, who organized private discussions in his own home, attracted primarily French-speaking students enrolled in science departments. He and his disciples alienated Arab-speaking Islamists mainly because of Bennabi's criticism of the salafists, the followers of the so-called purist movement, who reject progress, urging Muslims to eschew modernity and go back to the "strictness" of the Prophet's epoch, which they view as the golden age of Islam. The Algerian salafists drew their inspiration from Egyptian and south Asian sources. During the 1990s a current within the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front, FIS), known as the Jazʾara, or Algerianists, formed an elitist Islamist group, purporting, implausibly, to be inspired by Bennabi's ideas. Nourredine Boukrouh, an opponent of the FIS and founder of the Algerian Party for Renewal, rejected that claim, insisting that he was Bennabi's true disciple. He edited a book, Pour changer l'Algérie (To change Algeria, 1991), which contained Bennabi's newspaper and magazine articles organized into sections on political, economic, cultural, and international themes. In view of Bennabi's enlightened approach, it is doubtful that he would have endorsed the radicalism of the Jazʾarists or any other violent Islamist group.

Bibliography

Bariun, Fawzia. Bennabi, Malik: His Life and Theory of Civilization. Kuala Lumpur: Buaya Ilmu Sdn, 1993.

Christelow, Allan. "An Islamic Humanist in the Twentieth Century: Malek Bennabi." Maghreb Review 17, no. 1 - 2 (1992).

Zoubir, Yahia H. "Islam and Democracy in Malek Bennabi's Thought." American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 15, no. 1 (spring 1998): 107 - 112.

Dr. Yusof Al-Qaradhawi

biografi ringkas daripada: http://al-ahkam.com.my/ipaq/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=12

Lahir di sebuah desa kecil di Mesir bernama Shafth Turaab di tengah Delta pada 9 September 1926. Usia 10 tahun, ia sudah hafal al-Qur'an. Menamatkan pendidikan di Ma'had Thantha dan Ma'had Tsanawi, Qardhawi terus melanjutkan ke Universitas al-Azhar, Fakultas Ushuluddin. Dan lulus tahun 1952. Tapi gelar doktornya baru dia peroleh pada tahun 1972 dengan disertasi "Zakat dan Dampaknya Dalam Penanggulangan Kemiskinan", yang kemudian di sempurnakan menjadi Fiqh Zakat. Sebuah buku yang sangat konprehensif membahas persoalan zakat dengan nuansa modern.




Sebab keterlambatannya meraih gelar doktor, karena dia sempat meninggalkan Mesir akibat kejamnya rezim yang berkuasa saat itu. Ia terpaksa menuju Qatar pada tahun 1961 dan di sana sempat mendirikan Fakultas Syariah di Universitas Qatar. Pada saat yang sama, ia juga mendirikan Pusat Kajian Sejarah dan Sunnah Nabi. Ia mendapat kewarganegaraan Qatar dan menjadikan Doha sebagai tempat tinggalnya.

Dalam perjalanan hidupnya, Qardhawi pernah mengenyam "pendidikan" penjara sejak dari mudanya. Saat Mesir dipegang Raja Faruk, dia masuk bui tahun 1949, saat umurnya masih 23 tahun, karena keterlibatannya dalam pergerakan Ikhwanul Muslimin. Pada April tahun 1956, ia ditangkap lagi saat terjadi Revolusi Juni di Mesir. Bulan Oktober kembali ia mendekam di penjara militer selama dua tahun.

Qardhawi terkenal dengan khutbah-khutbahnya yang berani sehingga sempat dilarang sebagai khatib di sebuah masjid di daerah Zamalik. Alasannya, khutbah-khutbahnya dinilai menciptakan opini umum tentang ketidak adilan rejim saat itu.

Qardhawi memiliki tujuh anak. Empat putri dan tiga putra. Sebagai seorang ulama yang sangat terbuka, dia membebaskan anak-anaknya untuk menuntut ilmu apa saja sesuai dengan minat dan bakat serta kecenderungan masing-masing. Dan hebatnya lagi, dia tidak membedakan pendidikan yang harus ditempuh anak-anak perempuannya dan anak laki-lakinya.

Salah seorang putrinya memperoleh gelar doktor fisika dalam bidang nuklir dari Inggris. Putri keduanya memperoleh gelar doktor dalam bidang kimia juga dari Inggris, sedangkan yang ketiga masih menempuh S3. Adapun yang keempat telah menyelesaikan pendidikan S1-nya di Universitas Texas Amerika.

Anak laki-laki yang pertama menempuh S3 dalam bidang teknik elektro di Amerika, yang kedua belajar di Universitas Darul Ulum Mesir. Sedangkan yang bungsu telah menyelesaikan kuliahnya pada fakultas teknik jurusan listrik.

Dilihat dari beragamnya pendidikan anak-anaknya, kita bisa membaca sikap dan pandangan Qardhawi terhadap pendidikan modern. Dari tujuh anaknya, hanya satu yang belajar di Universitas Darul Ulum Mesir dan menempuh pendidikan agama. Sedangkan yang lainnya, mengambil pendidikan umum dan semuanya ditempuh di luar negeri. Sebabnya ialah, karena Qardhawi merupakan seorang ulama yang menolak pembagian ilmu secara dikotomis. Semua ilmu bisa islami dan tidak islami, tergantung kepada orang yang memandang dan mempergunakannya. Pemisahan ilmu secara dikotomis itu, menurut Qardhawi, telah menghambat kemajuan umat Islam.

HAMKA

dikutip daripada http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamka

Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah (atau lebih dikenal dengan julukan HAMKA, yakni singkatan namanya), lahir tahun 1908, di desa kampung Molek, Maninjau, Sumatera Barat, dan meninggal di Jakarta 24 Juli 1981, adalah sastrawan Indonesia, sekaligus ulama, dan aktivis politik.

Belakangan ia diberikan sebutan Buya, yaitu panggilan buat orang Minangkabau yang berasal dari kata abi, abuya dalam bahasa Arab, yang berarti ayahku, atau seseorang yang dihormati.

Ayahnya adalah Syekh Abdul Karim bin Amrullah, yang dikenal sebagai Haji Rasul, yang merupakan pelopor Gerakan Islah (tajdid) di Minangkabau, sekembalinya dari Makkah pada tahun 1906.

Biografi

HAMKA (1908-1981), adalah akronim kepada nama sebenar Haji Abdul Malik bin Abdul Karim Amrullah. Beliau adalah seorang ulama, aktivis politik dan penulis Indonesia yang amat terkenal di alam Nusantara. Beliau lahir pada 17 Februari 1908 di kampung Molek, Maninjau, Sumatera Barat, Indonesia. Ayahnya ialah Syeikh Abdul Karim bin Amrullah atau dikenali sebagai Haji Rasul, seorang pelopor Gerakan Islah (tajdid) di Minangkabau, sekembalinya dari Makkah pada tahun 1906.

Hamka mendapat pendidikan rendah di Sekolah Dasar Maninjau sehingga kelas dua. Ketika usia HAMKA mencapai 10 tahun, ayahnya telah mendirikan Sumatera Thawalib di Padang Panjang. Di situ Hamka mempelajari agama dan mendalami bahasa Arab. Hamka juga pernah mengikuti pengajaran agama di surau dan masjid yang diberikan ulama terkenal seperti Syeikh Ibrahim Musa, Syeikh Ahmad Rasyid, Sutan Mansur, R.M. Surjopranoto dan Ki Bagus Hadikusumo.

Hamka mula-mula bekerja sebagai guru agama pada tahun 1927 di Perkebunan Tebing Tinggi, Medan dan guru agama di Padangpanjang pada tahun 1929. Hamka kemudian dilantik sebagai dosen di Universitas Islam, Jakarta dan Universitas Muhammadiyah, Padangpanjang dari tahun 1957 hingga tahun 1958. Setelah itu, beliau diangkat menjadi rektor Perguruan Tinggi Islam, Jakarta dan Profesor Universitas Mustopo, Jakarta. Dari tahun 1951 hingga tahun 1960, beliau menjabat sebagai Pegawai Tinggi Agama oleh Menteri Agama Indonesia, tetapi meletakkan jabatan itu ketika Sukarno menyuruhnya memilih antara menjadi pegawai negeri atau bergiat dalam politik Majlis Syura Muslimin Indonesia (Masyumi).

Hamka adalah seorang otodidiak dalam berbagai bidang ilmu pengetahuan seperti filsafat, sastra, sejarah, sosiologi dan politik, baik Islam maupun Barat. Dengan kemahiran bahasa Arabnya yang tinggi, beliau dapat menyelidiki karya ulama dan pujangga besar di Timur Tengah seperti Zaki Mubarak, Jurji Zaidan, Abbas al-Aqqad, Mustafa al-Manfaluti dan Hussain Haikal. Melalui bahasa Arab juga, beliau meneliti karya sarjana Perancis, Inggris dan Jerman seperti Albert Camus, William James, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Toynbee, Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Marx dan Pierre Loti. Hamka juga rajin membaca dan bertukar-tukar pikiran dengan tokoh-tokoh terkenal Jakarta seperti HOS Tjokroaminoto, Raden Mas Surjopranoto, Haji Fachrudin, Ar Sutan Mansur dan Ki Bagus Hadikusumo sambil mengasah bakatnya sehingga menjadi seorang ahli pidato yang handal.

Hamka juga aktif dalam gerakan Islam melalui organisasi Muhammadiyah. Beliau mengikuti pendirian Muhammadiyah mulai tahun 1925 untuk melawan khurafat, bidaah, tarekat dan kebatinan sesat di Padang Panjang. Mulai tahun 1928, beliau mengetuai cabang Muhammadiyah di Padang Panjang. Pada tahun 1929, Hamka mendirikan pusat latihan pendakwah Muhammadiyah dan dua tahun kemudian beliau menjadi konsul Muhammadiyah di Makassar. Kemudian beliau terpilih menjadi ketua Majlis Pimpinan Muhammadiyah di Sumatera Barat oleh Konferensi Muhammadiyah, menggantikan S.Y. Sutan Mangkuto pada tahun 1946. Beliau menyusun kembali pembangunan dalam Kongres Muhammadiyah ke-31 di Yogyakarta pada tahun 1950.

Pada tahun 1953, Hamka dipilih sebagai penasihat pimpinan Pusat Muhammadiah. Pada 26 Juli 1977, Menteri Agama Indonesia, Prof. Dr. Mukti Ali melantik Hamka sebagai ketua umum Majlis Ulama Indonesia tetapi beliau kemudiannya meletak jawatan pada tahun 1981 karena nasihatnya tidak dipedulikan oleh pemerintah Indonesia.

Kegiatan politik Hamka bermula pada tahun 1925 ketika beliau menjadi anggota partai politik Sarekat Islam. Pada tahun 1945, beliau membantu menentang usaha kembalinya penjajah Belanda ke Indonesia melalui pidato dan menyertai kegiatan gerilya di dalam hutan di Medan. Pada tahun 1947, Hamka diangkat menjadi ketua Barisan Pertahanan Nasional, Indonesia. Beliau menjadi anggota Konstituante Masyumi dan menjadi pemidato utama dalam Pilihan Raya Umum 1955. Masyumi kemudiannya diharamkan oleh pemerintah Indonesia pada tahun 1960. Dari tahun 1964 hingga tahun 1966, Hamka dipenjarakan oleh Presiden Sukarno karena dituduh pro-Malaysia. Semasa dipenjarakanlah maka beliau mulai menulis Tafsir al-Azhar yang merupakan karya ilmiah terbesarnya. Setelah keluar dari penjara, Hamka diangkat sebagai anggota Badan Musyawarah Kebajikan Nasional, Indonesia, anggota Majelis Perjalanan Haji Indonesia dan anggota Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional, Indonesia.

Selain aktif dalam soal keagamaan dan politik, Hamka merupakan seorang wartawan, penulis, editor dan penerbit. Sejak tahun 1920-an, Hamka menjadi wartawan beberapa buah akhbar seperti Pelita Andalas, Seruan Islam, Bintang Islam dan Seruan Muhammadiyah. Pada tahun 1928, beliau menjadi editor majalah Kemajuan Masyarakat. Pada tahun 1932, beliau menjadi editor dan menerbitkan majalah al-Mahdi di Makasar. Hamka juga pernah menjadi editor majalah Pedoman Masyarakat, Panji Masyarakat dan Gema Islam.

Hamka juga menghasilkan karya ilmiah Islam dan karya kreatif seperti novel dan cerpen. Karya ilmiah terbesarnya ialah Tafsir al-Azhar (5 jilid) dan antara novel-novelnya yang mendapat perhatian umum dan menjadi buku teks sastera di Malaysia dan Singapura termasuklah Tenggelamnya Kapal Van Der Wijck, Di Bawah Lindungan Kaabah dan Merantau ke Deli.

Hamka pernah menerima beberapa anugerah pada peringkat nasional dan antarabangsa seperti anugerah kehormatan Doctor Honoris Causa, Universitas al-Azhar, 1958; Doktor Honoris Causa, Universitas Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1974; dan gelar Datuk Indono dan Pengeran Wiroguno dari pemerintah Indonesia.

Hamka telah pulang ke rahmatullah pada 24 Juli 1981, namun jasa dan pengaruhnya masih terasa sehingga kini dalam memartabatkan agama Islam. Beliau bukan sahaja diterima sebagai seorang tokoh ulama dan sasterawan di negara kelahirannya, malah jasanya di seluruh alam Nusantara, termasuk Malaysia dan Singapura, turut dihargai.

berkongsi tentang pengarang dan pujangga yang anda kenali

dalam blog ini saya ingin berkongsi dengan para pembaca dengan apa-apa yang berkaitan dengan dunia penulisan melalui berkenalan pujangga, penulis, pemikir dan pengarang yang unggul. pada saya orang yang menulis buku, kebanyakkannya mempunyai daya intelektual dan kesungguhan untuk memperjuangkan sesuatu. bezanya mereka ini berjuang melalui penulisan dan pengkaryaan. tidak mereka atas apa alasan dan tujuan penulisan mereka, sememangnya mereka memang memiliki keberanian yang unggul untuk melalui jerih payah menegakkan sesuatu yang difikirkan membina. saudara pembaca barangkali tidak ada masalah mencadangkan penulis yang saudara kenali dan hormati di sini. selamat melayari alam pujangga dan pengarang dunia.