Gonzalo Rojas: Google celebrates 106th birthday of famous Chilean poet

Happy Birthday Gonzalo Rojas! 

Google today celebrates 106th birthday of Gonzalo Rojas, a Chilean poet, diplomat, and teacher who won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1992. Google dedicates a doodle to Gonzola Rojas. His work is part of the continuing Latin American avant-garde literary tradition of the twentieth century.

Gonzalo Rojas was born on December 20, 1916. He was the seventh son of a coal mining engineer, born in the port town of Lebu, Chile.

Gonzalo Rojas attended boarding school on scholarship and studied law and literature at the University of Chile in Santiago. While working on his first poetry volume, he also taught literacy to miners in the Atacama desert. During this time, he also founded a literary journal called Antárctica and served as its editor. He also became the University lecturer in Valparaiso.

Gonzalo Rojas taught in a number of small schools, even a German School in Valparaíso, but was eventually hired (1947) in the University of Chile in Valparaíso (now the University of Valparaíso). Having finally earned his degree in 1952, he was awarded a professorship at the University of Concepción. 

The publication of Gonzalo Rojas' first collection, La miseria del hombre (The Misery of Man), in 1948, won him international recognition as a poet. Rojas published countless more collections like Contra la muerte (Against Death, 1964), Oscuro (Darkness, 1977), and Del relámpago (Of Lightning, 1981) throughout his seven-decade career.

After the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, Gonzalo Rojas was forced to go into exile, an “undocumented person”. He was stripped of his diplomatic position and was also banned from teaching at any Chilean university. The University of Rostock in East Germany provided him with a placement.

Gonzalo Rojas taught at universities in Germany, the United States, Spain, and Mexico. A Guggenheim scholarship allowed Rojas to return to Chile in 1979. He settled in the city of Chillán, where he continued publishing celebrated works of poetry. He went on to win the Chilean National Prize for Literature (Chile’s highest national award for writers), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize of Spain, the Octavio Paz Prize of Mexico and the José Hernandez Prize of Argentina in his later years.

His poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Romanian, Swedish, Chinese, Turkish, Bengali and Greek. He died on April 25, 2011 due to stroke he suffered just two months earlier. He was considered one of the greatest modern poets in Chile, together with Nicanor Parra.

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