Ernesto Sabato

Biography

In 1934 the Communist Party of Argentina sent Ernesto Sabato to study at the International Lenin School in Moscow. On the way he went to Brussels as a delegate to an anti-fascist congress, decided there that he might never come back from the USSR, and left for Paris.

He was twenty-three, and already general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation.

He was born on 24 June 1911 in Rojas, in Buenos Aires Province, the tenth of eleven children in a family of immigrants from Calabria; his mother was Arbëreshë, from the Albanian community of Italy. He was given the name of a brother who had died in infancy. In 1924 Sabato finished school in Rojas and moved to La Plata, to the Colegio Nacional, where one of his teachers was Pedro Henríquez Ureña; Sabato later named him as the person who pushed him towards writing. From 1929 he studied at the School of Physics and Mathematics of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. A supporter of university reform, he and his comrades founded a left-wing group, “Insurrexit”. At a lecture on Marxism he met Matilde Kusminsky Richter, who became his wife in 1936.

In Paris in 1934–1935 he began a novel, “La fuente muda”, later published in part. In 1938, in Buenos Aires, Sabato defended his doctoral dissertation on cosmic radioactivity. Thanks to Bernardo Houssay he received a fellowship to work in Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s laboratory at the Curie Institute. By day he did physics, and in the evenings he kept company with the Paris Surrealists, among them André Breton. By his own account he sat in cafés with them making “exquisite corpses”, while in the laboratory he felt empty. In 1939 he moved to the United States, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1940 he returned to Buenos Aires and taught relativity and quantum mechanics at the university. He also translated George Gamow’s “The Birth and Death of the Sun” into Spanish.

In 1943, after an acute existential crisis, he left science. From 1941 he had been writing for the magazine “Sur”, close to the circle of Jorge Luis Borges. His first book, a collection of philosophical essays, “Uno y el universo” (“One and the Universe”, 1945), criticised the supposed moral neutrality of science; for it he received the first prize of the city of Buenos Aires and an honorary award from the Argentine Society of Writers. After his articles against the dictatorship of Juan Perón, he had to give up teaching in 1945.

His novel “The Tunnel” (1948), after several publishers turned it down, appeared in “Sur”. It is psychological prose in the first person, in the spirit of existentialism. Albert Camus, to whom Roger Caillois had pointed out the book, saw to its publication in French; the novel was translated into more than ten languages and was filmed in 1952, 1977 and 1987. “On Heroes and Tombs” (1961) became, I think, his best-known book: Eduardo Falú set a piece based on it to music, “Romance de la muerte de Juan Lavalle”, and part of the text was filmed in 1979 by the writer’s son Mario Sabato. “The Angel of Darkness” (1974) deserves a separate mention: for it Sabato received the Grand Prize of the Argentine Society of Writers. Among the essays one can single out “Hombres y engranajes” (“Man and Mechanism”, 1951), “Heterodoxia” (1953), “Tango, discusión y clave” (“Tango: Discussion and Key”, 1963) and “Apologías y rechazos” (“Apologies and Rebuttals”, 1979).

In 1983–1984, at the invitation of President Raúl Alfonsín, Sabato chaired the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP). It examined the crimes of the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, and its result was a volume of testimonies, “Nunca más” (1984). Sabato repeatedly received threats from far-right death squads, above all from the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. His awards include the Prix Médicis (1977), the Cervantes Prize (1984), the Legion of Honour (1987), the Jerusalem Prize (1989) and honorary doctorates from the universities of Murcia, Rosario and Turin. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, the last time in 2009.

When doctors forbade him to read and write, he turned to painting. His exhibitions were held in Paris, Madrid and São Paulo. In 1999 he acquired Italian citizenship in addition to his Argentine citizenship. On 4 June 2000 Sabato posted his text “La resistencia” on the website of the newspaper “Clarín” before the book came out, becoming the first major Spanish-language writer to do so.

Ernesto Sabato died on 30 April 2011 in Santos Lugares, less than two months short of his hundredth birthday.