Nalé Roxlo, Conrado (1898–1971)

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Nalé Roxlo, Conrado (1898–1971)

Conrado Nalé Roxlo (b. 15 February 1898; d. 2 July 1971), Argentine journalist, poet, and dramatist. Born in Buenos Aires, Nalé Roxlo contributed to a wide array of literary genres, but for the most part only his epigrammatic poetry and his works for the theater continue to be read. As a journalist and literary critic, he wrote for La Nación, El Mundo, and other such journals. His dramatic efforts corresponded to the enormously significant developments in theatrical activity in Buenos Aires in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s known as the Teatro Independiente, a movement that affirmed a noncommercial (but very public) art theater in the tradition of Pirandello, O'Neill, and Shaw. (Nalé Roxlo's play Judith y las rosas [1954] won the Primer Premio Nacional de Comedia for 1954–1956.) Nalé Roxlo brought to his theatrical efforts the dominant emphases of his multifaceted poetry: a concern for the human comedy seen in often markedly farcical terms, the contradictions of fragile and transient individual endeavor, the interplay between illusion and anguished uncertainty, and a jocose manipulation of language that underscores life's existential ambiguities. The result is a highly original form of literary humorism that reveals a profound preoccupation with the human condition during a period of intense international and national moral, social, and political turbulence.

El grillo (1923), Nalé Roxlo's first book of poetry, possesses a significant metapoetic dimension that evokes the literary vanguard of the period and the emphasis on the privileged, primordial voice of the poet even when dealing with mundane reality and unpretentious natural elements. Other works by Nalé Roxlo include Antologías apócrifas (1943), De otro cielo (1952), and El pacto de Cristina (1945).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

María Hortensia Lacau, El mundo poético de Conrado Nalé Roxlo: Poesía y estilo (1954) and Tiempo y vida de Conrado Nalé Roxlo: Entre el ángel y el duende (1976).

Arturo Berenguer Carisomo, Conrado Nalé Roxlo (1986).

David William Foster, The Argentine Teatro Independiente, 1930–1955 (1986), pp. 70-85.