Ricardo Güiraldes

Ricardo Güiraldes (Buenos Aires, 1886 – Paris, 1927) was an Argentine novelist and poet who wrote in Spanish after a childhood shaped by French. He belonged to the generation that brought avant-garde ideas to Buenos Aires in the 1920s, yet he is remembered above all for a rural novel, Don Segundo Sombra, published in 1926.

He was born into a wealthy family from the old landowning elite. His father, Manuel Güiraldes, later became intendente of Buenos Aires and cared deeply about art, and the son inherited that interest: as a young man he sketched countryside scenes and painted in oils. The family spent several years in Europe, and the boy came back speaking French and German fluently. French became the language that shaped his style and tastes most. He grew up partly on the family estate at San Antonio de Areco, where he came into close contact with gaucho life and met Segundo Ramírez, whose character inspired the title figure of his novel.

His formal studies were uneven. He began architecture and law without finishing either, and his business ventures failed. After travelling through Europe and the East in 1910, he settled in Paris and resolved to become a writer, though for a time the city's social life distracted him. Some rural sketches he found in a drawer, later part of Cuentos de muerte y de sangre, drew him back to writing, and even these early drafts showed a distinctive voice.

Back in Buenos Aires he married Adelina del Carril. His 1915 short-story collection met with little response, and he withdrew the unsold copies himself. That year he also published the poetry collection El cencerro de cristal. His early novels, Raucho (1917) and Rosaura (1922), explored youth and urban life. From 1922 a spiritual crisis drew him towards theosophy and Eastern philosophy, which is evident in his later poems. In Buenos Aires he encouraged the young avant-garde writers, and in 1924 he co-founded the magazine Proa with Borges and others; it was better received abroad than at home.

He completed Don Segundo Sombra in March 1926. Its clear, evocative prose blends the realism of the plains with a reflective account of a young man's education, and the novel became a cornerstone of Argentine literature. He died in Paris in 1927 of Hodgkin's disease, and his body was taken back to San Antonio de Areco. His reputation rests mainly on that novel, still read as a portrait of the pampas and of a vanishing way of life.