Recorrido - Maria Calcaño [ENG]

In the 1900s, in Venezuela and even in other countries, you may notice a smell of many taboos, many secrets customized by a society where detailed or at least well paraphrased carnal desires could not be divulged without having fingers pointed around. So, it was the time when María Calcaño was born in 1906 in the warm arms of the city of Maracaibo.

Life in those times was not easy for a lady, it was full of strict traditions and social-patriarchal paradigms. Even more difficult, it became when this incursion into a literary world close to erotic works, where desire was a living protagonist marked by the sensations lived in each centimeter of the skin.

Even though this is the context, it was not enough to stop the sprouting of suspicion and of good feminine and latent literary coordination in Mary. Simply everything in her was so natural, that although she was prey to the conditions of the time, an arranged marriage, the life of wife and later mother of 6 children; it was not enough to stop her love of writing.

It is for this reason that in 1935 his first book entitled Fatal Wings was born; a writing impregnated with eroticism and sexuality that pointed to pleasant actions, characteristic of femininity and liberated from being only a matter of masculine pleasure.

The struggles and traditions of those years simply could not understand the creative currents described by the poet. A low acceptance of both social and family circles, coupled with the pointing out by many, led to the fact that she will leave the beloved country and settle in Ecuador. At this stage of her life also culminates the relationship with her husband Juan Roncajolo, who in addition to having been older than her, was also an alcoholic.

As the years went by, writing continued, nothing that had happened could have influenced the distillation of inspiration where Eros reigned. After a time of absence from his country in 1940, he decides to return to Venezuela. Later a small circle of readers is integrated in a not perennial way, in this stage his amorous life painted a new opportunity since he knows a writer called Hector Araujo O. In the year 1953, it is where he contracts again marriage, and is limited to raise a nephew of his husband.

In addition to her first book, she wrote two more, one entitled "Songs My Last Dolls Heard " which was released in 1956. However everything was not happiness, in this same year she is diagnosed with lung cancer and losing the battle with such a devastating disease dies.

Her other book is titled "Between the moon and men " (1961), she was given birth years after her death, being her husband who encourages the publication of the same one, obviously it was posthumous.

It is truly regrettable that the works of the first Venezuelan poet were covered by a society that did not understand this new awakening of literature, an outcrop of modernity accompanied by subtle descriptive and passionate verses. However, it is a treasure to have among the range of writers a woman who did not let herself be silenced or separated from her most faithful love, writing.