Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005).

Americas bids farewell to Augusto Roa Bastos, one of the great Latin American writers of the twentieth century, who died on April 26 at age eighty-seven, in his native city of Asuncion. Poet, journalist, novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and literature professor, Roa was active until almost the end of his life. His last novel, Madame Sui (1996), was reviewed in Americas in October 1997.

Roa Bastos brought to life the history of his native Paraguay in his stories and novels. He was raised in Iturbe, a rural area in central Paraguay dominated by Guarani culture, where his father was an engineer in a sugar mill. Later, his parents sent him to the capital to receive a more conventional education. He discovered the great classics of world literature in the library of his uncle, the prominent bishop Hermenegildo Roa, who encouraged his intellectual development. His immersion into the two dominant cultures of his country--Guarani and Spanish--resulted in the rich fusion that distinguished his writing.

At thirteen Roa wrote his first play and at fourteen, a story, "Lucha hasta el alma" ["Struggle until Dawn"]. When the war of the Chaco broke out in 1932, Roa, only fifteen years old, volunteered as a hospital assistant. The conflict with Bolivia gave him firsthand knowledge of the dangers of extreme nationalism and of human beings' capacity for brutality. This experience would color his political. convictions as well as his writing. The following year he abandoned his studies to work as an administrative assistant in a bank and write for the Paraguayan newspaper El Pais.

He also began to compose poetry. He was an influential member of a young group of poets striving to invigorate Paraguayan poetry through an amalgam of Guarani oral traditions and international trends. In 1942, Roa published a collection of poems, El ruisenor de la aurora [The Nightingale of Dawn], and other collections followed. During this period he continued to write plays and fiction and also continued his work for El Pais.

In 1945, Roa was awarded a British Council scholarship, which enabled trim to travel in England. He continued working for El Pais, now as a foreign correspondent in London and Pans, and at the end of World War II, interviewed Charles de Gaulle. He also wrote and broadcast his impressions of England, published as La Inglaterra que yo vi [The England I Saw].

Roa's stay in Europe made him acutely aware of backwardness and prejudice in his own country. As a result, he participated in a 1947 coup with hopes of modern Paraguay. However, the effort produced the opposite result, bringing to power the brutal dictator General Alfredo Stroessner. In order to escape persecution. Roa left for Argentina, where he took all kinds of jobs, including postman, waiter, and window cleaner.

In Buenos Aires. Roa's literary career took off. He became friends with important Argentine writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato. He published Iris first collection of stories, El trueno entre las hojas [Thunder among the Leaves], and won his first significant literary prize for the novel Hijo de hombre (1960) [Son of Man, 1988], which was made into a film. Set during the Chaco War, it captures in Spanish the speech and thought patterns of Guarani, the language of the Indian conscripts who are the novel's subjects. During this period he also wrote film scripts, sometimes adapting his fiction for the screen. Roa lived in Argentina until 1976, when he left after being harassed by the military junta of President Jorge Videla. He settled in Toulouse, in southern France, where he taught literature and the Guarani language.

Roa Bastos's best known novel is Yo el supreme (1974) [I the Supreme, 1986), considered a modern masterpiece. The "I" of the title is the vicious nineteenth-century dictator Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay from 1811 until his death in 1840. Although Roa meticulously researched his subject, he denied the book was historical fiction. Stroessner considered it a personal attack and banned it in Paraguay. In 1982, the dictator withdrew Roa's Paraguayan citizenship. Ironically, the novelist received the prestigious Cervantes Award in 1989, the very year Stroessner was toppled from power. Roa returned to a democratic Paraguay in 1996, when he was almost eighty.

During his last years Roa not only continued his own literary activities, but also actively encouraged young writers. After his death, Paraguayan president Nicanor Duarte Frutos declared three days of national mourning. Augusto Roa Bastes is survived by his third wife, Iris Gimenez, and three children.