Silvina Bullrich
| Silvina Bullrich | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
October 4, 1915 Buenos Aires |
| Died | July 2, 1990 (aged 74) Geneva |
| Resting place | Jardín de Paz Cemetery Pilar, Buenos Aires |
| Occupation | Novelist, professor and translator of French literature |
| Language | Spanish |
| Nationality | Argentine |
| Period | 1939–86 |
| Genre | Modernist literature |
| Notable awards | Municipal Prize - Literature (1961) National Prize - Literature (1972) |
Silvina Bullrich (October 4, 1915 – July 2, 1990) was a best-selling Argentine novelist, as well as a translator, screenwriter, critic, and academic. She was known in Argentina as la gran burguesa ("the great bourgeois lady").
Silvina Bullrich was born to María Laura Meyrelles de Bullrich and to Rafael Bullrich (1877–1944), a distinguished Argentine cardiologist and Dean of the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. The second of three sisters, she was raised in a privileged background; despite the conservative Dr. Bullrich's disapproval, her mother occupied her free time introducing her daughters to classic literature and, unhappily married, frequently traveled with them to Paris, where Silvina's paternal grandfather had been a diplomat. She was unable to pursue a university diploma, but received a diploma in French language studies from the Buenos Aires Alliance Française.
She married Arturo Palenque in 1936 and had one son. Devoting herself to writing, she contributed literary reviews to La Nación (then Argentina's most-widely circulated daily) and in 1939, had a collection of poems (Vibraciones) and Calles de Buenos Aires ("Streets of Buenos Aires") published in Atlántida magazine. Befriending renowned writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, in 1945 she collaborated with the latter in a collection of prose titled Los compadritos ("The Poseurs"). These early years in Bullrich's career were accompanied by a difficult phase in her life. Her husband, a lawyer aligned with Argentina's influential conservative Catholics, was not a good provider and this, coupled with his disapproval of his wife's work, led to their divorce in 1946. Bullrich also lost her father, elder sister and paternal grandmother during this interim, the latter two of whom she was particularly close with. These experiences were likewise reflected in much of her work, which continued to set young ladies brought up in comfortable circumstances against prolonged, unhappy relationships and relative penury.
This was first evident in Historia de un silencio ("History of a Silent Moment"); the 1949 novel, set in the popular weekend destination of Tigre and written from a man's perspective, secured her reputation in the Argentine literary scene. Her Bodas de cristal ("Crystal Jubilee," 1951) and Telefono ocupado ("Busy Signal," 1956) continued showing her preference for detailing private moments and for allowing her characters to criticize male chauvinism or a weak character in women privately and in thought. "Crystal Jubilee" was also her first commercial success and coincided with her marriage to Marcelo Dupont, a happy interlude in her life which ended with his losing his battle with a sudden cancer in 1956.
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