León de Greiff
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León de Greiff
Born	July 22, 1895 Medellín, Colombia  Colombia
Died	July 11, 1976 Bogotá
Pen name	Leo de Gris
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	Colombian
Literary movement	Modernismo

León de Greiff (1895 - 1976), was a Colombian poet of the 20th century. His full name was Francisco de Asís León Bogislao de Greiff and used several pseudonyms in his works. The most popular were Leo de Gris and Gaspar de Nuit. He was one of the founders of Los Panidas, a literary and artistic 1915 movement in Medellín that is considered the beginning of Modernismo in Colombia. In that movement were also the philosopher Fernando González Ochoa and the cartoonist Ricardo Rendón. The poetry of De Greiff is philosophical and sometimes difficult to understand, inspired in modernist authors, the same ones he read since he was young.

Life

León de Greiff at the age of one. The photography was taken by Melitón Rodríguez in 1896.

León de Greiff was the son of the political leader Luis de Greiff and Amelia Haeusler, whose father was a German. The great-grand father of León was a Swedish engineer, Carlos Segismundo Von Greiff, who moved to Colombia in 1826. The other well-known Von Greiff in the South American nation was his youngest brother, the musician and poet Otto de Greiff.

Foundation of Los Panidas

De Greiff did his first studies in Liceo Antioqueño. In the University of Antioquia he started engineer, but the administration expelled him with other students in 1913 stating that "they were subversives."^[1] In that same year he was private secretary of the journalist and politician General Rafael Uribe Uribe, a personal friend of his father. The General was killed at the following year in Bogotá.

The name of León is also in the list of boys, followers of the Liberal Party, who fought in bloodless battle against the boys of the Conservative Party of the Spaniard Rev. Cayetano Sarmiento in Plazuela de San Ignacio in Medellín on May 11, 1913. It was a fight of boys in the plaza in a time where the feeling among both parties were delicated after the Thousand Days War. The Police stopped the three hours battle and most of the Liberals were brought to the station. The main leader of the Liberals was León de Greiff.^[2]

On February 1915 Leon de Greiff was also the main head of the foundation of Los Panidas, a group of 13 boys to publish a literary magazine with that same name. The first three editions had de Greiff as the director and the other seven numbers were under the Felix Mejía Arango name. In Los Panidas Magazine de Greiff published his first poem, La Balada de los Búhos Locos (The Ballad of the Mad Owls), and a work where he manifested his unusual vocabulary, his irony, humor and the intensive lyricism between archaism and modernism of his poetry.

The Antioquian poet defined like this the purpose of their literary movement:

"We were motivated, first of all, by a purpose of innovation. In those times poetry (and art, added the modern chronist) was done through a lot of academics. It was seen by us like a walled thing that we thought we might fight. It was that criterion of generation that we wanted to impose.^[3]

But the life of the first literary and artistic modernist movement of Colombia endured only six months. In June 1915 they published the last number of the magazine and in that same month León de Greiff moved to the city of Bogotá.

"Los Nuevos"

In Bogotá, Leon de Greiff joined "Los Nuevos", another literary movement composed by personalities like Luis Vidales, Alberto Lleras Camargo, Rafael Maya and Germán Arciniegas. They published also their "Los Nuevos Magazine" that followed the most contemporary tendencies of Europe. Most of the members of that movement becama after journalist, and some of them remained poets, like de Greiff.^[4] Los Nuevos attacked the remains of the Hispano-American literary romanticism and costumbrism and questioned the political systems of their time.

In 1925 he published his firts book of poetry, "Mamotreto",^[5] a title that would become a mark of identity of his works (he would publish other mamotretos along the rest of his life). The second Mamotreto appeared in 1930.

Works and recognitions

De Greiff liked statistics and accounts and for this reason he worked in some officials, while he consolidated his name as an intelectual and bohemian in Colombia. He was professor of literature and redaction in the Faculty of Engineering of the National University between 1940 and 1945 and professor of history of the music in the Conservatory of the same university. After his death, the university gave his name to the Central Auditorium as a memorial.

The work of De Greiff was controversial because he looked all the time for originality, style and a rich vocabulary. All the elements of his work is condensated in what he called the "Mamotretos", big compilations of his poems. At the end of the 1950s he moved to Sweden as a consul of Colombia. In 1970 he received the National Prize of Poetry and he was a candidate to the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[6]

References

External links

• The Melting Pot: León de Greiff, GUZMÁN, Jairo. Link retrieved on June 23, 2008.