Bello, Andrés
Bello, Andrés
(ändrās` bā`yō), 1781–1865, South American intellectual leader, b. Venezuela. In 1810 he was sent with Bolívar on a mission to London, where he remained for 19 years as a diplomat, teacher, and writer. He reflected a new attitude in Hispanic-American letters, initiating the movement for intellectual independence from Europe. Called to a governmental post in Chile, he soon became a leader in Chilean education and reorganized the university at Santiago, becoming (1843) its rector. Many of his learned works, such as Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847) and Principios de derecho internacional (1844; revised from an earlier work), became textbooks, and he was author of a code of civil law for Chile. He wrote many poems in the neoclassical style.Bello, Andres
Born Nov. 29, 1781, in Caracas; died Oct. 15, 1865, in Santiago, Chile. Venezuelan writer, philologist, and statesman.
From 1810 to 1829 Bello was the representative of Latin American republics in London, and beginning in 1829 he lived in Chile. Bello was the first rector of the university in Santiago (1842), and in 1855 he took part in drawing up the Chilean Civil Code. He is the author of A Grammar of the Castilian Language (1832) as well as translations of Vergil and Horace. Bello published his narrative poem An Address to Poetry in 1823, his Ode to the Agriculture of the Torrid Zone in 1826, and poems and translations from European romantics. An Enlightenment thinker in his philosophical views and a classicist in his style, Bello, by his interest in national color and folklore, anticipated romanticism in Latin American literature.
WORKS
Obras completas. Caracas, 1951. (Edition expected to be in 20 volumes.)In Russian translation:
“Sel’skomu khoziaistvu v tropicheskoi zone.” Soldaty svobody. Moscow, 1963.
REFERENCES
Caldera, R. Andrés Bello, su vida, su obra, y su pensamiento. Buenos Aires, 1946.A. Bello: 1865–1965. Santiago, 1966. (Contains bibliography, pp. 325–26.)
V. S. STOLBOV