“María Mercedes Carranza” (Encyclopedia article). Notable Twentieth-Century Latin American Women: a Biographical Dictionary . Cynthia Margarita Tompkins and David William Foster (eds.). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press (December 2000): 71-76. María Mercedes Carranza * (b. 1945, Bogotá) Carlos Jáuregui. María Mercedes Carranza, the most authoritative voice in contemporary Colombian poetry, belongs to the “disenchanted” generation of poets. This generation, which began publishing in the 1970's, revealed writers like Giovanni Quessep, Harold Alvarado, Juan Manuel Roca, Juan G. Cobo- Borda, Mario Rivero and Darío Jaramillo-Agudelo (the latter two have been important influences in her work). As Carranza alleges, her generation was marked by the “political and cultural impact of the Cuban Revolution, the Frente Nacional, the political crisis of the traditional parties and the left, the increasing urbanization of the country, the zenith of the mass media, […and] the boom of the novel, that relegated poetry to a second or third place” (in Rincón 5,6). She was the only daughter among three siblings, from a Catholic family of peasant origins. Because of her father's, the poet Eduardo Carranza (1913-1985), position as a cultural consular representative, she spent a good part of her youth abroad; she lived in Chile (1946-1948), and later in a post-war fascist Spain (1951-1958), idealized in her memory as “an isolated country outside of the society of consumerism” (Interview). She grew up under the protective figure of a politically conservative father -- although tolerant -- who initiated her in the secrets of the Prado Museum, the Spanish and French classic literature, and at the same time transmitted to her his passion for detective novels. Among the many writers and artists who visited her father, she remembers Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso, Jorge Gaitán Durán, and especially the painter Débora Arango (1907-), who did a full-length portrait of her in a red dress, that she reminisces as the bright image of those days. Especially influential in her life was the writer Elisa Mujica (1918-), her maternal great-aunt who was living in Spain at that time: “The fable of my childhood is knitted with the legends and stories that she told me; with her I discovered the power of language” (Interview). Later, studying in a school run by nuns, with her brothers at boarding school, and amidst domestic problems between her parents, she found poetry in the pages of Rubén Darío in her father's library, “the place of solitary games with books” (Interview). With that time period in mind, she edited a collection of juvenile literature in 1982 (Colección ICBF de literatura infantil). The return to Colombia was not easy: “When I returned, I still played with dolls and didn't know how babies were born. I left Spain and my childhood; I experienced a terrible cultural nostalgia which I confronted with a resolution to belong to this country” (Interview). Before finishing high school in Colombia, she decided to become a bilingual secretary which was a fairly common “fate” for intellectual aspirations of women at that time. Her mother, Rosa Coronado, convinced her to continue her studies with the promise of sending her to Spain. After * The interview, related data and bibliography was gathered thanks to the support of the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Pittsburgh. Unless other wise indicated, translations throughout the text are my own. Poems are quoted from Poesía incompleta except in the case of El Canto de las moscas.