The Peruvian poet Martín Adán, whose real name was Ramón Rafael de la Fuente Benavides , was born on October 27, 1908 in Lima, on Corazón de Jesús street (current Jirón Apurímac). His parents were Santiago de la Fuente Santolalla and Rosa Mercedes Benavides, whose marriage did not last long and both the poet and his brother César grew up practically without a father. His grandfather Rafael Benavides, a prestigious gynecologist, and his aunt Tarsilia took charge of the family. Martín Adán completed almost all of his studies, both primary and secondary, at the Colegio Alemán, where one of his teachers was the poet Alberto Ureta, and he had as classmates Estuardo Núñez, Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Carlos Cueto and Guillermo Lohmann. . Around 1926, as a natural consequence of his friendship with José Carlos Mariátegui, he began his collaboration with the magazine Amauta publishing articles and comments, as well as previews of The cardboard house , which he had written between 1924 and 1926 under the direction of Professor Emilio Huidobro. By the year 1927 he entered the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos where he studied Letters and Law . The New Peruvian Magazine published in 1929 Time , a beautiful text in prose that extols the chiaroscuro of the morning; in turn, the magazine Letras spreads a rather academic text called:The Spanish demon of the 16th century , in relation to The Matchmaker , by Fernando de Rojas. He then writes Power Trance , which is the portrait of a marginal uncle, who was very ill at the time. When the San Marcos cloister was closed in 1932, Martín Adán decided to finish his law studies in the city of Arequipa, where he also got a job at Banco Agrario. There he meets José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, then head of the legal department of said bank office. In the city of Misti, Martín Adán, now released from his aunt Tarsilia's guardianship, develops a fondness for drinking that will always accompany him.
Works by Martin Adam
During his stay in Arequipa, he wrote the poems that correspond to what would become the book La Campana Catalina , published only in 1942. He returned to Lima in 1934 and, from then on, his inclination to alcohol led him to be confined again and again in the Larco Herrera hospital.
In 1938 he opted for a doctorate in Letters with the thesis De lo baroque en el Perú , which would be published as a book thirty years later. In 1939 he wrote the unitary book of poems entitled La rosa de la espinela . The University of San Marcos entrusted him with a description and bibliographic content work on the authors of the first century of Peruvian literature, which was published in installments in the University's Bibliographic Bulletin between 1939 and 1940, but which remained unfinished. As of 1944, the economic crisis that the poet was experiencing due to the loss of his two houses forced him to rent a room in a hostel behind the Lima cathedral. With Extrasea crossing or Sonnets to Chopin , Martín Adán won the national poetry prize corresponding to the year 1946. In January 1959 he was incorporated into the Peruvian Academy of Language and in 1961, in addition to publishing Escrito a blind , he won the national poetry award again for La mano desaida (Song to Machu Picchu), which would be published in 1964. The following year he wrote The absolute stone , collection of poems published in 1966.
In 1975 the Intisol publishing house published Poet's Diary . At that time, Martín Adán had moved from the room he occupied in the sanatorium to a more comfortable rest home. There he received continuous visits from the bookseller and publisher Juan Mejía Baca, whom he had met in the 1950s, becoming his closest friend. Proof of this was the power that the poet gave him in 1958 to take charge of the editions of his works. In 1976 he was awarded the national prize for culture in the area of literature. In 1980, the Banco Continental foundation for the development of culture sponsored the edition of the complete poetic work of Martín Adán and two years later, under the same seal, the volume corresponding to his prose works appeared. Around 1983 the poet was in very poor health but he maintained a column in the newspaper La República, entitled:"The human who is alone is not the only true human." In the middle of 1984 he lost the sight of one eye and after a brief recovery he went to the Loayza hospital, where he died on January 29, 1985 . After his death, the interest aroused by his work in several countries has been increasing, and two important anthologies have been published, among others:one in Madrid (Antología, 1989) and the other in Mexico (El más Hermoso crepúsculo del mundo, 1992).