{"id":10167,"date":"2021-09-14T10:27:37","date_gmt":"2021-09-14T10:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/personaje\/couffon-claude\/"},"modified":"2021-10-22T11:23:48","modified_gmt":"2021-10-22T11:23:48","slug":"couffon-claude","status":"publish","type":"personaje","link":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/personaje\/couffon-claude\/","title":{"rendered":"Couffon, Claude"},"content":{"rendered":"

French poet, Hispanist, translator, academic and professor at the Sorbonne University. He was one of the great scholars of the life and work of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, the first to investigate his murder and to conclude that the poet was buried in the Barranco de V\u00edznar<\/a> along with hundreds of others shot in the early days of nationalist repression in the Spanish Civil War. He also studied and disseminated in France the work of other Spanish and Latin American writers such as Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n, Rafael Alberti<\/a>, Miguel \u00c1ngel Asturias or Miguel Hern\u00e1ndez<\/a>. Through his translations and anthologies, he played a very important role in the promotion of Spanish writers in France.<\/p>\n

He was born in 1926, in Caen. He studied Hispanic Philology and in 1945 he began to publish studies and translations of various Spanish and Latin American authors. In 1948, he took a trip to Granada to investigate the death of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca. Although later other foreign scholars such as Agust\u00edn Pen\u00f3n<\/a> or Ian Gibson took the same trip and with the same intention, he was the first. Upon his arrival, only nine years after the end of the war, he found a wall of silence and fear around the figure of the poet.<\/p>\n

In the face of their investigations into Lorca’s death, the Franco Regime started to fear a massive influx of researchers and curious people and decided to plant pine trees the area around V\u00edznar and Alfacar in an attempt to hide the mass graves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A Spanish teacher in France, who had fought in the International Brigades, was the one who told him about the poet’s death and raised an investigative curiosity that eventually became a passion. He then decided to travel to Granada and investigate Federico’s murder. Everyone told him that it was very dangerous, since the murderers were still in the city. Finally, a student, whose father had been killed in the same days as Lorca, wanted to help him and took him to V\u00edznar. There he was able to distinguish the undulations of the graves, in a landscape still undisturbed. He published a first article in Le Figar\u00f3<\/i> in 1950 and created an international stir. Intellectuals and poets began to contact him and in some cases he ended up being their translator. One of the reactions of the Regime to the article, which feared a massive influx of researchers and curious people, was the planting of pine trees in the V\u00edznar and Alfacar<\/a> areas.<\/p>\n

\"Claude<\/a>
\nIn 1953, he published The Crime Took Place in Granada<\/i>, in Madrugada Publishing House, Central University of Quito. In 1962, he published in Seghers A Grenade sur les pas de Garc\u00eda Lorca<\/i>. Although he has been one of the most consulted authors during the various searches for the remains of the poet, he has expressed his disagreement with it on different occasions: “I am not in favor of searching for his remains. He has to rest in peace with the dead. I suppose that the family does not want it either because a myth has already been created with respect to that. With Garc\u00eda Lorca many myths have been created, some false, now it is difficult to restore the truth against the legend.”<\/p>\n

He was named Knight of the Legion of Honor and awarded France’s Art and Letters Prize. In Fuente Vaqueros<\/a> he received the Pozo de Oro distinction on June 5, 2011. He died in December 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

French poet, Hispanist, translator, academic and professor at the Sorbonne University. He was one of the great scholars of the life and work of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, the first to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10170,"template":"","agrupacion":[132],"class_list":["post-10167","personaje","type-personaje","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","agrupacion-hispanists-and-researchers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/personaje\/10167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/personaje"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/personaje"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"agrupacion","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.universolorca.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/agrupacion?post=10167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}