Manuel Bernardez

Infobox Person
name= Manuel Bernández


caption= Poet, Journalist, Diplomat
dead=dead
birth_date= August 13 1867
birth_place= Spain
death_date= 1942
death_place= ??

Manuel Bernárdez (1868 - 1942) was a Spanish-born Uruguayan diplomat, poet, journalist, and editor, and is is chiefly remembered as one of Uruguay's most important writers.

Life and Family

Bernárdez was the son of Juan Ramón Bernardez and Dolores Filgueira. When he was six, they left Villagarcía de Arosa, Galicia, to settle in Arapey, Uruguay; he became a naturalized Uruguayan when he reached the legal age.

Bernárdez was completely home-schooled by his father, having never attended school or college. In his youth, he took to prose and especially poetry, publishing his first volume ("Confidencias, a una joven Amiga") when he was eighteen. For the next thirty years, he would spend his professional life mainly in the staffs of various periodicals and newspapers at home and abroad; he would also marry Carmen Martínez-Thédy during this time (in 1894), with whom he would have four children.

In 1898, he became an editor for "El Diario" in Buenos Aires, living there for some time; later, he made a trip to Brazil, writing a book about his journey ("De Buenos Aires al Iguazú"). In 1904 and 1905 respectively, he wrote two volumes on Argentina, in which he celebrated that nation's economic development: "Viajes por la República Argentina, La nación en marcha", "Jornadas del progreso Argentino, Hacia las cumbres".

In 1910, he would become the Uruguayan Consul to Brazil, and then Minister of Uruguay in 1916.

Bernárdez died in 1942.

List of Works

"(Aside from those mentioned before)"

*"Claros de luna" (1886)
*"Memorias de campo" (1887)
*"Ave, Maria!"
*"La muerte de Artigas" (1891)
*"Tambos y Rodeos"