Las dificultades y las licencias de un biógrafo. Ricardo Rojas y su Vida de Sarmiento

Abstract

This article analyzes certain aspects of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s biography written by Ricardo Rojas and published in 1945: El profeta de la Pampa. Vida de Sarmiento. Among other things, special emphasis is laid on the biographer-biographee relationship, and how Rojas uses the biographical genre to proceed to a sort of seizure of Sarmiento’s legacy and to proclaim himself as the true inheritor of that legacy. At the same time, it emphasizes how, in a kind of role reversal between biographer and biographee, biography serves Rojas as a platform to continue with the nationalist preaching he had been performing since the first decades of the twentieth century in texts such as La restauracion nacionalista or Blason de Plata. Finally, on its reverse, an underlying failure is highlighted, a failure that, at different levels, would be both of the biographer and the biographee.