Jaime Sáenz

Fascination with death was something experiential for Sáenz. Like he himself reports in his most autobiographical book, La piedra imán (The Lodestone) (1989), visiting the morgue to contemplate the dead was one of the extravagant activities he participated in as a youth. But one should not see this as a necrophilic act, but as an obsession to understand life and death as a unity, which he came to call "La Verdadera Vida (True Life)".

Sáenz died in La Paz on 16 August 1986, surrounded by his dearest friends and colleagues. He was buried the next day in the city's General Cemetery [es].

The impact of alcohol is greatly explored in two works: the poem La noche (The Night) (1984) and the novel Felipe Delgado (1979). Sáenz denied many times that this novel was autobiographical in nature, but one cannot fail to see some aspects of his personal life within it, especially the references to his time as an alcoholic.

With the support of scholars, and invited by some students, Sáenz opened a Poetry Workshop in the Literature Program of the UMSA in 1978. That same year, he published Imágenes paceñas (Images from La Paz).

In 1970 he earned a professorship in Bolivian Literature with a dissertation on Alcides Arguedas at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz. In 1974, he presented a theatrical play called La noche del viernes (Friday Night) and a libretto for his opera Perdido viajero (Lost Traveler).

In 1967 he befriended Carlos Alfredo Rivera, with whom he shared a very close friendship, so much so that it is said Sáenz was the only one who paid attention to Dr. Rivera. And for that same reason, Rivera forbade him to drink. Sáenz began following that order, but died after a few weeks due to two crises of delerium tremens.

His voluntary renunciation of alcohol, which took place sometime in the 1960s, was one of his greatest achievements of his life. Save for sporadic relapses, Sáenz did not go back to drinking until just before his death in 1986. The years where he was distanced from alcohol were when he was most productive. In 1980, one of his relapses brought him to the brink of death, thus sparking inspiration for La noche (The Night), a collection of poems that can be classified as "frightening" due to its subject matter rooted in his near-death experience.

In 1939 he returned to Bolivia and in 1941 he started to work in the Bolivian Department of Defense, then in the Bolivian Treasury. In 1942, he joined the United States Information Service (USIS) at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz. Two years later, he married a German citizen, Erika Käseberg, and in 1947 they had a daughter named Jourlaine. In 1948, due to Sáenz's relapses into dipsomania, Erika left Sáenz and returned to Germany with their daughter. In 1944, he published the first volume of his magazine Cornamusa. In 1952 he left his job at the USIS. In 1955 he published El escalpelo (The Scalpel) and in 1957 Muerte por el tacto (Death by Touch). Around then he also published Aniversario de una visión (Anniversary of a Vision) (1960), Visitante profundo (Immanent Visitor) (1964), and the first volume of his magazine Vertical (1965). In 1967 he published El frío (The Cold), and the Arca Gallery exhibited his illustrations of skulls, of which there were various.

In 1938, he traveled to Germany with some classmates and cadets from the Military School of Bolivia. This trip to Europe greatly affected the direction of his work, as he was strongly influenced by the works of philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer, Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and writers Thomas Mann, William Blake, and Franz Kafka; as for his music tastes, Sáenz enjoyed Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner.

Jaime Sáenz Guzmán (8 October 1921 – 16 August 1986) was a Bolivian writer, poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, illustrator, dramaturge, and professor, known best for his narrative and poetic works. His poetry, though individual to the point of being difficult to classify, bears some similarities with surrealist literature.

Sáenz was born on 8 October 1921 in La Paz, Bolivia. His father was Genaro Sáenz Rivero, the lieutenant colonel of the Bolivian Army, and his mother Graciela Guzmán Lazarte. His humanistic and artistic formation began in La Paz, being sent to the Muñoz School in 1926 for primary school, and then to the American Institute of La Paz for secondary, which he finished in 1937.