Elisabeth Mulder facts for kids

Elisabeth Mulder Pierluisi (also known as Elizabeth Mulder de Dauner) was a Spanish writer. She was also a poet, translator, journalist, and literary critic. She was born in Barcelona on February 9, 1904, and passed away there on November 28, 1987.

Early life

Elisabeth Mulder Pierluisi was born in Barcelona. Her father, Enrique Mulder García, was a doctor with Dutch and Spanish parents. Her mother, Zoraida Pierluisi Grau, was from Puerto Rico and had Italian and Catalan family roots.

Elisabeth spent some of her early childhood in Puerto Rico. When she was seven, she moved to Barcelona, where she lived most of her life. She traveled a lot around Europe. She learned four languages: German, French, Italian, and Russian. This helped her to translate books and poems directly from those languages, like works by Alexander Pushkin. Her mother also encouraged her to study music. Elisabeth learned to play the piano with the famous musician Enrique Granados in Barcelona.

Career

In 1919, Elisabeth Mulder won a poetry contest with her poem "Circe." Around this time, she also started working as a journalist. She wrote for El Noticiero Universal in Barcelona. There, she focused on English literature, especially reviewing Victorian novels.

Her first book of poems, Emmbrujamiento, came out in 1927. Her first novel, Una sombra entre los dos, was published in 1934. In 1935, she released La historia de Java. This book was a beautiful story about a cat named Java. The cat was independent and loved to wander. Critics like Manuel Azaña liked this work very much.

Elisabeth Mulder also wrote books and plays for children. These included Casa Fontana and Romance de media noche. She worked on these with María Luz Morales. Before the Spanish Civil War, she wrote for several newspapers. These included Mundo Gráfico and El Hogar y la Moda in Madrid. She also wrote for Las Provincias in Valencia and La Noche in Barcelona.

She was also a talented translator. She translated poems and books from different languages. For example, she translated The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. She also translated poems by Charles Baudelaire and Alexander Pushkin. From 1930 to 1935, she wrote about thirty short stories for magazines like Brisas and Lecturas. One of her stories was even made into a movie called Verónica.

In the 1940s and 1960s, she continued to write and translate. She translated works by Baudelaire, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1944, she published El hombre que acabó en las islas. This famous book tells the story of a young man growing up. He travels through Spain, Nordic countries, and Puerto Rico. In the Puerto Rico part, she wrote about her own childhood memories.

In 1945, she published a new collection of short stories called Este mundo. Her important work Alba Grey came out in 1947. In 1953, she published El vendedor de vidas. She also wrote Flora (1954) and Luna de las máscaras (1958). In Luna de las máscaras, she told the story from the viewpoint of different characters.

Elisabeth Mulder wrote two children's books. They were Los cuentos del viejo reloj (1941) and Las noches del gato verde (1963). In 1976, she translated a children's book called La lente mágica by Swedish writer Astrid Bergman Sucksdorff.

She kept writing fiction and journalism. She wrote for newspapers like La Vanguardia Española, Destino, and Solidaridad Nacional in Barcelona. She also wrote for ABC in Madrid. From 1954 to 1955, she was in charge of the "English letters" section for Ínsula magazine in Madrid.

In the 1960s and 1970s, she gave talks at universities. She spoke at institutions in Boston and Puerto Rico. In the 1980s, she slowly lost her eyesight. But she still managed to finish a novel called El retablo de Salomé Amat. She said she had been working on it for over twenty years. The novel tells the story of four generations of women in the same family.

Her novels often featured young women. These characters could speak different languages and traveled abroad. They had often attended schools in Switzerland.

Personal life

In 1921, Elisabeth Mulder married Ezequiel Dauner Foix. He was a Catalan lawyer and politician. He was almost thirty years older than her. They had one son, Enrique Dauner Mulder. Her husband passed away in 1930.

Selected works

See also

In Spanish: Elisabeth Mulder para niños

• List of Costa Brava films