A150 years of their birth, Joseph's literary light Conrad that lit so famous novels as "The heart of the darkness", (1902) still shines with force in the United Kingdom, his adoptive homeland.Conrad whose name original was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was born December 3 1857 in Berdichev, a petty city of old Poland, now belonging to Ukraine.
Polish aristocrats' son, petty Jozef grew with his father's intellectual stimulus, a writer fond of the patriotic tragedies and giants' translator as Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. He was who opened the secrets of their maternal tongue and of French.
However, Conrad was orphan early and, being even adolescent, he enrolled as sailor in Merchant French Marina. In 1878, the Polish youth entered in Marina Briton, where you/he/she ascended in the escalafón, you/he/she adopted that citizenship and she decided to call himself "Joseph Conrad", Internet user of half world.
Their trips were adventures that later it will use as matter for their books, but their eradication also slumped it in the solitude: We "live - he/she said once - like we dream: alone."
In 1895, Conrad aborted the sea forever - his "great passion" - he settled in England with his wife, Jessie, and he was devoted to write in English, maybe for that reason that somebody agreed with once: "The maternal tongue, castrates."
Although it didn't dominate Shakespeare's language until the 21 years, that author with Polish accent mark finished transforming in an astonishing way into one of the best writers in English tongue of all the times.
"Conrad has had more influence in the literature of the XX century than any other writer" he commented, to Efe, Keith Carabine, chairman of the "Society Joseph Conrad" of the United Kingdom.
For that reason, the anglo-Polish novelist's books, plagued of antiheros that dive in the dark of the human soul, they have marked authors like Ernest Hemingway, Graham Green, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf or Gabriel García Márquez.
Also, Conrad is early at his time when approaching certain topics, "not because he is a prophet - precise Carabine -, because it hates people that pontificates on the future", but for his analysis" "power.
The writer specifies, for example, the cruel goods of the white colonization in "The heart of the darkness", maybe his more influential book that also includes the famous scream "The horror! The horror!", uttered by perverse Kurtz in Belgian Congo.
Same, the former sailor predicts the future and wild-type expansion of the American capitalism in "Nostromo", (1904) as well as the international terrorism in "The secret (1907)" agent.
They are issues, by the way that will give foot to the debate the proximate one December 6, in National Portrait Gallery of London, where he/she will meet a round-table with writers like Colm Toibin or Iain Sinclair to remember this anniversary.
The novelist also inspired contemporary "big film directors, as (Alfred) Hitchcock or (Francis Ford) Coppola", the director of the Institute Cultural Pole affirmed in London, Pawel Potoroczyn.
Coppola, to mention a director, made a version very free of "The heart of the darkness" in its successful movie "Apocalypse now", (1979) where it transfers to the war of Vietnam (1959-1975) that horror covered in the human conscience that scans the novel.
In fact, British (British Film Institute, BFI) Filmoteca has celebrated during all November Conrad's birth with a cycle of more than twenty movies inspired by its works.
The writer died August 3 from 1924 of an attack to the heart and it was buried in the cemetery of Canterbury, the city of the stories. In the tablet, sculpted to chisel blow, it figures with three misspellings their original name, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and some versos of Edmund Spenser by way of epitaph:
"The dream after the effort / the port after the tempest / the rest after the war / the death after the life, full they please...".
"Apocalypse now" of Francis Ford Coppola is a version free of "The heart of the darkness", perhaps Conrad's more influential book.
