Francisco de Asís León Bogislao de Greiff Haeusler (July 22, 1895 – July 11, 1976), was a Colombian poet known for his stylistic innovations and deliberately eclectic use of obscure lexicon. Best known simply as León de Greiff, he often used different pen names. The most popular were Leo le Gris and Gaspar Von Der Nacht. De Greiff was one of the founders of Los Panidas, a literary and artistic group established in 1915 in the city of Medellín.
De Greiff was born on July 22, 1895, in the city of Medellín, Colombia to Luis de Greiff Obregón and Amalia Haeusler Rincóna. His father was of Swedish ancestry and was the grandson of Karl Sigismund Fromholt von Greiffb, a Swedish engineer and geographer who moved to Colombia in 1825 and whose family had played an active role in the abdication of King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden. De Greiff's mother was of German descent, the daughter of Heinrich Häuslera (a German mechanic and cabinetmaker who emigrated to Colombia in 1839). De Greiff was also the great-grandson of Francisco Antonio Obregón Muñoz, who had been Governor of Antioquia between 1836 and 1841.
Greiff was baptized on August 11, 1895, at the Church Parish of Veracruz by Fr. Pedro Alejandrino Zuluaga with the names Francisco de Asís, in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, and León, in honour of Leo Tolstoy. His godparents were his paternal aunt Rosa Emma de Greiff Obregón and her husband Luis Vásquez Barrientos. Although of mixed Scandinavian-Germanic-Spanish-Criollo heritage, de Greiff's family had a strong Colombian identity and were part of standing mainstream Colombian society. His family background influenced many of his later works. He had four siblings, Leticia, Laura, Otto, and Olaf, and a half brother, Luis Eduardo.
On July 23, 1927, de Greiff married María Teresa Matilde Bernal Nicholls, a Colombian of English descent whom he met through his sister Leticia. They were married in a Roman Catholic ceremony in the Cathedral of Villanueva officiated by fr. Bernardo Jaramillo Arango a mutual friend of both families. Together they had four children: Astrid, an architect; Boris, a renowned chess player; Hjalmar, a cellist and editor; and Axel an architect who resettled in Sweden.
Greiff was educated at the Lyceum of the University of Antioquia in Medellín and went on to study engineering at the School of Mines of the University of Antioquia. In 1913 the administration expelled him along with other students for claims of being "subversive and disruptive" as a result of the political turmoil of the times and his leftist tendencies and associations. In 1914 he traveled to Bogotá as secretary ad hoc to General Rafael Uribe Uribe, a personal friend of his father. Once in Bogotá, he attended the Free University of Colombia and studied Law. He did not finish his studies, choosing rather to drop out of school and focus on his writings and poetry. As he put it, his decision to move to Bogotá was not to become a lawyer: "It was rather to get to know Bogotá.
When de Greiff returned to Medellín in 1914, he joined the tertulias that gathered in the local cafés of the city, most prominently the ones that met in the café of the bookstore El Globo. It was there that he became acquainted with the underground cultural movement of his time and began developing and experimenting the style of poetry that would define him later on.
A group of 13 young bohemian artist and writers that formed during that time became known as los Panidas, named after the god Pan, and included future prominent figures in the Literature of Colombia such as de Greiff and Fernando González. The panidas were influenced by the modernist movement in literature, which in Latin America became known as modernismo . This movement aimed to reclaim the already established European standards of art and literature and give it a modern and local character; the panidas thus became the precursors of modernism in Colombia, transforming the foreign and strange into local and tangent. De Greiff often exposed Colombian audiences this way, for example to the mystic land of Vikings and fjords by giving it a familiar antioqueño feel, a combination of the two worlds that were part of de Greiff’s life He also became known for his eclectic use of the language often using a lexicon so unfamiliar to most Spanish speaking audiences of that time that it would sound as if it were a foreign language, and introduced references to obscure or unknown authors and works of art and literature that were not part of standard curricula. Also present in de Greiff’s and the panida’s work was the influence of symbolism, and more significant that of parnassiastic thought, of creating poetry in its purest form to more closely resemble art. De Greiff described the purpose of the panidas in these words:
We were encouraged, above all, by a purpose of renewal. At that time poetry had become too academic. It seemed a mediocre thing, a thing which we must fight against. It was essentially that generational criterion that we were trying to impose.
The artistic group published a quincenal literary magazine called Panida in February 1915. This short lived publication of only ten issues was illustrated by Ricardo Rendón first directed by de Greiff, and later by Félix Mejía Arango. De Greiff had its works published for the first time in this magazine under the pen name Leo le Gris, the first one being his Ballad of the Mad Owls.
No sooner had the magazine been published than the Roman Catholic Church in Colombia banned for fear of corrupting the youth with its pernicious and extravagant content. The public reception was not welcoming either, the writing style of de Greiff and the other panidas was at the vanguard of its time, but too far-off from what mundane Colombian society was familiar with. It did however earn the praise and support of prominent Medellín literati such as writer Tomás Carrasquilla and journalist Fidel Cano Gutiérrez.
The magazine went out of circulation in June, mostly due to the dispersion of the panidas. De Greiff moved to Bogotá, and many others went into business leaving their artistic aspirations behind. Others chose the nihilist path of suicide. In 1925, when he published his first book Tergiversaciones, de Greiff dedicated it to the memory of "The 13 Panidas".
In 1925 now in Bogotá, de Greiff was now a regular of the tertulias that gathered in the Windsor café and part of the publication of a new vanguard magazine called Los Nuevos (es:The New Ones). Directed by Felipe and Alberto Lleras Camargo, de Greiff worked with other writers such as Jorge Zalamea and Germán Arciniegas among others as regular contributors to the magazine. Los Nuevos was of political, artistic, literary and social content, and aimed to challenge the remnants of exhausted romanticist writings, regionalist politics, and conservative society. This movement followed the path that the panidas had begun in Medellín and that was a representation of modernismo in Colombia much like the ultraist movement in Spain.
Influenced by Vicente Huidobro, de Greiff followed creacionismos standards of poetry, reinventing himself to make each poem unique, translatable, and truly poetic. His poetry is sometimes criticized as standoffish and intricate. He was devoted to the artistic form of poetry.
Starting with his first book Tergiversaciones in 1925, every one of his published books of poetry that was directed by him were named in order as mamotretos, which in Spanish loosely refers to a bulky jumbled collection of writings that could be loosely interpreted as a tome. The name was both an example of de Greiff's masterful use of language and his humility towards his work and himself. His eighth and last mamotreto would be Nova et Vetera, published a year before his death, and was a collection of new and old found poems of his from even before Panida.
Although de Greiff studied poetry, he had also been influenced by music as a child, and musical qualities guided both his poetry and his prose. Even though he did not follow the same musical path as his brother Otto, his knowledge and love of music drove him to seek and become Professor of Music History at the Conservatory of the National University of Colombia on September 1, 1946. The relationship of his poetry to music has been noted by Stephen C. Mohler in his doctoral thesis (The Poetic Style of León de Greiff, Ann Arbor, Michigan,1969). De Greiff had previously taught at the University from March 1940 to January 1, 1943, as Professor of Literature and Redaction at the Faculty of Engineering