Argentine writer Tamara Kamenszain SEBASTIÁN FREIRE
Tamara Kamenszain (Buenos Aires, 1947) was, like Alejandra Pizarnik (to whom she dedicated unavoidable pages), like Mirta Rosenberg and like Juan Gelman, Argentine descendant of European Jews fled from the massacres in their native countries.
In each of these poets and in different ways, that position is decisive.
Tamara's father, Tobías Kamenszain, born in Poland in 1918 and died in Buenos Aires in 2000, was a senior leader of the Argentine Jewish community, and one of the leading figures in the work of the poet (or
poet
, as she preferred) : to him she dedicated one of her most deliberately constructed books,
El ghetto
(2003): “In your surname I install my ghetto”, it says in the dedication.
More information
The novel of the poem
It should not be inferred in any way that Kamenszain, who died at the age of 74 last Wednesday due to cancer, has experienced some form of discrimination or isolation; on the contrary, he was one of the central figures of a fundamental generation in the last 50 years and that includes his great friends Arturo Carrera and Juana Bignozzi. That mixture, that presence of something distant and alien in the writing itself is what has given Argentine (and American) poetry one of its most enduring distinctive notes.
The echo of my mother
(2010), affects that character: the memory of the other language (Yiddish) that reappears in the proximity of death and that makes him write: “I cannot narrate. / What past would serve me / if my mother doesn't knit me anymore? / Desmadrada then I'll stop… ”. The book extends the thread of other writers who worked on the disease and the loss of speech, such as another Argentine daughter of immigrants, Sylvia Molloy y su
Desarticlaciones
.
The echo ...
opens with the famous first verse of
Los heraldos negros
de Vallejo: "There are blows in life so strong ... I don't know." Kamenszain dedicated to Vallejo one of the essays in
The mouth of testimony: what poetry says
(2007), in which he makes a subtle reading of that line, centered on the ellipsis, on what interrupts the speech, on the blow that removes the word and imposes its not knowing, on what makes it go from the impersonal “there is ”To the subjective“ I don't know ”. It is not surprising that Paul Celan has been another of his most cited poets.
Testimony, story:
The novel of poetry
entitled Kamenszain to his collected work (Adriana Hidalgo, 2012, with a well-documented foreword by Enrique Foffani). Not because he intended to circumvent the boundaries between genres but on the contrary: because in those eloquent silences, in those detours, in those twists and distortions of saying a trajectory, a written life is encrypted. A life that includes his psychoanalytic journey, to which he dedicated a precious
Book of Couches
; her husband and father of her children, the writer Héctor Libertella (1945-2006), to whom she offered the precious
The Book of Tamar
. There are, of course, the poets, particularly the young people, to whom Kamenszain, contrary to what usually happens, was paying more and more attention:
The mouth of the testimony
, which contains the aforementioned chapters dedicated to Vallejo and Pizarnik, closes with one focused on three poets twenty or twenty-five years younger than her: Cucurto, Gambarotta and Iannamico.
Kamenszain is usually located within the generation of neo-baroque, or “neo-baroque,” as another of his friends called it, Néstor Perlongher, whose
Complete Poems
(1997) carry an epilogue by Tamara.
She also wrote the epilogue to
Medusario
(1996), a canonical anthology of the neo-baroque.
It was, in that sense, fully modern: it assumed that the poem must be written and also
thought
: all his essay work goes in that direction. In Kamenszain, moreover, criticism seems to acquire an intellectually gregarious sense: a conversation with his colleagues, living and dead, an attempt to understand what poetry is and what it means today. Without solemnity, without ever losing the smile that was also in his writings. In 2017, on the occasion of a congress on Pizarnik at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, we took long walks around the city together. The chronicle he wrote about that trip to Israel, which he had not visited since his adolescence, is a masterpiece of intelligence and humor.