Veronica Abdala
07/28/2021 2:54 PM
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 07/28/2021 2:54 PM
When she recalled the interview she had once, in her years of practicing journalism, with the American novelist William Burroughs, Tamara Kamenszain remembered a phrase that had shocked her: "You cannot write without being interrupted by life."
Now it is
the news of his death -
unexpected and fulminant - that has a full impact: the writer died this Wednesday at the age of 74, due to cancer.
A great poet, she recovered the word "poetess".
He explained it: "Poetisa is a sweet word, which we put aside
because it embarrassed us
, and yet now it returns in a handkerchief that our ancestors tied to the throat of their hoarse lyrics."
She was also an essayist, teacher, librarian, journalist, editor, briefly a stimulating cultural manager at the Ricardo Rojas Center at the beginning of the 90s: Kamenszain left behind a work with which she earned
a place in the sky of the great
Latin American authors and which is study material in universities in Latin America, Europe and the United States.
But above all, it leaves
the mark of his lucid and sensitive gaze.
His
poems and essays push us to
feel without ceasing to think
, to revisit, to contextualize: they
are texts that hurt
, as he liked to say, in the sense in which Roland Barthes defined aesthetic impact.
"He calls that wound 'the punctum'. If we used the controversial 'I like-I don't like it"', I would tell you that the stimulus that some art products cause me is my thermometer of whether something I liked or not, "he defined in 2020.
"If that doesn't happen to me with a book, with a painting, a play or a movie,
if it doesn't make me want to write, it's because it didn't touch me
, it didn't hurt me ... And the summum is when it not only encouraged me to write mine, but also and above all, it encouraged me to write simply ".
He was born in Buenos Aires in 1947. His poetry books -in
La novela de la poesía
his ten books devoted to the genre were gathered in a single volume-, won him among other recognitions the Konex de Platino in 2014, the
Prize of the Criticism of the Book Fair,
the First Prize for Poetry Festival de la Lira, the First Municipal Prize for Essay, the grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Pablo Neruda Medal of Honor from the Government of Chile.
They were also
translated
into various languages, including English, French, Portuguese, German and Italian.
His
essays
include
The Silent Text (1983), The Age of Poetry (1996), Love Stories and Other Essays on Poetry (2000);
The mouth of the testimony (2007) and An inoffensive intimacy.
Those who write with what there is (2016).
While in
the Tamar book
, published by Eternal Cadence in 2018 and which delved
into the narrative
, he faced his own
autobiographical memories
and a generation of authors who had made his arrival on the
scene in the 70s and was crossed for the tragic experience of the last dictatorship.
Kamenszain.
He mentioned Alejandra Pizarnik, Fogwill, Héctor Viel Temperley, and Nicanor Parra as key authors in his training / Photo: Luciano Thieberger.
In 1978, she had known firsthand
the experience of exile
: she traveled to Mexico, together with the writer Héctor Libertella, who was her husband: "We were very young and it was a wonderful time for us, there, where the work of the writers "remembered in relation to those years.
The last book by the author -who in her last years, worked as a Professor in the Arts of Writing Career at UNA-, dedicated to the Mexican writer Margo Glantz, is called
Girls in Suspended Times
, and was published by Eterna Cadencia in June of this year.
"
We women do not write to convince anyone
- it reads in the first of the poems of the series -. It seeks to come out of the closet right now, towards a new destination that was already written and that on the edge of its own revisited history, it never tired of waiting for us. "
Reading and writing is a duo that can only be separated when the head is raised from other people's pages to lean it back on one's own
Tamara kamenszain
While in the previous one,
Libros chiquito
s, by Ampersand - under that title he had proposed "to lower the pretense of solemnity and 'grandeur' that can be assumed to account for his own readings -, he had faced the review of his
training reader and as a poet
.
The generation
Member of a generation that also had among its references Arturo Carrera and Néstor Perlongher, recognized Alejandra Pizarnik, Fogwill, Héctor Viel Temperley, César Vallejo, José Lezama Lima, Mariano Blatt, Paul Celan, Witold Gombrowicz and Nicanor Parra as
key authors of his training
, in that exercise of rethinking himself in the present.
A path in which she was also assailed - and not infrequently - by the memories of close friends, such as
Enrique Pezzoni or Josefina Ludmer and Héctor Libertella
, with whom she had two children;
Mauro and Malena.
The book also gave an account, within the framework of that always dynamic process that is poetic production in Argentina, of the fate that
women authors
suffered - and do
.
His years at the helm of the Literature area of
the Centro Cultural Rojas
were updated in recurring mentions shared with
Batato Barea
, Alejandro Urdapilleta, Humberto Tortonese and
Fernando Noy
, among others, and references to poets such as Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, Rubén Darío, Marosa di Giorgio.
At the time, she had been attracted by aesthetics such as that of the underground of the 80s, to which she remained emotionally associated.
His books, poetry and essays, circulate translated into many languages, including English, French, Portuguese, German and Italian.
"Reading and writing is a duo that can only be separated when the head is raised from other people's pages to lean it back on its own," he said.
Up to that point,
the pleasure of reading
and her vocation as an author
were woven throughout her history
.
He did not deny
genres
, if what he played was reading or writing.
Nor did the recognition reveal her: her commitment to literature - to writing, which was also a job, in fact - was intimate and aesthetic, and therefore uncompromising.
He said, in his last interview with
Clarín:
"Reading for money for me is an essential part of reading. I don't have that romantic belief that writers don't have to have other jobs -such as journalism, teaching, editing, etc.- because their vocation would be spoiled. All of them helped me on the way down to earth,
away from mystifications and the attitude of supposed purity of the artistic.
From all of them I took and I continue to take, in addition to money to survive , more fruits than those that it would have obtained if it had always been dedicated exclusively to literature ".
News in development
Look also
Tamara Kamenszain: "Reading for money for me is an essential part of reading"
Alejandra Pizarnik: the "cursed" poet who went to the depths would turn 85