The euphoria of the World Cup, in which an ocean of people filled the streets of Argentina, also had its literary black hole: a few hours before the final against France, Argentine writer Marcelo Cohen dies at 71. It didn’t take long for the shock of the news to be noticed. The views of the authors and authors were shared: Cohen the largest of this country’s letters and Latin AmericaWith a disposition inversely proportional to his impartiality and modesty, it led him to abandon all pursuits of prestige and notoriety as unnecessary: his books could speak for him without any other tinsel.
He was born in 1951 in the city of Buenos Aires to a Jewish family. He was a journalist and one of the greatest translators into Spanish in Latin America. He went into exile in Barcelona in 1975 before the coup and remained there until 1996. He was editor of the literary journal ‘Quimera’ and later ‘El viejo topo’. became one regular collaborators of the Catalan media.
imaginary regions
Cohen’s great literary career and as a translator began to flourish in Barcelona, where he published some of his first and canonical books, such as the series of short stories collected in ‘El fin de lo mismo’ or the novel ‘El testamento de’. O Jaral’. There we begin to glimpse some of the features that would define Cohen’s universe: A twist with the tongue with its idiomatic repertoirewords that can only be found on those pages, and also imaginary and disturbing zones JG Ballard, whose novels he has translated numerous times, may be related to Phillip Dick or Gene Wolfe. But Cohen was, above all, an Argentine writer who metabolized tradition and assimilated other branches, which led him to go through processes known as fantasy genre, but in his case it was just a misleading description. Cohen’s literature has no regional parallels, owing to the self-reliance of the imagination, the intersection of themes and concerns, the political and utopian in his stories. “The tireless renovator of literature’s horizon of possibilities, and therefore both its obsolete forms and servile and official use of languageico critic Juan F. Comperatore “never gave up on his desire to break the boundaries between realism and fantasy in works of imaginative rigor and plot skill.”
His readers formed a legion of passionate followers of every step taken. What is the best book? The arguments between them can be endless: some lean towards ‘El oido absolute’ (1989), others to the great novel ‘Where I Wasn’t’ (2006), and many lean towards the opening story series ‘Los acuáticos’. their world: Panoramic Delta. The narrator and critic Elsa Drucaroff has no doubts about this: “First decade and post-industrial spaces, the first literary representations of these wild capitalism-built spaces, I’ve read about them in Cohen’s novels and long stories. The first traces of a literature in which distrust of the progress of history produced silent stories and stories in which the narrative syntax was broken appear in his literature in the 1990s. And he adds: “He had a tremendous imagination and technical capacity to give it realism, materiality and coherence. I have seen this in very few writers in the country”.
jazz lover
Mastery, Cohen added a special musical touch. A lover of music with a special fondness for jazz, but open to any innovation, his stories are filled not only with imaginary music, but also with instruments and listening experiences. Cohen also became famous as the translator of not only Wolfe and Ballard, but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alice Munro, Clarice Lispector, William Burroughs, JA Baker, JM Coetzee, M. John Harrison, Julia Armfield, and others. “Translation requires a lot of discipline. In a way, he is like a taxi driver. The day you don’t work or the day you work less, the less you earn per month. You have to be very disciplined and I’m pretty neurotic, obsessed.” She was also a major cultural activist. Together with his wife and the great essayist Graciela Szperanza, she ran the journal ‘Otra Parte’.