A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
Aurora Venturini’s career has been defined by the will of a long-distance runner. Born in 1922 in La Plata, Argentina, from a very young age she knew that her relationship with language was different, that she had a very special connection to it, and even as a child she took refuge in words and in reading.
The cousin of her paternal grandmother was none other than Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the celebrated author of The Leopard. But the person who really served as her guide, in terms of writing and reading, was her grandfather, Juan Bautista Venturini, with whom she maintained a close relationship. As the years passed, his persistent influence would prove indispensable.
When she was nineteen, having recently earned her teaching certificate, Venturini starting working as a teacher to pay for her studies at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where she was taking courses in Philosophy and Education Sciences. Seven years later, she had already published numerous books of poetry, and added a profoundly distinct voice to La Plata’s literary history, augmenting its mythical status as “the city of poets.” Critics have often praised her lyricism and the formal mastery of her poetry, displayed in titles like Versos al recuerdo, El anticuario, Peregrino del aliento. In 1948 her book of poetry El solitario won the Premio Iniciación, which the author accepted from the hands of Borges himself.
Even though the radical party reigned in her family, she became a supporter of the man running the country at the time: Juan Domingo Perón. Due to her political affiliation, before long, she began to write speeches for the wife of the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Elena Caporale. Later on, Elena introduced her to Eva Perón—a woman who changed her life forever. Evita, whom she described as a “force of nature,” enjoyed her company, her sense of humor, and her passion for the thought of Heraclitus. Evita makes frequent appearances in the work of the writer from La Plata.
In 1956, a year after the overthrow of Perón, Venturini left for Paris. She studied psychology at the Sorbonne and became a member of the “existentialist group,” beginning a period of great professional fecundity. She became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, and Juliette Gréco. Aurora got married twice: the first time in 1956 to the judge Eduardo Varela and the second in 1993 to historian Fermín Chávez. She has translated and written critical essays on poets like Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, François Villon, and Arthur Rimbaud; her translations of the latter two won her the Iron Cross medal from the French government. She also published collections of short stories (Carta a Zoraida; relatos para las tías viejas), poetry (Laúd, La trova, La Plata mon amour), and traveled throughout much of Europe. In her short stories, the prose is intensely poetic, enriched by frequent autobiographical evocations, as stark as they are candid, and enriched too by the history and politics of those difficult years in Argentina, full of conflict, persecution, and flight.
When she returned to Argentina, she continued to write and publish with small, independent publishers. But recognition came to her in 2007. That year the Buenos Aires journal Página/12 organized and presented the Premio Nueva Novela, and her book Las primas ended up winning. An unsettling story, the committee described it as “A unique novel, extreme, of disconcerting originality, that forces readers to ask themselves many questions books tend to ignore or carefully keep quiet.” Convinced that new literature never depends on a writer’s age but on the thirst for adventure a writer retains, Venturini accepted the award emulating Flaubert: “Las primas c’est moi.”
THE ACORN
THE TORTURE OF DOCTOR JOHNSON
I think of the Golden Age playwrights and the surprising formal hybridity they managed. Lope de Vega, for example (along with many others), used the tragicomedy to convey his characters’ development. I had those authors as a point of reference for this first chapter of my novel, Las primas. I explain what the family of the protagonist, Yuna, was like: what her mother did, what her cousins were like, her sister, her aunt Nené, and the art professor, whose role in the development of the story is crucial. Yuna’s mother feels a profound detachment from her family in particular because her husband abandoned her with two very strange daughters. One is a handicapped girl, Betina, who’s in a wheelchair. The other is Yuna, the narrator, who loves to paint. In this first part I tried to describe not only this girl’s talent when she attends a fine arts school in La Plata, where she wins prizes at exhibitions, but also the astuteness of the professor. Yuna has trouble speaking, and since she can hardly read or write, she expresses herself through painting. She meets a professor who values her very highly and who tells her they’re going to show her work first in Buenos Aires and then in Europe. He tells her they’re going to travel and she jumps on the professor to kiss him and they fall over together. “No, Yuna, that’s not done. Because men are fire and women straw and the devil comes along and blows.”
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DEAD
I feel very close to Dostoyevsky, who for me is the greatest writer ever, especially in The Idiot. And also Pasternak, whose work I enjoy immensely, and Joyce, whose Ulysses I’ve read so many times. Incredible that everything takes place in one day. We’re so dynamic, so full of internal monologues. And I can’t forget Alberto Ponce de León; I often revisit his book, Tiempo de muchachas. I’ve also translated Villon, Rimbaud, the Comte de Lautréamont, and in Sicily I struck up a friendship with Quasimodo. Those are my literary dead. With respect to the others, to the dead in my family, the figure of my grandfather, Giovanni Battista, is very important. He was a wise man. He came to Argentina from Sicily, fleeing Garibaldi; he didn’t want a united Italy. He was a person who never rested and who read a lot, especially Dante, Virgil, Petrarch. He would tell me: “If you ever write a sonnet, write it like Petrarch or don’t bother.” He arrived in 1860, started a family, and, on top of that, gave us the nostalgia that all children of immigrants share.
CODA
Before leaving for Paris, you received a prize from Borges’s own hands, and later, when you were eighty-five, you won another award from young Argentine writers who considered you one of their own. Narratively, Paris was like an intermezzo between Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires.
I began writing here but I love Paris very much. It was the happiest time of my life, amazing to be in Paris at the height of existentialism. I entered university in 1942 and ended up with a doctorate in Philosophy and Education. Afterward, with the Revolución Libertadora in ’55, I had to leave, and in Paris I specialized in psychology. The French authorities were good enough to give me citizenship and I was able to work. Nothing like what happened to me in Argentina after the fall of Perón, where I was attacked over and over. But no one remembers that and no one talks about it. Because people who went to war don’t talk, the ones who talk are inventing, because if someone told what actually happened no one would think it was possible. But I went to Paris and that influenced me because I was with the greatest writers. I was with poets like Quasimodo, I took courses with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I was very close friends with Violette Leduc. We had such beautiful experiences, the nights we’d get together in the Latin Quarter. And now, here, the “youth” prize for Las primas opened the door to many opportunities, the novel has been adapted for the theater several times and has been translated into many languages.
A THOUSAND FORESTS
FROM LAS PRIMAS
[A NOVEL]
A disabled childhood
My mom carried a pointer when she taught and wore a white dustcoat and she was very strict but she was a good teacher in a suburban school for not the brightest kids from middle class families