Aurora Venturini

Aurora Venturini is an Argentinean writer who was born in La Plata in 1921. She put out nineteen books of poems between 1944 and 2007 and sixteen narrative books during the period from 1963 to 2006. Although most of her literary work had been published in author’s editions and without a significant reward in the world of letters, Venturini has lately achieved a special site in Argentinean narrative literature. Since 2007, when she won the Página/12 New Novel award for Las primas, her literature has started to be visible to the press, she has contributed with articles and short stories for Página/12 newspaper and the publishing house Mondadori has put her writings in print. Therefore many books written by Venturini were edited from that moment until now: Las primas (2009; 2011), Nosotros, los Caserta (2011), El marido de mi madrastra (2012), Los rieles (2013) and Eva. Alfa y Omega (2014).

Aurora Venturini’s Present Literary Work

Las primas, the novel that brought her renown as a writer, is a work specially composed for the literary contest organized by Página/12. Its main character, who narrates the whole story, is a young disabled girl who cannot write in a proper way. For that reason, the text is frequently ungrammatical and it presents many problems of punctuation. But the linguistic faults are not the only malfunction the novel shows. There is also a great disorder in connection with the characters’ moral life. This novel exposes heinous facts.

Venturini’s literary style had been defined by the characteristics of the texts published from Las primas to the present. Even though the formal transgression accomplished in this novel took a main part in Venturini’s achievement, it was not developed in the other texts. Instead of that, the common factor the books published after Las primas seem to have is certain reappearing subjects related to horror, deformities, perversion, immorality, etc. And Venturini’s success was mainly sustained by her dedication to these topics.

However, many of the texts published by Mondadori since 2009 are in fact reeditions of old Venturni’s writings, put to press years ago by other publishing houses. For example, the well-known novel Nosotros, los Caserta was written before 1969 and edited at least twice (in 1992 by Pueblo Entero; in 2002 by Corregidor) before Mondadori’s edition (2011). Besides, the book El marido de mi madrastra (2012), whose title and cover image anticipate the reappearance of dark subjects, is made up of twenty short stories, sixteen of which were first published in 1997, in the volume Hadas, brujas y señoritas. That means that only four were written by Venturini after 2007.

This gesture of going back to texts from the past, together with their rewrites and the mixture with present production, characterizes Venturini’s present literature. Among other things, she aims at earning a new recognition for her past literary work.

Bibliography

• Friera, Silvina. “Tal vez lleve dentro otra mujer mucho más joven”. Página/12. 4 de enero (2008): http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/4-8804-2008-01-04.html. 13/05/2013.
• Guerrero, Leila. “Quién le teme a Aurora Venturini” Gatopardo. http://www.gatopardo.com/ReportajesGP.php?R=157&pagina=1. 13/05/2013.
• Krapp, Fernando; Agustina Massa. Beatriz Portinari. Un documental sobre Aurora Venturini. Buenos Aires, 2013.
• Salerno, María Paula (2013). “La apropiación de los franceses en la obra de Aurora Venturini: traducciones y creación literaria”. En: Estudios argentinos de literatura de habla francesa: Herencia y transmisión, Lealtad y Traición, Literatura Comparada, Oscar Caeiro et al. Córdoba: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, pp. 323-327.
• Salerno, María Paula. “La construcción de la imagen de escritora de Aurora Venturini en diálogo literario con poetas franceses”. XXVII Jornadas Nacionales de Literatura Francesa y Francófona. Mar del Plata, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, en prensa. En prensa (2013).
• Salerno, María Paula. “La «nueva» narrativa de Aurora Venturini: textos de ayer y de hoy”. Actas III Congreso Internacional “Cuestiones Críticas (Año 2013). Rosario: Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literaria de la Facultad de Humanidades y Artes, Universidad Nacional de Rosario. En: http://www.celarg.org/int/arch_publi/salerno_mar_a_paulacc.pdf
• Salerno, María Paula. “Reescrituras y nuevas ediciones: los poemas de Aurora Venturini a través del tiempo (1953-2004)”, inédito (2013).