“Juana Bignozzi. Everything comes together with the night”. Vanina Colagiovanni. Gog & Magog.
“Those who play important things / will not understand my life / a life too talked about / without death, the experts would say.” Although the poet Juana Bignozzi always felt like a porteña, she spent a large part of her life in Spain, where she worked as a translator for important publishers.
Before and after that long pause in his relationship with the city, he surrounded himself with poets, those of the magazine El Pan Duro, in his youth; and the young people who admired her and followed her on her return to Argentina. As Bignozzi had no children, some of them were her material and spiritual heirs, the ones who read each of her books and valued the indelible mark of her work on the Argentine literary tradition.
One of those girls is Vanina Colagiovannian excellent poet and storyteller, at the helm of one of the most interesting independent publishing labels: Gog & Magog, dedicated almost exclusively to poetry.
For that label, in a brand new collection that will publish biographies of great poets, he wrote the book “Juana Bignozzi. Everything comes together with the night”. (The next poet to be biographed will be Irene Gruss by Daniela Pasik).
As in any biography, Colagiovanni covers the life of Juana from her childhood to her death, in a choral work to which friends of the poet contribute their testimony, such as Beatriz Sarlo, Marina Mariasch, Santiago Llach, Martín Gambarotta, Martín Prieto, Andy Nachon, Osvaldo Bossi and their great friend, Marcelina Jarmaamong many others.
Colagiovanni herself was a regular visitor to the home of Bignozzi and her husband, Hugo; and she knows firsthand the circle of poets that surrounded the writer in Buenos Aires.
His mythical evil occupies a funny chapter and not so much, according to the intensity of the damage inflicted on the victim, in the biography. A trait of her character that distanced her from many young poets who admired her and that complicates her relationship with her closest friends.
Although fickle and capricious, Juana was also very sociable, and she liked to go out at night, until very late. A feature of the Buenos Aires of her youth, which in her return she found difficult to revive. “Woman of a certain order”, “Return to the homeland” and “Interior with a poet” are perhaps her most admired books, gathered in the volume “La ley tu ley”.
In the final chapter, the biographer manages to access Bignozzi’s most difficult-to-find book, the first, “Los límites”, which the poet banished forever from compilations and anthologies. The story ends with a poem from that volume: “If I died I would not have a love that thought: ‘I was going to be a poet’”.
A “conversed” life, without great tragedies or passions, which Colagiovanni tells with humor, detail and all the nostalgia of affection.
other biographies
Always an interesting genre, with readers willing to unravel the secrets of other lives, the biography has resurfaced this year. In recent months some very interesting ones have been published for different types of readers; those who prefer a very documented and meticulous work, almost academic, or those who prefer a good story that is also based on real events. Here are some of those titles.
Warhol. Life as art. Blake Gopnik (Taurus)
This spectacular biography of the North American artist has more than 1,000 pages and is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date reviews of his life and work. Each chapter is titled with the years that are investigated within those pages, in detail. Gopnik was head of the Art Criticism section of The Washington Post and is an impeccable researcher.
Soriano. A story. Angel Berlanga (South American)
Fair biography of a fundamental author of Argentine literature that today, due to the maelstrom of the market, is not read as much as it should. Berlanga is also a journalist and, like Soriano, works at Página12. In “Soriano” he creatively combines the documentation at his disposal, testimonials, novels and notes, to put together a biography that escapes the usual paths of the genre. A must read if it is about honoring or discovering the creator of “There will be no more sorrows or forgetting”.
Bemberg. Life and work of a filmmaker with her own style. Celina Arreseygor. The Athenaeum
This biography is part of a series published by El Ateneo, which also edited “Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo. Biography of an encounter” by Irene Chikiar Bauer. Three exceptional women and the testimony of her passage through the world.
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