Romanian writer and poet Alina Diaconu, A nationalized Argentine, she defines herself as a “book eater.” A simple visual tour of her bright apartment in a stately and old building in San Telmo is enough to verify it. Most of the walls are covered with libraries, works of art, photographs and memorabilia, but in an order that doesn’t overwhelm; on the contrary, they transmit tranquility and beauty. Perhaps that constant search for harmony has a lot to do with what he experienced during his adolescence, in the family home.
He was born in Bucharest in 1945, in a house full of art. Her father, Aurel Vladimir, was a critic and collector. “I loved painting, I could describe one by one the paintings that were in the house,” he recalls. That collection, of one hundred paintings, remained anchored in Romania, when the family was forced to emigrate. “We couldn’t take anything of value because they were part of the national treasure, and when my father tried to sell them they offered him a ridiculous sum. He then decided to give them to each friend who came to say goodbye to us, ”he summarizes.
His mother, Varinka, was an artisan bookbinder. “If King Carol II had an important gift to give, he would order a book from him. And the communists, when they needed to give something to Stalin, too. He did exhibitions and had collectors. He was using a medieval technique,” she recalls.
In 1959, with the help of Irina, a teaching aunt who lived in Argentina, the local government was able to intercede with the Stalinist regime and the Diaconú were able to leave Europe. “The trip was in prehistory, on the Conte Grande, the same ship in which García Lorca had arrived in this country,” she summarizes. Here, at the age of 14, he underwent the language transition, but was able to adapt to the new reality of a country where there was still hope. “He only spoke Romanian and French. When I started going to Mallinckrodt, a German school, I couldn’t communicate, and there Luisita Miguens -daughter of the filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg and Carlos Miguens- helped me a lot. With her I was able to start a dialogue and, little by little, I incorporated Spanish”, he evokes.
The passage of time transformed his passion for letters into a trade that he mastered with relish. She was a columnist for the magazine Cultura and a contributor to the main newspapers in the country. She received numerous awards, such as the Fulbright scholarship from the University of Iowa, which led her to live in the United States in 1985; and the prize of the American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1994.
She is the author of twenty-one books in which she cultivated aphorisms, essays, poetry and novels, rubbed elbows with her countrymen, the philosopher Emil Cioran and the playwright Eugene Ionesco, and had the pleasure of maintaining a friendship of more than forty years with the prestigious Argentine plastic artist Guillermo Roux. Illustrated by him, he published Aleteos, in 2015, and the recent book-object And we will be like gods, conceived during the pandemic and edited by Estudio India, by Eugenia Rodeyro and Victoria Blanco, in an elegant black case that carries three volumes.
NEWS: Is your latest work like the swan song?
Alina Diaconu: Something like that. I say that it is like my “golden book”; the culmination of a lifetime dedicated to literature. It is divided into three parts: vehemence, impotence and wisdom. It is like the journey of a life where I explore love, death, illnesses. We are supposed to be passionate when we are young, then we suffer from unfulfilled things or failures, and at a certain age we have the experience that brings us wisdom.
NEWS: Are the works that Roux created his artistic testament?
Deacon: Yes, he had had mobility problems for years, and used a wheelchair, but he looked fine. When I brought him the model of the book he was in good spirits, as always, and a week later they had to hospitalize him and he died. All this was very hard. Franca, his wife, always took care of his works, but he had a secretary for all the daily things. In a call he told me that Guillermo was not going to get better because he had a fatal leukemia and that he had something for me. It was a copy of Rosa in the desert, my previous book, illustrated with a photo of a portrait that he had made of me, totally intervened with drawings made days before he died.
NEWS: How did you meet?
Deacon: Forty years ago I wrote opinion columns in La Nación. He was my reader and he liked those notes on everyday life. One day he sends me a letter and behind it a sketch of the mural he did for the Pacific Galleries. I met him and Franca in person at the house of a mutual friend, the writer Marta Lynch, one Sunday night over spaghetti dinner. The link was maintained because we had other acquaintances with whom we met, the painter Raúl Alonso and the poet Alberto Girri, who was like a kind of life brother.
NEWS: Is it difficult to continue betting on poetry?
Deacon: It is the only thing that can save us, art is our lifeline in these dark times. It has been during the pandemic and it will be until the day I go elsewhere. Both art, aesthetics, and living good times. Tomorrow… I don’t know what can happen.
NEWS: What impression do you have on humanity today?
Deacon: I lived it all. From communism to the military dictatorship that in ’78 censored a book for me (Good night, teacher). I know what the two systems are and finally the struggle is still the same. Here and everywhere. I think the world is on the brink of the abyss. I do not say it as a tragedy, but as a reality.
The fact of being born in another country, having traveled so much in my life, allows me to always see things as if I were on a plane: from a certain distance. I do not say objectivity because that does not exist. I look and see that we are on the edge.
It’s like the end of something. It is a world that is in absolute decline, in every sense. There will always be a struggle between one power and another. I don’t know if we are not on the verge of a possible third world war because of what is happening between Russia and Ukraine. Here in the country I see a huge decline. I knew an Argentina and a Buenos Aires in the 60s that was an explosion of freedom and culture. I am a person who has followed a very important spiritual path and I believe that if there is no spiritual revolution this will end, and what has to change is one internally. The Indian philosopher and writer Krishnamurti had a book with a title that says it all: Individual peace is world peace.
