Opening the Pandora’s Box of Latin American Women’s Writing
By Elaine Elinson
THOUGH AURORA VENTURINI wrote more than 40 books and was awarded the two top literary prizes in her native Argentina, the first English translation of her fiction, Cousins, was published only in 2023, almost a decade after her death. We, the Casertas is her second novel to appear in English, this month via Soft Skull Press. Both were translated by Kit Maude, the Buenos Aires–based literary translator who has also translated works by Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.
In addition to her many published novels, Venturini’s literary executor Liliana Viola estimates that she left behind more than 60 unpublished manuscripts, all written on a typewriter. Despite this volume of work, the author was not widely recognized during her lifetime. In 1948, she won the Premio Iniciación for her first book of poetry, El Solitario. Fifty years later, Cousins, published as Las Primas in Argentina in 2007, was awarded the prestigious Página/12 New Novel Prize—established to honor new writers!
In an online conversation with me, translator Maude explained his admiration of Venturini’s work and noted that “her reputation rose and fell but for most of the time was pretty much nonexistent until she won the award for Cousins, and even after that, the acclaim subsided fairly quickly.” It is only now, with a recent set of reissues and some first-time publications coming out from Spanish publisher Tusquets Editores, that her work is being more widely appreciated. “The tragedy is that she isn’t around to see it,” Maude adds.
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