Guest of the ilb 2007
Edgardo Cozarinsky
was born in Buenos Aires in 1939. He studied literature in his native
city and founded the film magazine »Flashback«. In the sixties and
seventies he wrote film reviews and essays, among them »El laberinto de
la apariencia« (1964; t: The labyrinth of appearance) on Henry James.
In 1974 he edited the volume »Borges y el cine« (1988; Eng. »Borges
in/and/on Film«, 1988), a collection of film reviews by Jorge Luis
Borges. Cozarinsky was awarded an essay prize by the newspaper »La
Nación« in 1979 for »El relato indefendible« (t: The indefensible
account), an essay on gossip as narrative form. In 1973 he settled in
Paris after leaving Argentina to escape the climate of populist
authoritarianism and cultural repression which took hold following the
reelection of Juan Perón as president.
Cozarinsky first became
well-known in Europe for his extensive cinematic work. He made many
feature films here, including »Les apprentis sorciers« (1977; t: The
sorcerer's apprentices), »La guerre d’un seul homme« (1981; t: One
man’s war) and, more recently, »Citizen Langlois« (1995) and »Ronda
nocturna« (2005; Eng. »Night Watch«). Alongside this, Cozarinsky also
wrote scripts and produced a series of documentary-style portraits of
artists, including Jean Cocteau, Sarah Bernhardt, Italo Calvino,
Vincent van Gogh and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Whilst seriously ill Cozarinsky
began to devote himself to his literary passions. Since then he has
published three plays and several collections of short stories which
have been translated into many European languages. As in his essays on
film, which are a fusion of fiction and documentation, the boundaries
between reality and fantasy in his writings become permeable. In »Vudú
Urbano« (1985; t: Urban Voodoo) he embarks on a »sentimental journey«
from which he posts thirteen so-called »postcards«. These are fictional
anecdotes, meant to trigger images in the reader’s imagination, that
are based on collective clichés and comparable to postcard pictures.
Cozarinsky wrote this book in English – in the language he calls
Foreigner’s English – with the intention of making the original
untraceable. It was preceded by a foreword by Susan Sontag and
Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
He also writes about the city,
exile and travel into the past in the seven stories that make up »La
novia de Odessa« (2001; Eng. »The Bride from Odessa«, 2004). His book
»El rufián moldavo« (2004; Eng. »The Moldavian Pimp«, 2006) was
translated into German in 2007. The short novel depicts a doctoral
student’s research on Jewish theatre in Argentina. The search for
traces in the Buenos Aires of the thirties soon becomes a confrontation
with his own ancestry.
Cozarinsky recently published
the collection of short stories »Tres fronteras« (2006; t: Three
borders) and the novel »Maniobras nocturnas« (2007; t: Nocturnal
manoeuvres). He has been living back in Buenos Aires since the nineties
and also in Paris.
© international literature festival berlin
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