Thursday 13.6.2024
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Last update 8:53
On Wednesday, June 6, Beatriz Vignoli presented Song of Defeat. Essays 1990-2023 (7 Vidas Ediciones), which represents the first book of essays by an author of numerous works. The event was held at Oliva Libros (Entre Ríos 579, Rosario) and included the participation of the editor Patricio Bordes, the writer Marcelo Britos and the graduate in Literature Magdalena Aliau.
About the work Vignoli says: “It is my first book of essays. The subtitle is Reunified Essays 1990-2023. It covers an arc of 33 years of collected essays. This book has just been published by a new publishing house, Santa Fe, based in San José del Rincón, which is a town near Santa Fe Capital. The publishing house is called 7 Vidas Ediciones and is directed by Patricio Bordes. It is a compilation that we made between the two of my rehearsals in that period of time.”
This medium was present at the event and spoke with the author.
Beatriz Vignioli in first person
-How did the title Song of Defeat come about?
-The title was chosen by the editor Patricio Bordes. That’s the name of one of the texts. It is a book of collected essays. I tell you that the original file provided a fairly extensive corpus of texts that we filtered. In the first set there were unpublished ones and the best ones remained. There were writings that I did not dare to publish and that remained in the drawers or that I sent and did not hear any more.
-Are there reviews in the book?
-In the book there are no reviews, what there are are essays, that is, the development of a thought through prose, it is not a review where the possible value of a work is commented on. In the essays there is a drift of thought that flows through the prose. All the texts in the book have that in common, some are even more narrative, and were published in the back cover section of Rosario /12, which is a section of rather literary texts and not necessarily classifiable within a genre. Some works were found in boxes. One of the texts that I include was part of a work of art, that is, it was read as a performance in the year 90. A performance, as part of a collective work by the Rozarte group, and the text is called, like the work , “Memory of Argentina” and circulated like a flyer, from hand to hand, on paper. There is a presentation from the Tomarte Biennial, also from the year 90, and a text that is an essay that I really like and was published in the Grandes Líneas supplement of the newspaper El Ciudadano at the end of the 90s.
Gentleness
What is common about these texts is that they drift. They start from a theme to navigate through different disciplines and the rudder there is prose.
-There is a peculiarity of this work that was published in El Ciudadano.
-Yes, I was able to rescue it thanks to AHIRA, the Historical Archive of Argentine Magazines, because it was digitized there. I have it on paper, but I had to look for it. Let’s say, it’s not that I accessed my entire file, only the part that I have organized. “Song of Defeat” was a note that I had taken on the back cover of Rosario /12. At that time I lived in San Telmo, in a boarding house, and the newspaper Página/12 was very close to me. I would walk down a street, I would go with the photocopy of the typewritten original, and from Buenos Aires they would send it by fax to Rosario/12.
A vertigo from another time
-What influence does typing have on your essay prose?
-There is an essayistic prose in me that was formed with that technique, because when you are in front of a typewriter you do not have much possibility of correcting, so you stand in front of the machine with the attitude of writing the definitive version. That’s what the typewriter has, and that’s what my essays from the 90s had. I think that later they didn’t have it, there is a drive, a performative attitude in those texts, like the player who goes out onto the field, to improvise knowing that that improvisation It will be the definitive text, because there is no going back.
Jackson Pollock said that his painting was like that, because he created lines by dripping paint from a leaky can onto the canvas placed on the floor. The Citizen’s note that I compiled there in the book talks about that, about the painter, who cannot turn back, who improvises and moves the can and that line remains, and that is what it is, and that also remains forever. .
In that same essay I write about the jazz musician who improvises. In jazz, improvisation also has immense value, it is what is called the choir and each musician shines with their instrument, without leaving what harmony is. A melodic line is created at the moment and if that is recorded, that is what will remain. My writing was a bit like that in the 90s. I’m playing this tomorrow, I quote Cortázar there in that note because it’s “I’m playing this tomorrow.”
-What was the vertigo of typing?
-Typewriting had the vertigo of the 20th century. That is why for me it is very valuable to rescue these writings, typewritten, with the typewriter, with that impossibility of going back, without the possibility of rewriting that you have now.
-What method makes you feel most creative?
-That old typewriter method. Returning to the title of the book, I wrote it when Argentina was left out of the 94 World Cup when Maradona tested positive for doping. “Song of defeat” is that defeat, when “they cut off Diego’s legs,” which is where a whole popular debate appears at that time, which I half unconsciously put into that text.
-It revolved around the difference between defeat and failure. Does a defeat imply a failure or are they two different things? Marcelo Bielsa says that a defeat is not a failure.
When Patricio reads the essay today, 30 years later, he thinks of it as a political allegory. That is a reading that seems very valid to me, because at that moment, in the text, I did not make the context explicit, that is, there is a very interesting issue of communication. I’m interested, because they were times of defeat and no one wanted to talk about the political defeat. It had been just 5 years since the Berlin Wall had fallen, and 3 years since the Soviet Union had fallen. We had been in Menem’s government for 4 years and no one wanted to talk about it.
The year 94 was just when the illusion that with the dollar peso we were going to get somewhere began to crack. The peso dollar is beginning to falter due to the Tequila Effect and everything that happened in Mexico. Our illusion dissolved, because soon the floats became pumpkins again, and the horses became rats again, then one said, what a vote! I didn’t vote for him! Nobody dared to talk about it, life went on as always, but with less and less money, less hope and less future. In this context, we allowed ourselves to cry for Diego, for football.
Gentleness
-The spirit that is in the book…
In the book is the defeat of the working class at the hands of neoliberalism. Patricio told me: we have to talk about this, we haven’t dared to talk about this defeat for 30 years, and we have to talk about it like this, like a song. The class defeat. Defeat, the minstrel who comes with a guitar and tells you the joke. We must talk about class defeat, because what we have called the middle class all our lives is actually a working class that was able to progress thanks to the policies of the Welfare State, which we no longer have now.
-Is the Welfare State a thing of the past?
-Of course it’s a thing of the past. So, there is great relevance in that title, this is what the editor proposes, because this is the moment when things are very clear.
-A back cover that not only gives the book its name, but can also be read today…
Perfectly. And it will be read with today’s eyes, like that premonitory nightmare, like that collective unconscious that at that moment spoke to us in symbols, through sport, through metaphor, “they cut off our legs,” “they cut off my legs.” the legs”, and which is now going to be read completely. We are going to be able to read the deep meaning of that metaphor, and therefore that title.
Title: Song of defeat. Trials 1990-2023
Cover art: Germán Lavini
Cover design: Nati Fessia
Bio photo: Maxi Conforti
Publisher: 7 Vidas Ediciones
