Norah Lange

Norah Lange

Norah Lange (actually: Berta Nora Lange Erfjord, born October 23, 1905 in Buenos Aires , † August 4, 1972 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine writer.

Life

Norah Lange was born as the fourth daughter of a Norwegian engineer, Gunardo Anfin Lange, and an Irish-Norwegian mother, Berta Erfjord, in Buenos Aires, in the Villa Mazzini district, in a house on Calle Tronador, 1746, on the corner of La Pampa . However, she spent her childhood in Mendoza , where her father was transferred at the end of 1910. Among other things, he built dikes, explored the Río Pilcomayo (which is why he was jokingly called " Livingstone des Pilcomayo") and wrote several specialist books at the end of the 19th century.

After their father's death in 1915, the family returned to Buenos Aires, where they lived in the Belgrano district , in a house that was famous even then for its mother's salon with its literary gatherings (among the guests was the young Borges , Horacio Quiroga , Alfonsina Storni and Leopoldo Marechal ). Every Saturday evening, poems were recited there, cultural topics discussed and even tango danced . Through these family contacts, Norah felt drawn to poetry as a young girl, and she took an active part in the early avant-garde movements of the 1920s in Argentina. Together with Borges she founded the magazine Prisma (1922) and then Proa ; In 1924 the first number of Martín Fierro appeared with the famous manifesto of Oliverio Girondo , who would later become Norah Lange's partner: After a long informal cohabitation, they married in 1943 and remained a well-known artist couple until Oliverio's death in 1967, for whom Enrique Molina used the expression “Noraliverio “Coined.

Girondo was not only her lover and husband, but also her teacher in the literary field: he “forced” her to work very diligently and methodically and “corrected” her orthographic and other idiosyncrasies. The magazine turned against symbolism and modernismo ; In these circles, Norah Lange was considered the “ muse ” of Ultraísmo , as expressed in the famous sentence by Néstor Ibarra: “The Ultraísmo needed a woman and she got her in the form of Norah”. She was also usually the only woman represented in contemporary anthologies . She formed the center of a bohemian scene in Buenos Aires and was friends with Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca , among others . She was very respected and popular among the Martín Fierro group , and on various occasions she held humorous speeches, often appearing in disguise (e.g. as a mermaid, Oliverio as a captain). She later collected these speeches and published them in the anthology Estimados congéneres in 1968 .

Borges wrote the preface to her first volume of poetry La calle de la tarde (1925) and praised the clarity of her poetry. In 1926 she published her first novel, Voz de la vida . In 1928, at the age of 23, Norah made a trip to Norway in a cargo ship with 30 sailors; She processed this experience in her novel 45 días y treinta marineros .

Later she worked as a translator, "leaving the writing to Oliverio"; Since the serious accident of Girondo in 1961 she worked as his nurse, she published his collected works in 1968 and also donated the Premio Oliverio Girondo. She left the house on Calle Suipacha in 1444 to the Museo Fernández Blanco. Norah Lange died on August 4, 1972 - five years after the death of her husband.

plant

Often Norah Lange is known less for her own writing than for her extravagant, rebellious lifestyle and as the red-haired, eccentric companion of Oliverio Girondo. However, she was an important poet and prose writer; Her novels, especially Cuadernos de infancia , had about the same meaning for prose as Alfonsina Storni's poems were for poetry, breaking taboos that until then had barred women from touching on certain topics, especially erotic topics.

Complete edition

• Obras completas . Rosario (Argentina): Beatriz Viterbo, Ed. al ciudado de Adriana Astutti. Volume 1: 2005 ISBN 950-845-155-6 ; Volume 2: 2006. ISBN 950-845-176-9 .

Poetry

• La calle de la tarde . Buenos Aires: Samet Librero Editor, 1925 (with foreword by Borges)
• Los días y las noches . Buenos Aires: Sociedad de Publicaciones El Inca, 1926
• El rumbo de la rosa . Buenos Aires: Gate, 1930

Novels

• Voz de vida . Buenos Aires: Proa, 1927
• 45 días y treinta marineros . Buenos Aires: Gate, 1933.

• Cuadernos de infancia . Buenos Aires: Losada, 1937. Newer edition: 1995. ISBN 950-03-0079-6 .
  • German edition: Childhood notebooks. From the Argentine Spanish and with a presentation by the author of Inka Marter and an afterword by María Cecilia Barbetta. Lilienfeldiana Vol. 8. Lilienfeld Verlag, Düsseldorf 2010, ISBN 978-3-940357-19-9 .
• Antes que mueran . Buenos Aires: Losada, 1944
• Personas en la sala . Buenos Aires: Losada, 1950
• Los dos retratos . Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956.

Talk

• Estimados congéneres . Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968 (first published 1942)

Prizes and awards

• 1938 Premio Municipal for Cuadernos de infancia
• 1959 Premio de Honor of the Sociedad de Escritores Argentinos (SADE)

reception

For the (fictitious) 100th birthday of the author, a homage to Norah Lange was held in Buenos Aires in 2006; her collected works, including a previously unpublished novel, El cuarto de vidrio , were published by Beatriz Viterbo in 2005/06, with an introduction by César Aira and a foreword by Sylvia Molloy .

literature

• Nora Domínguez: Literary Constructions and Gender Performance in the Novels of Norah Lange. In: Anny Brooksbank Jones, Catherine Davies (Eds.): Latin American Women's Writing. Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis . Clarendon Press et al., Oxford et al. 1996, ISBN 0-19-871513-7 , ( Oxford Hispanic studies ), pp. 30-45.
• María Esther de Miguel : Norah Lange. Una biografía . Editorial Planeta, Buenos Aires 1991, ISBN 950-742-028-2 , ( Mujeres Argentinas ).
• María Gabriela Mizraje: Argentinas de Rosas a Perón . Editorial Biblos, Buenos Aires 1999, ISBN 950-786-223-4 , ( Biblioteca de las mujeres 9).

Web links

• Literature by and about Norah Lange in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Norah Lange in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Dissertation by Ana M. Miramontes (pdf file, in Spanish, with an English summary; 1.10 MB)
• El Barrio, Periódico de Noticias (in Spanish) about the house where she was born and the literary scene in Buenos Aires in the 1920s
• Palabra Virtual (in Spanish) Some poems by Norah Lange
• Página12 (in Spanish) Review by Leonor Silvestri
• Clarín (in Spanish) Article by Cecilia Fiel about the “rediscovery” of Norah Lange

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Actually as the sixth in the sibling series, because two brothers had died early before that: Alejandro at six months and Oscar at two years. The names of the other siblings are: Irma, Haydée (Borges' childhood sweetheart), Chichina, Ruth and Juan Carlos. Her date of birth was often given as 1906; like so many Latin American authors, she apparently wanted to make herself a year younger.
2. ↑ today Villa Ortúzar in Belgrano
3. ↑ Cf. Mizraje 1999: 211.
4. ↑ In his monumental novel Adán Buenosayres , he also refers to the house on Calle Tronador and the family living in it, which is called "Amudsen" in the literary text.
5. ↑ which incidentally in 1926 at the suggestion of Borges added the silent -h to her first name; thus she resembled Borges' own sister, the painter Norah Borges, cf. Mizraje 1999: 192f.
6. ↑ Cf. Mizraje 1999: 194.
7. ↑ Quoted in Domínguez 1996: 30.
8. ↑ Domínguez 1996: 30.
9. ↑ Cf. Mizraje 1999: 201.