Tununa Mercado

Tununa Mercado, May 1993, at a writers' congress at the Catholic University of Eichstätt in Bavaria

Tununa Mercado (born December 25, 1939 in Córdoba , Argentina ) is an Argentine writer and journalist .

Life

Tununa Mercado was born the daughter of a lawyer ("el Negro Mercado") and a clerk in Córdoba, Argentina. Officially registered as Nilda Mercado, her relatives have called her "Tununa" since 1941 at the latest, and this is the name the budding author used to sign her first newspaper articles. Her family valued literature, painting, and education in general; her father was a sought-after speaker, whose published speeches gave his daughters important ideas for their school essays.

From 1958 to 1964 Mercado studied "Filosofía y Letras" (humanities and literary studies) at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba , among others with Noé Jitrik , whom she married in 1961 and from whom she had two children, Oliverio (born 1962) and Magdalena Jitrik (born 1966). Although she was only missing two exams for the university degree, she gave up her studies in 1964 when she moved to Buenos Aires ; later they did not bring him, because with the military coup of 1966, Juan Carlos Onganía she went along with her husband and children into exile after Besançon ( France ), where she held courses on Latin American history and regional studies. So she experienced May 68 there and drove to Paris almost every day to be closer to what was happening.

In 1970, Tununa Mercado and her family returned to Argentina, where she settled in Buenos Aires and worked as a journalist for the daily La Opinión , which was considered a reservoir for progressive intellectuals, at a time that was marked by numerous strikes and demonstrations. After the coup in Chile in 1973 , when Pinochet came to power, Mercado and her husband got involved in solidarity work with Chile. In September 1974 Noé Jitrik was given a six-month visiting professorship in Mexico. His wife was to follow suit with the children some time later, but had to leave the country in a hurry due to anonymous threats from the Triple A ( Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance ); The planned vacation trip turned into a long-term exile in Mexico .

In 1975 Tununa was involved in founding a solidarity organization for Argentine exiles in Mexico; There she also organized a cinema circle, which became the cultural meeting point of the exile scene, and a reading circle, which dealt with Hegel's phenomenology of the mind . In Mexico, she initially worked as a " freelancer " in various media, including Femme, one of the first feminist magazines, and in the press department of the Dirección de Artes Plásticas of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA). Finally, she took over the editing of the “Los otros continentes” (The Other Continents) section of a Mexican weekly.

In 1987 (a few years after the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983) she returned to Buenos Aires, where a year later her work Canon de alcoba , written in exile, was published by Ada Korn. In 1990 the same publisher published the volume En estado de memoria, a text that is difficult to classify in terms of genre, and which gives a loose look at experiences from exile and return (“desexilio”). In 1994 La letra de lo mínimo was published by Beatriz Viterbo (Rosario), and in 1996 La madriguera by Editorial Tusquets, Buenos Aires. A second edition of En estado de memoria was published in 1998 by Alción Editora, Córdoba, and in 2005 by Planeta in Buenos Aires Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad, a work that is somewhere between the novel, biography and contemporary history and by a Spanish-French exile acts.

Prices

• 1967 Award of recognition (Mención de honor) of the Casa de las Américas ( Cuba ) for Celebrar a la mujer como a una pascua .
• 1988 Premio Boris Vian for Canon de Alcoba as best book of the year in Buenos Aires.
• 1998 Guggenheim grant.
• 2004 Premio Konex “Diploma al Mérito” in the narrative genre for the years 1999–2003.
• 2007 Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico) for Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad .

Works

The texts by Tununa Mercado are characterized on the one hand by a fine erotic note ( Canon de alcoba ), on the other hand by a pronounced tendency to insert non-fictional elements into the narrative texts, so that they are often difficult to classify as a genre, and one entirely represent demanding reading. A recurring motif is that of exile, homelessness, the vulnerability of the individual.

Novels

• En estado de memoria , Buenos Aires: Ada Korn Editora, 1990 (second edition Córdoba: Alción Editora, 1998).
• Yo nunca te prometí la eternidad , Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2005.

stories

• Celebrar a la mujer como a una pascua , Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1967.
• Canon de alcoba , Buenos Aires: Ada Korn Editora, 1988.

Essays

• La letra de lo minimo , Rosario (Arg.): Beatriz Viterbo, 1994.
• Narrar después (El Escribiente) , Rosario (Arg.): Beatriz Viterbo, 2003.

Translations

German

• "Warrior love", translated by Eva Schikorski, in: Do the pearls fall from the moon? Latin American love stories . Edited by Mempo Giardinelli and Wolfgang Eitel. Munich / Zurich: Piper, 1991.
• “The power of looking”, translated by Gotthardt Schön, into: Explorations. 21 Narrators from the Río de la Plata . Berlin: Volk & Welt, 1993.

English

• In a state of memory . Jean Franco (Introduction), Peter Kahn (Translator). University of Nebraska Press (April 2001). ISBN 978-0803282698
• Canon De Alcoba: 24 (paperback), Monica Bar Cendon (translator). ISBN 978-8483024973

French

• Mémoire argentine . Traduction de l'espagnol (Argentine) par Nicolas Goyer revue par Jacques Leenhardt. Paris: Editions Sabine Wespieser, mars 2004.

literature

• Guillermo Saavedra: The impertinent curiosity. Entrevistas con narradores argentinos (interviews). Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1993. (Spanish)
• Erna Pfeiffer : Exiliadas, emigrantes, viajeras. Encuentros con diez escritoras latinoamericanas . Frankfurt / Madrid: Vervuert / Iberoamericana 1995, ISBN 84-88906-19-6 ; ISBN 3-89354-073-3 (Spanish)

Web links

• Literature by and about Tununa Mercado in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Espéculo : Article by Nora Ricaud on La Madriguera (Spanish)