The writer, translator and literary critic Marcelo Cohen (Buenos Aires, 1951), one of the greatest innovators of the fantastic in short stories and novels, passed away this Saturday at the age of 71.
His work -based on stories, novels and essays that he began publishing in 1972– includes titles like “The country of the electric lady” (1984), “The absolute pitch” (1989), “The end of the same” (1992)“O’Jaral’s will” (1995), “Where I was not” (2006), “The aquatics” (2007), “Ottro’s House” (2009), “Ballad” (2011), “Prosaic music ” (2014), “Something else” (2015, Stealth) and “Notes on literature and the sound of things” (2016).
Due to his inventiveness and experimentation, he has been recognized as the great innovator of the fantastic genre in Spanish in recent decades.
As a Spanish translator, he has interpreted more than 100 titles and covered the work of authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, Alice Munro, Clarice Lispector, JA Baker, JM Coetzee, M. John Harrison, Julia Armfield.
Also he directed the cultural magazine “Otra parte” together with his partner for years, the writer Graciela Speranza.
In July, he had received the Copper Rose from the National Library. The distinction, whose name refers to the invention of Erdosain, Roberto Arlt’s character in “Los siete locos”, recognizes the trajectory. In this way, his name was added to a list of notables that includes Juan Gelman, Mirta Rosenberg, Juana Bignozzi and Jorge Coscia, among others.
That award coincided with the release of his new book, “Llanto verde” (published by Editorial Sigilo), the second in a trilogy of short stories that began with “La calle de los cines.”
In these stories, Cohen returns to the river islands where he has placed his fiction in recent years, in an area that he has baptized “the Panoramic Delta”. He created that literary space in 2001 and in each of the works he traced the geography, fauna and flora, history, customs and political system of each one of them. The main common denominator of those archipelagos is “deltingo”, a crazy language that Cohen made grow page by page.
