Arnaldo Calveyra

Arnaldo Calveyra (1929 – 15 January 2015) was an Argentine poet, novelist and playwright, living in Paris since 1960. In 1999, Calveyra was made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters for his contributions to the arts.

Life Calveyra was born in Mansilla, Argentina in 1929 and remained in the Entre Ríos Province for his early life. He died of a heart attack in 2015 in Paris.

Career Calveyra's first book of poetry, Cartas Para Que La Alegria, was much heralded by Carlos Mastronardi; in Victoria Ocampo's Sur magazine No. 261 (1959) Carlos Mastronardi wrote, "The pages of Cartas exhume remote happenings and hazy states of the spirit, a language of a sustained and unvarying tone that allows us to access volatile capacities. It's easy to feel how Calveyra negotiates expressive dilated forms, with incidental clauses that frequently capsize poetic essence. Attentive to the pure and docile nature he gives to the voices that come from its urgent intimacy, Calveyra dispenses with the heavy appoggiaturas and connectors that are themselves the strictness of logical language."

Like many Argentine artists and intellectuals, Calveyra emigrated to Paris in the 1960s buoyed by the dynamic cultural landscape there at the time. By the 1970s, the Guerra Sucia obstructed any possibility of a return to Argentina. Calveyra remained in Paris, where he worked with the English film and theater director Peter Brook and published his own works with the French publishing house Actes-Sud. In 1988, poet Juan Gelman recommended Calveyra to the Argentine publisher Jose Luis Mangieri (Libros de Tierra Firme), effectively reintroducing him to an Argentine audience.

Argentine literary critic Pablo Gianera recently wrote, "It isn't inexact to say that Arnaldo Calveyra never abandoned the Entre Rios (Mansilla) landscape, this primary terrain that gave forth to the almost adamic relationship he sustains with language. Everything he names, seems named for the first time ... Calveyra's language of discovery is a mechanic of surprisingly reversible time; with each word, he recovers with intimacy and pain that which no longer exists. It is the movement of memory that closes like a circle around origins and seizes forever those things that are as fleeting as light itself.".