Mariano Blatt is an Argentine poet and editor from Buenos Aires. He likes being a poet a little more than an editor, yes, because it has a “better aura”, he says after thinking about it for a few minutes. The publisher Blatt lived in Madrid for four years, between 2020 and 2024, when he created his publishing house Blatt&Ríos, which today extends its catalog to Spanish and Catalan writers. Blatt the poet will soon arrive in Spanish bookstores with a version of his book My united youth, —already published in Argentina by Ríos&Blatt and Mansalva – which will now be released on the La uÑa RoTa label.
He is 42 years old. There are no poets or writers in his family: his parents are “moderate, unsophisticated readers.” He grew up in a house with mostly popular, commercial, middle-class Latin American books. However, since he was little, he wrote stories and dreamed of becoming an editor. At the age of 18, he discovered the book war warby the Argentine poet and screenwriter Andi Nachón, and almost instantly a poet blossomed within him. He read these verses and returned home to write his own.
His career was born with digital technology, when at the beginning of this century on the social network Fotolog photos retouched with flash and neon abounded. There was an underworld interested in literature where Blatt got his start: “I belonged to a community of young artists and poets who used Fotolog to get to know each other, spread the word and find each other. » It was obligatory to upload a photo and he innovated by superimposing the poem on the image. There he met his people, who later were important in work, friendship and love.
The artist, DJ and the poet Perla Zúñiga was his companion for five years, until her death in July 2024 from cancer. They lived together in Madrid, where she devoted her final years to creating art based on her illness. From there was born I die, I love youhis only book, edited by Blatt after his death. In the prologue written by him, at his request, he states: “We had to work together on the most beautiful edition of the book. Unfortunately, we did not succeed. This is why I almost preferred not to touch the texts, with a few exceptions. I corrected a few verse cuts, something in the punctuation, not much else. I discussed all these corrections, in my own way, with an absent Pearl.” He says he imagined the dialogue, listening to her and assuming in which cases she agreed with him.
He feels this is a unique experience in his more than 20 years as an editor. It is a difficult challenge, professional and personal, that he has never faced, probably unmatched in the rest of his life, he believes. “I did it quite shortly before Perla’s death, with very fresh grief, but it had to be like this. We were working against time.” In her final days, they had almost finished it, but she was too weak to concentrate on the final details. “With this mandate in mind, I took courage, I took hold of the material and I revisited it, it was very hard, I made decisions. With all that there, raw.”
He lives his two personalities, poet and editor, 24 hours a day. Regarding editing, “it’s a profession, a professional practice like any other that can be learned. I may have more or better intuitions, but there is no secret”. In this profession he built his two houses: the Blatt&Ríos publishing house and the De Parado publishing house. The first has a limited catalog, between Argentina and Spain, with around 15 to 20 books per year. “There is little room to receive things. It fills up quickly with our readings, our worries.” Together with his friend and partner Damián Ríos, they publish what, as readers, they consider should reach others. There are Spanish speakers, Latin Americans, Argentinians, Spaniards, the living, the dead, the new, the translated, the young and the old. the geese by Álvaro Cruzado, for example, in the search for new local authors – in this case from Granada – or The archaeologist by César Aira, a well-known author in Argentina, with more than 100 books and candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature on several occasions.
De Parado is a publishing house weirdin the broadest sense of the term, which he founded with Francisco Visconti. “An Argentinian publishing house dreamed of by two gays,” Blatt explains. It was born as a publishing house ebooks gay erotic literature, but it transformed along the way. It is not clear exactly what the criteria for choosing publications are, but the catalog still makes sense. “I don’t ask actors who they sleep with, but it turns out they’re all on the spectrum.” weird“, he says and emphasizes, “if a heterosexual author brings us a completely heterosexual novel where there are absolutely no references, we are not going to publish it, because we are not even going to read it. “Ultimately,” he concludes, “all gays know what gay means.
“The girl who remembers / the boy who went / to the center to be / the skull of her time / the mother who cannot bear to see her daughter / sobbing over this parsley that is not worth a penny / and the taita, the tatita, indifferent to the suffering of his women / sitting at the bar table / intrepid / watching life go by / with no more company than a cognac / and the neighborhood boys / each more tormenting than the other / it must have been sensational / a time to have lived / I didn’t live it”.
Blatt does not seek to simplify poetry, nor to make it more accessible or popular. “Recently someone told me about one of my poems ‘I like your little poems’, and I liked that definition.” It is not a contrast with other more complex, difficult or grandiloquent poetry, he specifies: “it is the poetry that I was able to write, the one that came out of me, and that does not make it better or worse than any other”. Blatt’s writing is the product of an era, of a place at the end of the world, bathed in the interests and readings of an author who inhabits a mass of language from which he recovers the words of his poems. “I want to enrich my poetry with the Spanish language. All the available words, all the combinations, all the images that the Spanish language offers me and that life offers me.”
Poetry is not kidnapped by a privileged group, he believes, but rather it is everywhere: in the lyrics of songs, in graffiti, in the sentences of a group of friends, in popular songs and in the banners and flags of a demonstration. “Poetry is nothing other than an experiment with language.” He has no writing routine. Poems flow from him. He writes the first verse on his computer, then the second and third, and the magic appears.
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