“The certainty that governs me is that whatever I do, my emotions and my affections come into play there, without my suggesting it. It is from Buenos Aires, my city, where the best of me comes to me, these are my words and the way I put them together (…) From there also comes the way I am happy and not happy, which is the understanding of our own unique archetypality.” Luisa Futoransky’s digression (Buenos Aires, 1939) corresponds to the prologue of her poetry collection Inclinaciones (2006), the first part of the series included in Los años Leviatán (2025), published this year by Claudia Schwartz and Gerardo Pico Manfredi.
Futoransky’s words resonate not only as a general voice of identity, but also as belonging to a language that is constitutive of his poetics. Futoransky appropriates a tango because the language of that tango is his language, and he paraphrases it: “No one, but no one is the same, as far as you know, Buenos Aires, no one with your skin or with your voice.” Claudia Schwartz reports on this in the “Editorial Note” of this issue, pointing out that in Futoransky’s poetry there is an intrusion of a “Buenos Aires language, River Plate speech and vivid portraits of a world – this world – that throws her once again from this ruthless and dull terroir, a tireless repetition of the nightmare.”
Futoransky began his long exile in 1976 to Japan and then to China. Today she lives in Paris, speaks French, English, Hebrew and Italian. In addition to her work as a poet, she is also a novelist, journalist, translator and lawyer. She studied music with Cátulo Castillo and Anglo-Saxon poetry with Borges. He published novels such as Son Cuentos Chinos (1983), El Formosa (2009) and Noveleta (2013).
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
Futoransky makes it clear that when he arrives in a city, even the French capital where he lives, he feels the need to take photos, which is not the case when entering Buenos Aires, where “not even the details are in danger of being forgotten (…). The old images usually fight arm in arm with the new ones and sometimes they win, but not always.”
This edition completes the trilogy on which the author began working in Paris with the writer Mariano Rolando Andrade and from which emerged the Argentine Years (2019), the Pilgrim Years (2022) and now the Leviathan Years (2025), which brings us even closer to the skin and voice of Luisa Futoransky’s poetic universe, like a return of one’s senses and the exiled utopia of the eternal Return nourishes. Sometimes, however, or whenever, and in the form of verse, the poet says it: “If I know/ that it is home/ that it will return/ I will/ better return home/ in the middle of spring/ but if it must be now/ I leave the demand aside/ fragrant orange blossoms and a warm breeze/ it is enough/ that I see it.”
The Leviathan Years
Author: Luisa Futoransky
Genre: Poetry
Other works by the author: They are Chinese stories; From Pe to Pa; magpies; estuaries; tendencies; The Formosa: nettles; novella; cave painting; March by day; The Argentine Years; Humus… humus
Publisher: Leviathan, $40,000
About The Author
