Fantastic Metropolis

Angélica Gorodischer was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1928 but has lived for most of her life in the city of Rosario. She has published seventeen novels, many of them with fantastic or science fictional themes, and has won numerous awards. In 1996 she received the Dignity Award from the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights on account of her work for women’s rights. Her novel Kalpa Imperial (excerpt), widely considered a classic of contemporary Spanish language fantastic fiction, was recently translated by Ursula Le Guin and published in 2003 by Small Beer Press. Gabriel Mesa began interviewing Angélica Gorodischer by e-mail early in 2003 and finished the interview in person over a long, leisurely lunch at Vong Restaurant in New York City, where the author had stopped for a day on her way to WisCon. The interview was originally conducted in Spanish and then translated into English by Gabriel Mesa.

Gabriel Mesa: Let’s begin with what may be a trivial point, but it will save me some embarrassment when we meet in person. Someone was asking me recently whether there was any question, regardless of how silly, that an interviewer never asks a writer but that I would be curious to have answered. I responded that the first thing I always like to know about anyone, not just a writer, is how to pronounce their name so I don’t seem disrespectful. So, Angélica—is it GoROdischer o GoroDIScher?

Angélica Gorodischer: I don’t think it’s a silly question. One’s name is very important. It’s GoroDIScher. It’s my husband’s name. My fellow feminists ask me why I took my husband’s name and I answer: 1) I like Gorodischer more than Arcal (my maiden name); 2) my mother’s name was María Angélica Junquet and she was a writer and signed her name Angélica de Arcal—if I used my father’s last name I would still have to explain that I am not my mother; and 3) last but not least, there are no female surnames, all surnames are male surnames. Even in Iceland, where there are no surnames in the sense in which we use the term, people are called by the name of the father, which when you think about it is rather dubious. The only thing true and proven is that one is one’s mother’s daughter. As for the father… well, he’s the father because the mother says so. And in any event, I am free to choose. I choose my husband’s name: we’ve been married for over fifty years.

Gabriel Mesa: Many people seem to ignore that Argentina is a country that may be as diverse, in terms of the countries from which its population emigrated, as the United States, for instance. May I ask from where your and your husband’s ancestors came to Argentina?

Angélica Gorodischer: At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, Argentina said to the world: Come! And the world came, in a flood of people. And our grandfathers and great-grandfathers are still there, at our backs, just as they came from Spain, from Italy, from Syria, from France, from Egypt, from the Veneto, from Lyons, from Russia, from Germany, from wherever. My mother’s father came from France and here he married a local girl. My father’s father came from Aragón in Spain. My husband is himself an immigrant: he’s from a Jewish family and arrived with his mother (his father had come five years earlier seeking a job) from the Ukraine, one of the last few people allowed to leave the Soviet Union legally.