Writers, editors and journalists said goodbye with great affection and recognition to the author, editor and translator Christian Kupchik (Buenos Aires, 1954), who died at the age of 68, after having received recognition at the Editors’ Fair, which gave him the prize for editorial trajectory in 2022.
“He had the best prose of all of us because he was always a poet. You had to listen to him read aloud. How many languages did he speak? Five, six? How many publications and publishing houses did he create? He always had a project to do. There was always a trip to be realized. He aroused love as others arouse contempt or indifference. It was impossible for someone not to want to be his friend, not to feel like his friend, after chatting with him. He arrived with his smile, with his appearance as a Russian nobleman in exile, and captivated to everyone,” said the writer Sergio Olguín, defining his rich career from his Twitter account.
A tireless reader and editor of the Leteo label in the last part of his life, the writer, who died yesterday after falling ill with cancer, said in an interview with Télam for the publication of his stories “Pranzalanz”, that he had explored the world of books chaotically and voraciously, to the point that when he began studying psychology “he read Freud’s clinical cases as if they were fantastic literature.”
Author of seven books of poetry, translator from English, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, specialist in philology of Nordic languages and travel literature, Kupchik had been one of the founders of the Paradiso label, directed collections in Paidós and created with the writer Jorge Consiglio, the Leteo publishing house, where books by Fernando Pessoa, Raymond Queneau and Hjalmar Söderberg were published, and by Argentine authors such as Valeria Tentoni, Mariana Docampo, Camila Sadi, Pedro B. Rey, Natalia Gelós and Lucas Margarit.
He translated Honoré de Balzac, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Georges Perec, the 2011 Nobel Prize winner in Literature Tomas Tranströmer and Tove Jansson into Spanish.
“Christian is one of the best people I have met in my life, a very great, very strong friend. I had the reward of sharing part of my life with him, and the truth is that with his death he leaves an indispensable, an extraordinary person.” , a person who steps out of the mold,” Consiglio told Télam.
“There are three things that made Christian indispensable: one is the extraordinary curiosity that made him look at literature, cinema, art, in a very particular way, but also life. He looked at life as if from discovery to discovery. Walking a block with him was different, which made him a poet, because he looked like an extraordinary poet and editor,” said the author of “Hospital Posadas.”
“The second thing about Christian is generosity, a characteristic that made him a very luminous guy, what he had read he shared. Leteo is a sample of his generosity, those books that are a work of art, many of them he gave away directly,” recalls Consiglio and highlights Kupchik’s “celebratory spirit” that gave him “an intelligence and great creativity to organize his life that turned him into a poet. He always created his life like an artist creates his work and created the life he wanted to live. A extraordinary guy beyond the erudition he had with an incredible human quality”.
The writer and bookseller Cecilia Fanti also joined the farewell, saying: “The world in general, and publishing in particular, has just lost one of the best, Christian Kupchik. Thank you for all the beautiful books of all these years, for all the visits to the bookstore and for so many generous talks of immeasurable wisdom.
“A hug to family and friends of Christian Kupchik, colleague. We are very sorry for his departure,” said the publisher Blatt y Ríos, while the author Martín Becerra said goodbye to him as “a great guy, generous, kind editor and great reader.”
Kupchik had published several books of poetry, the stories Out of Place and the prologue and notes to Architecture of Heaven, by Emanuel Swedenborg. She also selected and prefaced the texts of the travel books El Camino de las Damas. Traveling writers. From mystique to passion, The Argentine route. The country told by travelers and writers, In Search of Cathay. Journeys through the enigmas of the Silk Road and The Traces of the River. Stories, mysteries and adventures on the great waterways.
Likewise, he was part of the team of the literary magazine V de Vian and interviewed writers of the stature of John Updike, Nélida Piñón, Susan Sontag and Jorge Luis Borges. In 2017, the collection of poems “The Colors of the Vigil” was published through Buenos Aires Poetry; In 2022, the Omashu publishing house published the story “The Lord of the Lighthouses”, and the Dualidad imprint, the stories of “Pranzalanz”.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
