Notes from Childhood

A series of luminous vignettes describe the childhood of Argentina's rediscovered modernist writer. Self-contained, interconnected fragments begin with her family's departure to Mendoza in 1910 and end with their return to Buenos Aires and the death of her father in 1915.

Lange's notes tell intimate, half-understood stories from the seemingly peaceful realm of childhood, a realm inhabited by an eccentric narrator searching for clues on womanhood and her own identity. She watches: her pubescent older sister, bathing naked in the moonlight; the death of a horse; and herself, a changeable and untimely girl. How she cried, when lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and how she laughed, climbing onto the kitchen roof in men's clothing and throwing bricks to announce her performance.

Lange makes her domestic setting into a laboratory where strangeness and eroticism combine in delicate, daring flashes of literary brilliance.

Born in 1905 to Norwegian parents in Buenos Aires, Norah Lange was a key figure in the Argentine avant-garde of the early to mid-twentieth century. Though she began her career writing poetry, her first major success came in 1937 with her memoir Notes from Childhood, followed by the companion memoir Before They Die, and the novels People in the Room and The Two Portraits. She contributed to the magazines Proa and Martín Fierro, and was a friend to figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca. From her teenage years, when her family home became the site of many literary gatherings, Norah was at the heart of Buenos Aires' literary scene. She travelled widely alone and with her husband, always returning to Buenos Aires, where she continued to write and host literary gatherings. She died in 1972.

Charlotte Whittle has translated works by Silvia Goldman, Jorge Comensal and Rafael Toriz, among others. She has been instrumental in bringing Lange to audiences in English. With People in the Room she was longlisted for the American Literary Translators Association prize and shortlisted for both the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the Society of Author's first translation prize. Her forthcoming work on Notes on Childhood won a PEN translates award. She lives in New York.