Purloined Letters. Some Notes on the Unpublished Correspondence of Eunice Odio

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on the correspondence of the wandering poet Eunice Odio with one of her most important interlocutors, the Venezuelan poet and journalist Juan Liscano Veluntini, by invoking a confronting reading with a single unpublished letter that the North American researcher Anthony Robb found in the “Liscano collection” at the National Library of Venezuela. The letter is unpublished not only because it was not included in the correspondence published in the Obras completas of the poet, but also because it was not edited by Liscano, who took charge of intervening in the rest of Odio’s correspondence that he published in his Anthology shortly after her death. The confronting reading between this material and the edited versions of the rest of her correspondence raises some concerns about the silences and the tears in the archives of women writers inserted in the intellectual networks of Central America and the rest of the continent during the twentieth century.