Alina Diaconu, a Personality of the Romanian Exile in Argentina

If in the Latin American cultural environment Alina Diaconu is recognised as a well-known and multi-awarded literary personality, the writer of Romanian origin, settled in Argentina since 1959 (when she was only 14 years old), is almost unknown in her country of origin. Although she wrote numerous novels and several volumes of poems, essays, publicist texts, interviews and even stories for children, she did not come to the attention of our literary criticism. The situation remained unchanged even after the translation into Romanian of some of her books. Except for Florea Firan (Firan 2023), even researchers of the Romanian literary exile did not pay too much attention to Alina Diaconu's creation. Therefore, the present article has a recuperative role and a precise ethno-identity stake, because from my point of view Alina Diaconu's work deserves to be (re)discovered and properly valorised. Particularly the novel El penúltimo viaje [‘The Penultimate Journey’] (1989), that I analyse in the second part of the paper, can significantly widen the referential arch of the meta-exilic vector, setting a more than meritorious landmark on the map of the Romanian exile in Latin America. This ingenious mixture of dark family novel, poem of announced extinction, totalitarian dystopia and parable of uprooting and interior exile, is an excellent transnational identity card of an Argentinian prose writer of Romanian origin.