DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
BEATRIZ INÉS ROVIRA
“Beti”
3 November 1943 – 22 April 2023
UBA professor of Argentine literature, devoted River fan and the tango teacher's wife
In 1976, Beatriz Rovira was dismissed from her post at the University of Buenos Aires by a letter that gave no reason, which was in itself the reason. She took the letter home, framed it, and hung it in the hallway, where it stayed for the rest of her life, next to a photograph of River Plate's 1986 championship squad.
Born in Rosario in 1943, the daughter of a railway accountant and a primary-school teacher, Beatriz arrived in Buenos Aires at seventeen to study literature at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, where she fell in love with the poems of Alfonsina Storni, with the lecture halls on Calle Puán and, in 1964, with a tango-dancing printer named Horacio Giordano, whom she married in 1966. For the eight years after her dismissal she taught privately and in secondary schools. In 1984, with democracy restored, she walked back into the university and stayed for twenty-four years, retiring as Professor of Argentine Literature.
Her students remember lectures delivered without notes, a voice that could silence a hall of three hundred, and an office door that was always open. She wrote two books on women poets of the River Plate, edited a collection of letters from the 1920s, and supervised more than sixty theses, several of which are now in print. She believed a good literature class was a conversation that should leave everyone a little hungry.
At home she and Horacio ran what their children called the divided house: he was a Boca man, she a River socia for forty years, and the Superclásico was a diplomatic incident handled with neutral snacks. She claimed to be a hopeless dancer, and Horacio claimed she was the best partner he ever had. Both, the children said, were true.
Beatriz died on 22 April 2023, aged seventy-nine, at home in Buenos Aires, after a short illness, with a volume of poems open on her bedside table. She is survived by Horacio, her husband of fifty-seven years, their children Marina and Gustavo, her granddaughter Lucía and her sister Alicia.
“Read slowly, argue kindly, and never apologize for a good book.”