Venetiana "Veza" Taubner-Calderon Canetti (1897 inVienna – 1963 inLondon) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, and short story writer.[1] Her works – including singular short stories published in the VienneseArbeiter Zeitung and other socialist outlets – were only published under her own name posthumously. She preferred pseudonyms, as was common at the time for left-wing or satirical authors, her favourite being Veza Magd (or Maid).The Tortoises (Die Schildkröten) which is set at the time of the Kristallnacht in 1938 remains her only known published novel. Her husband andNobel Prize in Literature laureateElias Canetti further posthumously declared her to be co-author of hisCrowds and Power.[2] She was also a translator ofWolf Solent byJohn Cowper Powys (Zsolnay, 1930), though the named translator is Richard Hoffmann who owned the agency where she freelanced, and three books byUpton Sinclair for theMalik Verlag (1930-32), where the named translator is once again male, this time her partner and future husband, Elias Canetti.[3]
Venetiana "Veza" Taubner-Calderon was born inVienna,Austria, in 1897 into aSephardi-Jewish family. AfterWorld War I, she initially worked as an English teacher. At the age of 26 she metElias Canetti, whom she would later marry in February 1934.
During the 1930s, she wrote short stories based on everyday life for the Viennese paperArbeiter-Zeitung.[4] 'Patience brings Roses' was included in a Malik anthology in 1932 edited by Wieland Herzfelde, Dreissig Neue Erzähler des Neuen Deutschland. Junge deutsche Prosa. The reissue of this volume in theGDR fifty years later eventually led to her rediscovery by Helmut Göbel. After the defeat ofRed Vienna in February 1934, it became increasingly difficult for her to publish.Tortoises draws from her time inAnschluss-Austria in 1938 and was written in exile in London and initially accepted by Hutchinson before the outbreak of war led the publishers to cancel the contract. It was only many years after her death that the publication ofYellow Street in 1990 led to her rediscovery. Her fiction was often political, usually witty and dialectical, grotesque, and partly autobiographical.
Vreni Amsler, Veza Canetti zwischen Leben und Werk: Eine Netzwerkbiographie (Innsbruck and Vienna: Studien Verlag, 2020)Sven Hanuschek, Elias Canetti: die Biographie (Munich / Vienna: Hanser, 2005)
