Baiera Ediciones
Baiera began in 2011, publishing poetry, photography notebooks and intimate diaries. A few silent years followed, which the imprint spent reading. It returns now with more craft, to translate and publish Vedānta, meditation and spiritual biography, and it keeps a place for India in its many forms, cooking among them, and for the house's poetry and essays. Print runs remain short.
About us
Baiera Ediciones is a project directed by The selection of texts, the translation, the editing and the layout all pass through the same workshop. Only the printer sits outside it, and in very professional hands.
Alejandro Gelaz was born in Gijón in 1963 and has lived in Argentina since 2001. He also signs as Alejandro G. Gelaz and, in his short Facebook texts, as Alex Gutiérrez.
Writer, translator and editor, he published the poetry collection Trilogía with Vinciguerra and, later, 33 variaciones, written together with two other authors, with Vela al Viento, in 2010. Between 2008 and 2012 he co-directed minificciones.com.ar, a site devoted to Spanish American microfiction that is cited in academic studies of the genre.
In 2012 he translated, in collaboration, El Yoga de Sri Krishna, by Swami Sarvagatananda, for Sarada Ma Publishing. Since then his work has revolved around Vedānta and the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda tradition, first with the gazette Nitya Lila and Radio Nityalila, and now from Baiera.
The name comes from Paris. There, together with Maud Lallement, Alejandro Gelaz ran a small artisanal press called Ginkgo Biloba, because the ginkgo had accompanied the two of them all their lives. They printed minimal editions, the story of Gajendra, गजेन्द्र, the king of the elephants, the sacrifice of the Aśvamedha, अश्वमेध, the horse sacrifice, taken from the fourteenth book of the Mahābhārata, or the Mahimnastava, महिम्नस्तव, the hymn to the greatness of Śiva attributed to Puṣpadanta. Maud handed them out, fanzine style, among the disciples of Swami Siddheswarananda, the Sorbonne professors she frequented and the occasional bookstore specializing in India.
When the time came, in 2010, for an imprint of its own, the name Ginkgo Biloba was already taken. The search went further back, to the ancestors of the tree. Baiera is a ginkgo with leaves split like a fan that grew alongside the dinosaurs and now exists only in stone. It is the origin, and it is already a fossil.
The catalog remains open. What comes next will come from where it has always come from, an archive, a recipe, a poem without a book, a pending translation.