To read an exclusive English-language translation of Fabián Casas’ short story, ‘The Fantastic Four’, click here.

Author Fabian Casas. (Photo: Víctor Santa María)

We found Fabián Casas waiting for us in an old bar in Colegiales. A stack of empty coffee cups and the complete works of Chekhov, 300 pages deep, has us wondering if we had arrived late, but Casas received us warmly and before long we were talking freely about poetry, travels, language, and what it’s like to be a great author with no imagination.

The author of fiction, essays, poetry, and screen plays, Casas is above all a deeply reflective person and the fact that he is having something of “a moment” doesn’t escape him, nor does it make him uncomfortable. His most recent books of fiction, ‘Ocio’ and ‘Los Lemmings’, have gone through successive reprints, only to sell out again. Lately, he finds himself rejecting the label of “Argentine writer”, indicative at once of a certain humbleness and his growing stature nationally and internationally. Generous with his time and his words, Casas opened up to us about becoming a “famous author” and how his head-space looks something like the bar from Star Wars.

What are you working on these days?

I spent all of last year writing a movie script, and this coming week we’re going to start filming. [Vigo] Mortensen is coming down, he’s going to act and produce the movie. [Lisandro] Alonso is the director. I’d never written for film before. I’m also writing an essay about Tolstoy, a very long essay that I’ve been working on for the last three years. I spent two years reading different authors talking about Tolstoy, in different languages, books that I found during my travels. And I finally sat down to write it, because I have to hand it over this year to Emecé so they can publish it.

I’m also working on a novel that I have to turn in next year, since I was contracted to submit two things. The novel I’ve been working on quite a bit. Lately I’ve been reworking it, and I like it better now because you can’t understand a word of it.

I like when I’m writing to feel as if I have a rock in my shoe, something that makes you ashamed, or uncomfortable. I’m not really sure what it is. Something about co-existing with the uncertainty.

You’ve also written some children’s literature. Is that something you will continue to work on?

Actually, just now I have a friend whose name is Nahuel Vecino. I had the urge to write something called “Mi Vecino Nahuel” [My Neighbor Nahuel] for kids. Because, since I don’t have imagination, the development of my books always comes from direct contact with people’s names.

Given the strong following you’ve developed over the years, do you have a sense of your audience, of who reads you?

When I used to write poetry, it appeared in small books that sold out quickly. They were small editions, for a limited audience of poetry specialists. And then ‘Lemmings’ was the start of something new. Now I don’t know who reads me. People stop me in the street, famous people call me saying they’ve read my books. It’s strange. But for me fame is worthless. It´s still strange to me how this all started, all different people from different places. Still, I couldn’t say if I have a particular reader or not.

Suddenly people are calling me, they write from Germany, from Brazil, from Italy. That´s what´s great about books, you don´t know where they are, but they´re circulating.

You’ve travelled quite a lot over the years. Some time ago, when you were working as a journalist with Olé you were awarded a grant to spend time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. What was that experience like?

I made good use of the grant. Aside from the workshop, I was swimming, running, eating. The truth is I had a great time with the grant. There are people though who get depressed, because it’s a long time and some people can’t handle it. I got to travel. I went to San Francisco, to see [John] Ashberry. That is, you had to explain why you were traveling, so I went to City Lights Books, where I read Ashberry, and later I went to see him. It was great. I also went to Portland and New York.

If you could meet any poet, living or dead, who would you like it to be?

I would have liked to have known Beckett. Still, you know how it is, you find yourself with the guy and you lose the urge. In general you have to read writers and not meet them, you know? But, as an idea, I would like to know Beckett. He’s an author that I’ve read a lot and his personality has always intrigued me. I’ve read at least three biographies about him, how he developed his writing and the things he had to break through and take apart to find his own voice. He’s an example of a really great author who took a long time to find his own voice. That part of him has always interested me.

You mentioned that at some point you had been translating the Objectivists poets from North America. How do you feel in the role of translator?

I don’t consider myself a translator. I do it because, it’s an activity, like…like going to see a movie. I went to see the Master, and I told all of my friends “go see it, it’s fantastic”. But with the Objectivists the deal was that they didn’t exist here. I had become fascinated with how the Objectivists were a small group, hidden within the North American canon, somewhere underneath the Beatniks, who are an international export. The Beatniks have their good writers, I don’t mean to say they don’t, but they’re easier to sell, to export, along with the whole outsider identity.

Later I was working on John Ashberry, who as a poet really blew my mind, but you have to spend a lot of time with it. So it came from wanting to share the poems.

Basically, as far as my relation with translation goes, I don’t produce, I don’t read books about translation, nothing. I read the translation that you guys did and it seemed like you had captured a certain intensity in the text, it seemed good to me.

And when they translate you, do you evaluate the translation?

If I can read the language, of course. Recently I was reading the Portuguese translation of ‘Lemmings’. And with Portuguese you can really work with the slang since it’s similar to our own. But then you also get the “false friends”, words that are so similar you thing they must mean the same thing and it ends up being a terrible mistake.

You’ve worked as a journalist, writing about football among other things, and it’s striking how you can speak in the same sentence about literature, football, philosophy, and so on. With such diverse interests and activities, how do you define yourself professionally?

I’m always aware when I’m working for a specific group and that you have a certain framework in which you have to work. For me, due to my training, there was never any difference between high and low culture. If there exist differences they exist to be criss-crossed. There are many times when my ideas about Lacan come to me when something happens while I’m watching a football match or something is said during the game. Or I see a popular movie, and that gets stored somewhere inside along with Hegel, and from there I start thinking, as if I were a welder. But I’m not original in that way, Walter Benjamin already did it a long time ago and he did it better. He was thinking in the bar, with his book about the Arcades, with his passage about how high and low culture are resignified. It seems to me like a very productive exchange.

I always prefer being a ‘welder’ to be being a ‘warrior’. Like the bar in Star Wars, with the guy with a fish head, and the girl with three tits [from the film Total Recall], I think that those are the ideal places where the things that really interest me start to emerge. The vital things, because they’re different, that’s where the exchange takes place. For me that kind of crossing is the anti-fascist place par excellence. Finding myself here with a Muslim, a woman, a man, a Jew, a black guy, it’s great. When you find yourself with the same set of people, who think the same, that’s where fascism comes in.

The bar from Star Wars is an interesting reference. Would you say you’re writing has some affinity with that space?

For me that’s where interesting things take place, always the great literature comes from there, from syncretism. I don’t know if it’s something you can detect in my literature, but it’s part of my personality, something I enjoy

Speaking of fascism, you’ve been called the “last author of the left”. How do you react to that label? Is it fair or accurate to call your writing “political”.

It makes me laugh. I consider myself a man of the left but I’m not a leftist militant. I identify the right with a certain view of nature. Because nature would have it that the weakest of the pack gets eaten by the lion and that way the herd is purified. The ones that remain are the best. I’m against all that, I want the weakest to have support, that they have their advocates. That they be protected. I consider myself leftist in that sense.

My cousin was always a reference point for me, like an older brother. He was an important figure in the JP [Juventud Peronista] and he took me along to places where they had occupied the university, and there was a kind of excitement in the 70′s that for me was beautiful, amazing. The type of thing, where people act politically and commit themselves to politics, to changing the world.

The Pope is Argentine, and he says that everything spiritual, the church, is apolitical. I think the exact opposite, everything spiritual is part of political progress, I can’t think about anything spiritual outside of politics. For me Christ was a completely non-transcendent figure. I don’t think anything exists up above, nothing at all, I think that’s a way to manipulate things. But I do believe that Christ was a political and spiritual leader. The spiritual acts he committed were also political acts. For example throwing all those guys out of the temple was a political act. It’s what the church needs to do. But I think that it’s impossible to change the church, for me change is always going to come from the outside. The counterculture is always invisible, you don’t know when it will appear.

What you’re describing reminds me a bit of Saint Augustine’s book, The City of God.

The story of Christ influenced me ever since I was little because I came from a Catholic family, and it always moved me to see Jesus washing people’s feet, to see Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Everything about him seems extraordinary to me, what he says and the way in which he says it and the way he reaches down to the people around him.

When we started translating “Los cuatro fantásticos” we wanted to capture some of the intensity in that story. In fact, the writer Alan Pauls has written a long essay, where he says of your books that this intensity has to do with how you employ proper names and “naming”, calling things, streets, people, songs by their names. Have you ever reflected on that aspect of your writing?

What I can say regarding the subject is that that I pay close attention to lexicon of the people I speak with. It seems to me that there in language, that’s where ‘Being’ is situated. It’s the same as when you are aware of the things that give you life, that give you pleasure. Because when you’re going to live, to live well, and you want to feel right, except when you might have some masochistic urge, you look to connect with the things that make you feel right, you don’t try to connect with the things that make you feel bad. Involuntarily, since none of us are Krishnamurti, you fall on bad times, moments of sterility and stupidity. But when you get in touch with good things, you connect with what you’re hearing, what you’re seeing, you try to find yourself with the things that transmit intensity, which for me is the opposite of cynicism and irony. For me wherever there is irony there’s no intensity.

So for me, I always have my ear trained and I look to capture something. Then I think how I would be able to take the word, cleanse it of the ordinary meaning it has and put it back in circulation with a new power.

You always have to listen. When I was a kid, in my neighborhood, when you played with figurines, when you lost them they used to say “melado”. I don’t know who invented the word, but there’s a ton of those kids, from different neighborhoods who are the same age as me and when I ask them “Do you remember the word “melar?”, this word that disappeared from the language. They say “Yeah, yeah, ‘melar‘ was when you lost all of your figurines” Who invented the word? Evidently, it wasn’t a word from the adult world, because it part of the kids’ code. Some kid invented it and it got around. But also these words, at some point, leave the language, stop working, and people stop saying them. And sometimes it’s a good thing, because you take that word, you use it again. You revive it.

Your texts are not only intense, they also tend to be very funny. Are you motivated to find humour? If so, does it come easy or is it something you labor over?

Humour feels totally natural to me. Actually, it doesn’t form any kind of a priori program for my writing, because I like a ton of things that aren’t at all funny, and are really dense. It’s just part of my nature, my personality. I think life is hell, and if you can’t introduce some humour… or at least some degree of excitement…You would go crazy if it weren’t impossible to convert the horror into laughter. You can’t go on. In that sense, it seems like a good counterweight. I also like people who can laugh at themselves, because when people don’t laugh at themselves, they spend their time thinking they’re important and that will destroy you.

Los Lemmings has made a great impact here in Argentina. Do you think that that impact has to do with a certain nostalgia or even melancholy for “the neighborhood”, which doesn’t exist anymore or has somehow transformed?

From my point of view, I see melancholy as a capital sin, as something really unproductive and negative. Especially now that I have a daughter I see it like that. I’m seriously happily with the life I have these days, I’m in a state of pure presentness. The past doesn’t interest me at all. I remember with fondness the good moments and the bad moments with sadness, but I don’t wish to be there again.

Everything I write springs from the fact that I lack imagination. It seems important to me that people, in whatever setting, whatever they’re doing, are able to recognise their own limits. “I am this person, this is what I do, I’m bald, I don’t have curls, I don’t look like Brad Pitt, I practice karate.” That’s what you are, what you do. I practice karate whenever I can, with my abilities, and just the same I write what I can.

So ‘Lemmings’ is a work about the things I know, not because I’m interested in defending that position, but instead searching among those things that happened to me for something that seems worth transmitting. Not to affirm that “I want to do populism” or “the neighborhood is my ideal”. I can only put forth what I know. Tolstoy could write just as much from the point of a Count or a peasant, that explained everything, but he was a genius. And the whole idea of the “literatura chabón”, for me literature can never be contained within all that. The moment you pronounce it, it’s no longer useful. Literature is the place where dogmas are broken, so it’s difficult to maintain labels.

You’ve said on various occasions that you don’t consider yourself an “Argentine writer”. How did you arrive at that?

I think sometimes that for me the most important thing is to not lose the human element. That can happen when you spend your time within certain norms that are really unproductive. So if you see yourself as an Argentine writer you can’t write. It destroys you. If you see yourself that way you can’t even think. I think [the label] serves insofar as something to repurpose, to take apart, to basically work against. The same thing happens when you start writing and discover some strength, over the course of many years writing becomes a strength. I have that strength, but for me writers have to work against their own strength. And in life, speaking from my own experience, comfort can be totally debilitating. I’ve realised this. I’m a person that can easily obtain a lot of things through work or whatever. But the comfort that brought was weakening me, instead of making me into something better. When I was a little kid, I lived in a poor family and that’s how I grew up, humble. We were really happy, I have really happy memories of my childhood. Not that I would want to glamorise poverty, of course.

The Japanese have a concept, one that I always liked. I travelled through Japan, and there I heard some guys talking about “wabi”, the idea of voluntary poverty. I travelled quite a bit. When I turned 22 I took off for two years traveling, and one of the things a person learns when they travel is you don’t want to have a heavy load. For me this applies to practically everything. You can’t carry too much, can’t be heavy, you can’t carry the weight of your parents demands or the idea that you have to be the great author of Boedo, or Argentina, that you have to have a girl, all of these things will destroy you.

You’ve travelled quite a lot through Latin America, right?

Yeah, I was gone from the time I was 21 to 24. At the time I almost needed my parents’ authorization to travel. I wanted to do Che’s journey, but without anybody dying. Even the literature I read there, Castaneda, etc. was very stimulating for me. The truth is I was very happy. Always throughout my life I had a certain nostalgia for that time period, up until I finally rid myself of that nostalgia, when I started to really feel self-realized.

I’m not saying that everything is always good, it’s not that kind of evangelical joy. I have my job, my partner that I enjoy, I have a very intense relationship. I adore my daughter. I never thought I would enjoy being a father so much. I enjoy what time I have to read. The friends I have are very important for me, they’ve supported me a lot, I couldn’t live without them. I feel good.

As part of our author spotlight series, we present an English-language version of Fabián Casas’ short story, The Fantastic Four, from the book ‘Los Lemmings y otros’, translated for The Indy by Agustina Santomaso and Nicolas Allen. To read out exclusive interview with Casas, click here.

There was someone before, but I never met him. Although lots of people say that I have his mouth and a bit of his personality too. That kind of thing. I’m not too worried about looking like anyone else though. There are so many faces in this world that, sooner or later, you’ll end up being the same as someone else. No, I want to talk here about the ones I knew. Each one came and tracked his footprints through my life, and I think the way to remember those who passed through me is to explain who they were, what they taught me. That kind of thing.

Around that time Mom was working in the Peter Pan lingerie factory. What a great name. I wonder if it’s still running. Mom, according to what everyone tells me, was a bombshell, a real glamour model. Legs, ass, hips. We lived in the Once neighborhood in a tiny apartment that I imagined was something like the pipe of Hijitus: Mom’s bedroom, the living room where I slept on a sofa bed and a kitchenette pegged to the wall. That was it. Mom’s clothes were scattered everywhere. And cosmetics and magazines that were brought back from her friend’s salon. My mom was a big reader. Sometimes when she went out dancing, I would stay with mom’s hairdresser friend, a Paraguayan woman who would tell me about her kids who, she said, were around the same age and lived with their father in Asunción. I didn’t associate “Asunción” with a physical place, it struck me more as a verb.1

In my memory, the first guy was Carmelo. Squat, muscular, a retired boxer. Mom introduced him one night when he came by to pick her up. I was watching something on a tiny miniature TV that the hairdresser had brought us from Ciudad del Este. You see? “Ciudad del Este” sounded like a real place.

Carmelo walked up and shook my hand. I thought he was going to give me a kiss, because I was a kid and that’s what people usually did when they first met me. But he shook my hand with his huge, calloused telephone-of-a-hand. I liked the gesture. From that moment forward Carmelo was always coming by the house, and more and more when he came by to get Mom he would also sit around with me, talking about his exploits from his boxing days. And one day on an outing to the park, under the sun’s light, the most incredible thing happened: in the fresh air, Carmelo’s skin looked the color of Scotch tape. I want to be clear. It wasn’t as if he was covered in Scotch tape, like some kind of mummy; he actually was the color and consistency of Scotch tape. So I baptized him- to myself- “Carmelo Scotch”. I bet he looked amazing, half naked, under the lights of the ring.

When I got bronchitis, Mom had to bring me to the hospital to get treated. They had me use a humidifier, they gave me some shots, and told me that I had to get more sun. Carmelo was especially concerned about my health, and he told my mom that I had to get more exercise, run, jump. That kind of thing. He showed up in gym clothes the next day and told me that he had a plan to turn me into an athlete. He unfolded a diagram across our little orange formica table with all the different exercise routines that he felt would alter my body. We started to work out in the mornings in the gym where Carmelo worked. Abdominals, short sprints, track. It was fantastic. He stood by my side while I poured sweat, and shouted at me: “Come on, harder. Feel the burn! Feel it!” Then we headed off to the showers together. One day,while we were drying off, he told me about the greatest moment of his life when he fought the opening fight for Nicolino Locce. “You don’t know what it is to step into the ring of Luna Park when it’s packed…only you under the lights and all the people looking at you…the red lights of the cigarettes in the blackness of the stadium…” It ended in a draw.

To this day I still hear the war cry of Carmelo Scotch: “Feel the burn!”

One afternoon, Mom told me that he had been relieved of his duties. She had to endure a week of my harassing her before she said why. “ Because he raised his hand to me.” Mom was always firm. And when choosing her boyfriends, she showed herself to be a true renaissance woman. And so she changed from Sports to the Arts. The second candidate she snatched up from right under my nose: Professor Locasso had come to the school as a substitute, and no doubt, to earn whatever he could while doing practically nothing. He would show up in class, put his breakfast of pastries or meringues on the desk- I went to school in the morning- cross his legs and stuff his face. He told us that we must paint whatever came to us in the moment. During Locasso’s class, we were free to space-out all we wanted. So we took the paper and we painted whatever. When we brought him the paintings to take a look, as he chewed and set aside the newspaper, he would glance at our artwork and utter his famous pet phrase: “More color, children. More color.” Even if the paper was smeared with tempera like a cake, he would repeat “More color, children. More color.” It was fine. It made us laugh. Naturally, we changed his name from Professor Locasso to Professor More Color. Imagine my surprise when I saw him one night without his smock, in a dark suit that fit him a bit big, holding a bottle of wine and standing in the doorway of my house. Professor More Color was a man of some forty years, with a horseshoe of white hair that rested on his neck, always a bit long and unkempt. His forehead shone like a billiard ball. His athletic body, when it walked around the school yard, moved in strides.

According to what I gathered much later, More Color came across my Mom at school during the events of July 9th, the same day I stepped forward and recited a poem to mark the occasion. The school was overrun with people and the night before I had been really nervous. I was afraid that when it came time to deliver the poem I would draw a blank. But it was glorious. With every new verse, I revealed my talent for reciting poetry and all during that patriotic week my schoolmates and teachers couldn’t stop praising my performance. But getting back to my mother’s love affair. It goes without saying I was the center of attention. All of my friends knew that my mom was going out with More Color. Sometimes, during recess, some kids went so far as to ask me if it bothered me. I asked them: “that you know about it or that they’re going out?” Silence. Other schoolmates tried to be more understanding, still, they told me that it would have been better if my mother went out with the Math teacher- a really hard subject- instead of Art class. They were right. I can’t deny that I had already thought the same thing.

My mother’s romance with More Color lasted almost two years. When they broke up I was in the fifth grade. Unlike my relationship with Carmelo Scotch, my relationship with More Color was easy-going. The guy slept over twice a week and sometimes the three of us went out for a walk. Only once did the two of us go out together. He took me to see an exhibition of Salvador Dalí, a painter that he really admired. He liked that kind of twisted stuff. Bent clocks, crucifixes from outer space. That afternoon in a cafe, we had the following dialogue:
- Would it bother you if I spent more time at your house?- he asked me.
-No- I told him after thinking about it for a moment.
- I think it would be better if there was a man at home, and I’m thinking about marrying your mom. I still haven’t proposed to her because I want to get your opinion first.-
-The only problem is that the house is really small.- I said.
-If you and your mother agree, we could move to another place. With a patio. Would you like to have a patio to play in?-
-Yes.- I told him after thinking about it for a minute.

More Color seemed satisfied with my answer. We shook hands and he took me to catch the subway. He showed me all the possible connections and the different kinds of trains that there were. When we got home, late, he went to talk with my Mom in the bedroom. It seemed to me like they were arguing. I put on my pajamas, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, and it seemed more clear that they were fighting. The next week More Color didn’t even sleep over for an hour and even if he called on the phone to talk with Mom, I started to sense that something was off-color. I tried to remember the conversation that we had to understand where he had gone wrong. And I drew the following conclusions: it was no doubt convenient for Mom to have a man at home. What’s more, she was always saying to the Paraguayan hairdresser that she wanted to find me a substitute father. Which seemed reasonable to me. When I went to my friends’ houses, I envied how they could feel so sure of themselves and brag about their fathers. So, regarding marriage there shouldn’t have been any problem. I think the conflict had to do with the possibility of moving. For some unknown reason that I couldn’t and I can’t understand, my Mom loved that pigsty in Plaza Once or “The Eleven Park”, as she called it. Something in that house touched a chord with her and it’s impossible to go back on that kind of thing.

One afternoon in winter, while Mom was putting her hair in rollers, she told me that More Color had entered her hall of fame. Today I think that my childhood was separated into different moments in which my mother told me about the boyfriend she’d just dumped. I continued to see More Color during the next three years-5th, 6th and 7th- but, except uncomfortable greetings when we ran into each other in the school yard, we avoided each other. Although, it’s fair to say, thanks to him, I know all the subway lines across the city to perfection. I could never get lost.

More Color was already history when I signed up in the Rec center at the church to play football every afternoon. The priests drew you in with an amazing football pitch and, in exchange, they asked you to take communion. So I went straight to the catechism and I ended up as an altar boy in a couple of masses. One afternoon Mom came to pick me up, and she told me to wait for her because she wanted to give confession. The gesture seemed strange, coming from her. But it’s true that around that time she was spending a lot of time in bed, as if something had broken her spirit. Father Manuel listened to her in silence, in the confessional booth. Mom started to come every other afternoon to give confession, or to to walk around chatting with Father Manuel. She told me that the priest- who was very young- was giving her the will to live. “Mom, why don’t you want to live?”, I asked her. “It’s not that I don’t want to live, it’s that I don’t have the will.”, she answered me.

One night when I was returning late from my friend’s house, I happened to see Father Manuel leaving my building. What surprised me most was that he was dressed like a normal guy. He didn’t see me, but I saw him clearly because I was on the other side of the street. I didn’t make a peep. When I got home, Mom’s eyes were all red, as if she had been crying. The day after, she spent the whole day in her bedroom with the Paraguayan hairdresser. Whenever they opened the door, to go to the bathroom or to look for something in the kitchen, there was an awful smell of cigarettes. I think that’s why I never smoked.

I decided to talk to Father Manuel after I found Mom sitting in the living room with huge bags under her eyes. It looked like she had been sitting there since puberty. “All of the appliances decided to commit suicide,” she said with a hoarse voice, hardly seeing me. The mini-fridge and the television weren’t working, and the water heater made a terrible noise when we turned on the hot water.

Father Manuel was in his bedroom reading, they told me. I told the nun that I needed him urgently. Soon, I saw him coming down the hallway. This time, he was wearing his impeccable robe. He patted my head as we walked across the football pitch that at that hour- 2 in the afternoon- was empty. It was a spring day.
-Father, I don’t know what’s going on with my Mom- I told him.
I felt my voice emerging from deep in my chest.
-Son- he said, even though he was very young- do you know the story about Calvary and our Lord Jesus Christ?- he asked.
-The whole bit about the Romans and the crown of thorns and the betrayal of Judas?-
-Exactly. I want you to think about that part of our Lord’s story. Because often in life adults have to make great sacrifices. Do you understand?-
I didn’t understand a bit of it, but I agreed. He was selling me a line.
-Your mother is an exemplary woman. I want to be clear about that. And more often than not, people of integrity suffer greatly. Now we’re going to to go to the church and we’re going to kneel and pray for her.-

And that’s what happened. We prayed in silence. To be honest, I didn’t pray. My mind jumped from one image to another like a video game. I saw Father Manuel in his robe, then I saw him in street clothes, like I saw him when he was leaving my building, then I imagined him in his underwear, then playing football. Finally, he took my hand and told me not to worry, that the Lord knows what he’s doing.

What’s certain is that Mom didn’t go back to church, and a few months later they moved Father Manuel to a convent in Córdoba. The Lord knew what he was doing alright, because Mom began to feel better and she started coming out of the depression that she’d been stuck in. We fixed the TV, the mini-fridge, we took out the water heater and replaced it with a better one.
Throughout the rest of secondary school Mom didn’t bring home any other boyfriends.
And, just when I was preparing to start University, the last and, for me most important boyfriend arrived. His was name Rolando, he worked installing antennas on rooftops, and he was pivotal because he talked to me for the first time about my father. Because he was obsessed with whoever it was that my father was.

Mom met him in a group that got together every Sunday in Hospital Pena. It was a psychological support group to deal with Sunday sadness. It wasn’t that my mother got depressed on Sunday, she was really accompanying the Paraguayan hairdresser who on Sunday around 7pm, invariably, wanted to kill herself. Rolando was going because his football team had descended to the B league, and for that he had to suffer game-less Sundays. According to Mom, he was a devastating arrow straight to the heart. Rolando had curls, a prince valiant haircut and a gravelly voice. I took an immediate liking to him. And even more when I found out that he spent his time on the roofs of buildings fixing and installing antennas.
I love people who spend their time up on roofs, I love jumping from the roof.

So quickly- I was seventeen- I started going along with him. It was grand. In the summer, we climbed to the peak with a cooler and a six pack. Sometimes, if we hadn’t eaten, we brought cheese and membrillo in a tupperware. After fixing the antennas, we sat down to, as he said, have a little chat. Rolando was obsessed with other people’s lives. “Look at the guys who go around the world playing against the Harlem Globe Trotters. It’s crazy. Showing up so that those black sons-of-bitches can make you look the fool. Some people’s lives are insane, right?”. And always, after the beers were done, he talked to me about my dad. “I don’t know how you’re mother could believe anything that that imbecile told her. Did you know that your dad was caught up with the guerillas, and that he preferred that to having a family, taking care of you, seeing you grow up…And your mom thought he was a great guy, brilliant! You seriously never saw a photo of him?”.

One afternoon, as we watched the sun set from the roof of a tall building, he told me: ” You know that I love you right?”. “Yes”, I told him and I felt goosebumps. “But before I couldn’t even look at you because I could only think about how you were your father’s fuck-made-flesh.” I didn’t answer because I was left thinking about his expression, and I remembered when Father Manuel said that Christ was God “made-flesh”. Rolando downed all of the beers and said : “in Italy they call this time of day the Pomeriggio, do you know why?” I didn’t make a peep. “Because Pomeriggio means tomato. Do you see the color of the sky?” What a guy. The sky was completely red. He added “You see, from here we can see all across the city. Isn’t it great? Most of the people don’t know that we’re up here, watching them. We’re like gods.”

Sometimes, before sticking an antenna in the roof, he would raise it high with one hand and shout: “I’ve got the power!”. And we would die of laughter. Other times, he would get melancholy and say to me: ” Swear to me that if your father comes back, you won’t get sucked-in by him.” “Where is he going to come back from, Rolando?” , I asked him. “From Timbuktu, how should I know?”, he replied.

Some time passed and I was drafted into military. I was assigned to ground troops, and so I had to come down from the roof. I spent a year in hell as an assistant to a military general. At some point that same year, my Mom and Rolando broke up. She told me so in a letter. When I came back home, I found a job fixing antennas. I never saw Rolando again, but I heard about him from a doorman of one of the buildings. He told me that he had an attack of vertigo and that’s why he had stopped working at heights. It sounded to me like science fiction.

Sometimes when I am up high, with my lunch, I realize how wonderful it was that he let me go along with him and learn the profession. Because the roof’s dizzying heights is a solitary calling. For mythical creatures. You don’t need anyone up here.

Rebellion and experimentalism – the signature of the vanguard – are the historical and cultural legacy bequeathed by Argentina’s literary reviews. The country’s small magazines assumed their present shape in the twenties, that auspicious decade of economic and social optimism. As cultural manifestos were vigorously being penned across the globe, Buenos Aires adopted its own reputation as the intellectual hub of South America – the so-called ‘Paris of the South’, a coinage that still lingers today.

But beneath the surface of bohemian glamour lurked glaring social contradictions that informed much of the groups’ cultural and political struggles. Portals of poetic, philosophical and artistic trends, the reviews fostered a strong artistic community, lending writers a sense of collective purpose.

This week’s Top 5 lists some of the literary journals that have acquired a mythical status in the cultural imagination. Many of the polarised views and vitriolic debates of the 1920s were stirred by two competing literary factions: the Florida group – dubbed the Martinfierristas – and their counterpart, the Boedo group, contributors to Claridad. Cosmopolitan, urban and elitist on the one hand and international and socialist on the other, they constantly pushed artistic and political boundaries. Of a much less militant strand, the long-running magazines Sur and Contorno were instrumental in providing a forum for the writers of Argentina’s literary golden age.

Victoria Ocampo with her review 'Sur' (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia)

Sur

Founded in 1931 and published regularly until 1970, Sur was the most vocal literary and cultural outlet in Argentine letters in the twentieth century. Sponsoring a cross-fertilisation of the arts – poetry, philosophy, history and the visual arts – it secured its iconic status for a generation of writers for whom the small magazine was a natural counterpart of the literary salon.

Its longevity was due, in large part, to the sound financial footing of its founder and lifelong editor, Victoria Ocampo, as well as the intimate friendship she cultivated with one of the country’s most famous writers Jorge Luis Borges. Sur provided the occasion for a number of literary encounters, including the introduction of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Ocampo’s younger sister, Silvina Ocampo.

Despite its name, Sur’s contributors ranged far beyond the local scene, including Virginia Woolf, Jean Paul Sartre and William Faulkner, to name just a few. Cultivating ties with foreign luminaries did lead to its derogative branding as extranjerizante - a term that indicated its allegiance to cosmopolitan, elitist, European models.

Whilst never brandishing a manifesto, and in spite of its apolitical ‘art for art’s sake’ agenda, the magazine articulated its own brand of liberalism – a resistance to mass culture and nationalist populism. Many cultural positions adopted throughout the twentieth century were often positioned by their adherence to, or distance from, Sur’s creative manual to the arts scene.

Claridad cover (courtesy of Claridad)

Claridad

A screaming face bursts out of montaged buildings; a man brandishes a florescent torch; a Grecian goddess dances precariously on a sphere, beneath which reads ‘the pedestal of social peace’. Founded by Antonio Zamora, Claridad hit the press in 1926 with the stated mission to mediate the cultural debate, until that time monopolised by another review named Martín Fierro. Inspired by the French magazine Clarté, it gave voice to a militant group of intellectuals who advocated social integration fostered through the arts.

Claridad’s editions serve as documents tracing the developments of leftist thought in the first half of the twentieth century. Its ideals addressed both the influx of immigrant workers and the internationalism of the left. The first editions provided a platform for Russian literature, French social realism, and the dissemination of new national voices – especially those affiliated with the Boedo group, as well as the work of Argentine artists Xul Solar and Emilio Pettoruti.

Designs by the so-called ‘People’s Arists’ served as a vehicle for the dissemination of social protest and the struggle of neglected sectors of society. Its provocative, ideologically-freighted covers owe much to the futurist and constructivist aesthetic taking off across Europe.While reviews of films by directors Léon Klimovsky and Alfonso Longuet introduced readers to the experimental gaze of Soviet and German expressionist cinema, the Boedo group believed that aesthetic development was inseparable from political consciousness.

Martín Fierro from 1924

Martín Fierro

Founded by Evar Méndez in 1924, the innovative literary magazine acquired a mythic status in its mere three years of publication. A product of the wave of the avant-garde literary reviews that sprang up in vanguard circles throughout the 1920s, Martín Fierro set out to disperse the new ideas that were taking Europe by storm, and assimilate them into the national agenda. Recalling the eponymous epic poem by José Hernández, the Martínfierristas sought to explore the ‘topography’ of criollismo – collapsing distinctions between national tradition and a modern, democratic aesthetic. The gaucho was subsequently recast as a cosmopolitan, flaneur figure, and a frequenter of the shabbier districts of the city.

Martín Fierro’s signature is a wry, sardonic humour, notable in its pseudo-obituaries. Apollinaire, Picasso, Corbusier, and Stravinsky were just some of the eminent international figures that found their way on to Martín Fierro’s pages – as well as Argentine writers including Leopoldo Marechal and Raúl González Tuñón.

The provocative ‘Manifesto of Martín Fierro’, penned by the avant-garde poet Oliverio Girondo, clearly owes much to the Futurists’ vitriolic agenda, debunking moribund traditions and catapulting Argentina into the twentieth century. Méndez discontinued the publication in 1927, unhappy that a faction of the group were using its pages to garner support for the presidential campaign of populist leader, Hipolito Yrigoyen.

Contorno cover from 1953

Contorno

Hailed as a landmark publication upon its inception in the mid-1950s, the contornistas occupied a niche ground in political and cultural journalism. Founded by brothers David and Isamael Viñas, it produced only ten editions over the space of six years but, in that period, successfully formulated a new critical idiom. In keeping with a core group of  Argentine intellectuals, one of Contorno’s most salient features was its militant anti-Peronism – viewing the 1955 overthrow as a moment of liberation. Their provocative manifesto, ‘Terrorism and complicity’ set out to dismantle the pillars of an antiquated arts tradition and bourgeois complacency. Contorno’s revisionary approach did, however, come under severe criticism from those who believed the magazine served merely as a vehicle to dismantle the cornerstones of Argentine tradition.

Despite its eschewal of the past, Contorno sought to advance a cultural agenda that would account for the stark realities of Argentine life, reproblematising relations between literature and society. The periodical published the work of an important coterie of writers, including influential contributors such as Juan José Sebreli, Oscar Masotta and Alejandro Rozitchner.

Highlight entries include Roberto Arlt and the Argentine novel and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and the essay. Acutely aware of its place in the avant-garde tradition, it contextualised its own project with an essay, ‘Martinfierristas: their time and ours’.

Proa reviews

Proa

Proa, the oldest Latin American publication still in print, was founded by Argentine writers Borges, Macedonio Fernández and Eduardo González Lanuza in 1922. Coeval with Martín Fierro, it shared many of its vanguard populist principles – including free circulation in libraries, bookstores and amongst friends.

Originally emulating the triptych design of the Spanish magazine ULTRA, it provided a platform for eminent European and Latin American writers of the era. Two years later, Proa was relaunched from Borges’ Recoleta abode with $50 capital, donated by Georges Braque, Alfredo Brandan Caraffa and Pablo Rojas Paz. The new version, with illustrations from Borges’ sister Norah, as well as Pedro Figari and Adolfo Gramojo, showcased the works of Pablo Neruda, Raúl González Tuñón, Roberto Arlt and Eduardo Mallea. But, constantly stymied by a lack of capital, Proa stopped publishing again the following year.

Silvina Ocampo and Bioy Casares relaunched the magazine in 1988 – a project that Borges ad unsuccessfully attempted since 1982. Proa’s content includes short stories, poetry, essays, literary, film and visual arts criticism. The magazine was again forced out of print following the 2001 economic downturn but was subsequently taken on until 2003 by Chilean publishers. In its third phase, Proa still has a circulation of over 17,000 with a wide distribution throughout Latin America.

For the return of Beyond Borges, Alejandra Pizarnik joins Alfonsina Storni and Silvina Ocampo as the third female to appear in the series and one of the most important and complex poets in Argentine writing.

In her 17 years of writing Pizarnik made a huge impact on Spanish language poetry, taking it down to its darkest depths and abandoning it there, leaving one of the most fascinating legacies in Argentine literature.

A Tormented Talent

Artist's portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Born in 1936, Pizarnik was a second generation immigrant of Jewish descent. She was raised in Avellaneda amidst a Jewish community and received education in both Spanish and Yiddish. In 1954 she began studying philosophy and letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) but later dropped out because she said it couldn’t give her what she sought.

Besides literature, she also studied painting under the surrealist painter Juan Batlle Planas but found herself either willingly or involuntarily tied to poetry.

“I would have preferred to sing the blues in some smoke-filled hangout than spend the nights of my life scrabbling through language like a madwoman” she once said. In a letter addressed to her good friend Rúben Vela, she described her poems as “brawling” inside herself and, though her relationship with her writing was a difficult one, she produced some of the most remarkable poetry of the 20th century.

A regular user of amphetamines and hallucinogenics (she reportedly once spent seven days holed up on hallucinogenics listening to Janis Joplin records) Pizarnik suffered throughout her life from periods of psychological instability and depression. These emotional states probably only served to make her writing more original and more interesting but undoubtedly caused her difficulties throughout her life.

Having never felt at home in Argentina, she travelled to Paris in 1960 where she lived for four years, endearing herself to the city’s creative circles and Argentine writers Arnaldo Calveyra and Julio Cortázar. Recognised as a great literary talent by many of those around her, she was also counted the influential Argentine poets Rúben Vela and Raúl Gustavo Aguirre, as well as Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Olga Orozco and Mexico’s Octavio Paz among her friends.

Besides receiving Buenos Aires’ First Municipal Poetry Prize, she was able to return to Paris a second time as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1968. Shortly afterwards Pizarnik was institutionalised following a suicide attempt in 1970, and eventually ended her life aged 36 by taking a sedative overdose.

Body of Work

Pizarnik published seven books of poetry and one book of prose during the years 1955 to 1972.

Her first book of poems, ‘La tierra más ajena’, was published when she was just 19 and still a student of philosophy and literature. She followed it with ‘La última inocencia‘ in 1956 and ‘Las aventuras perdidas’ in 1958, both written before her trip to Paris in 1960.

Portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Her 1962 collection ‘Árbol de Diana’, was written whilst she lived in Paris and is considered by many to be her best. Her most important work, however, would not arrive until 1968 when she was already grappling with her own mental illness.

‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ and the long prose poem of the same name, are regarded as a pinnacle of the author’s expressive abilities. Both the poem and its containing collection demonstrate a darkness not seen before in Argentine writing and rarely found afterwards.

As the title suggests, the book contains the most elaborate of Pizarnik’s meditations on the subject of madness – a theme carried across her entire body of work along with themes of entrapment and her almost hypnotic attraction to death.

Her books, in fact, come wrought with intertextual borrowing and overlapping symbolism; often mentioning forbidden gardens, cracks and voices in walls and night time (symbolic of both madness and death).

Obsessed with the idea of madness, fear of madness and the containment of madness, Pizarnik’s specialty was to drag the reader down into a chaotic, nightmarish world where they would be subjected to the same doubts, despairs, schizophrenic voices, claustrophobia, and fears as her.

Linguistically, her use of repetition, contradiction and words with ambiguous or changeable meanings lent her poems obvious overtones of paranoia. Her poems often transitioned radically between the first person, and a second third-person voice, which may have been forcibly created, or may, more likely, have emerged as second nature given her emotional and mental state.

If the character of Juan Pablo Castel in Ernesto Sabato’s existentialist novel ‘El Túnel’ had been an impressive product of the author’s imagination, then the ‘I’ in Pizarnik’s poetry was too close for comfort. One critic described the relationship between the two as a “death grip” – something which Pizarnik sought to distinguish herself from towards the end of her writing career.

Pizarnik’s Personal Legacy

From 1968 onwards Pizarnik set out to untether herself from “poetic language” and write with different “voices”. Around this time she turned to the writing of Cortázar in an effort to free herself from what she described as “creative prisons”.

Interestingly, though the “I” in her poems was something Pizarnik deliberated a great deal over, many poets have returned to use the first person singular without any of the same concerns.

The vocabulary and sometimes playful structuring of Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrate her mistrust for language. Her writing often freely condemned its failures and inadequacies whilst also revealing feelings of being powerlessness towards it. Torn between her dissatisfaction with language and her dependence on it as a poet, she would occasionally write poems omitting all punctuation marks bar parenthesis, and included lines of only one word causing intentional ambiguity.

A Spanish language edition of 'La Condesa Sangrienta' (April 2012)

An inability to write prose fiction was one of Pizarnik’s biggest grievances with herself as a writer, and she considered her only prose book, ‘La condesa sangrieta’, to be one of her greatest achievements.

The book, published in 1971, is in fact more of an elegant essay about a 16th century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed as many as 600 girls before finally ending her life walled up alone. Pizarnik ends the book with the resonating line “the absolute freedom of a human being is terrible” – a concept which she personally grappled with often.

Her last work, ‘El infierno musical’ was also written in 1971, one year before her death. It included the poem ‘El deseo de la palabra’, often considered to be her poetic suicide note.

Although it would perhaps be wrong to read the poem in this light, it does appear there was a literary suicide some time before Pizarnik’s real suicide took place. The poet and her poetry are at times so intertwined and bound up in each other that it almost seems her destiny was written out for her, by her.

Estranged, helpless and anguished, Pizarnik’s haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina’s most important female poet.

Reynaldo Jimenez in Oaxaca, 2007 (Photo: Gabriela Giusti)

To conclude our collaborative series with Palabras Errantes, the Indy profiles the celebrated poet and cultural commentator, Reynaldo Jiménez.

Jiménez was born in Peru in 1959 but has lived in Buenos Aires since 1963. A prolific writer, he has 19 of his own books published, the majority of which are collections of poetry. His work has been included in numerous poetry books and he has been involved in compiling dozens of anthologies. He is deeply involved in the Buenos Aires cultural scene.

He participates in events and festivals across Latin America. He has embraced new media and technology, with a regularly updated blog, facebook page, and youtube channel (oroqolla2) with news, work and interviews from his literary world.

Do you consider yourself an Argentine poet?

I was born in Peru but I don’t consider myself a poet from any place in particular. Before finding out about ‘neologism’ – called such by Deleuze then repeated by many after him – I felt it in my own flesh: deterritorialised. The roots are there however, I can feel them, they move.

Reynaldo Jimenez in Oaxaca, 2007 (Photo: Gabriela Giusti)

How would you describe your poetic style? 

I believe that precision in poetry sometimes needs indirect paths. When a summary tries to explain poetic ideas, it lays them out as something confirmative and self-publicising not as part of the poetic experience which tends to come from the unknown. The concept of a ‘style’ to me seems to restrict the adventure, it’s better to let yourself go with the words and see what happens. They can certainly surprise us. Each type of text asks questions of the form it is written in. I write in search of the impersonal, the latent and the unknown. If I had to appeal to an adjective, I would use: protean.

Are there subjects which come up frequently in your work? 

I don’t deal with subjects. I try to distance myself as far as possible from the school of thought “composition, subject: the cow”, by which I mean I distance myself from the scholarly. I don’t believe in working within the strict boundaries of definitions like realists do. I look for the experiential word; the word which creates itself, that doesn’t rely upon previous realities. Language and reality like an astonished meeting, not in a pre-existing conformity.

How do you feel about poetry translation?

I also translate poems (from Portuguese) – each writer poses his own particular challenges. In the case of transposing my writing to a language which isn’t Spanish, like in English at the moment, it strikes me as very difficult because I work so much with etymological roots; in reality it is something instinctive but it always refers to a particular language. The determined reading planes I lay out in the poems get lost, so in that case, the ideal [for the translation] is a poet who is able to create a sound-associated texture in the second language.

reverse (from sangrado)

Written by Reynaldo Jiménez. Translated by Geoffrey Maguire.

Con los campos en movimiento creamos en el corazón de la materia
Miguel Ángel Bustos

WILL THIS WATERMARK BE THE LOUD
ness that bewilders? on the page-soul
swift palms scatter, releasing fertile lions,
their breath lethal, just to remain on the
savannah: there, further, it cannot be found…

like disturbing low hunger in its lair
among layers that shade does not sharpen
but into the air, bliss surmounts bareback
& like the palm surrenders: drifted delta
between alluvial eyelids spouts, hushes.

will patina be the grace, quartz that hurls
resemblances by hungers-light
for mother Uma, lifted in arms
within the spy space just as water lilies
orbit the mud?

will this eating and fasting be the sphere, spirals
& sweat of each gram-age waiting
just to rage froth that the thorn kept?
separated petals radiate multiparous
wakefulness, & in the respite i restore.

*eating and fasting: Miguel Ángel Bustos

WITHIN HIS FEMALE HE THREADS
—the day burns from gem to yolk
with no command— then the cold
tongue is caught, transbeats

a star the lapse-pool of breath,
the twisting letters consume
more pages, around the time
that slows her passionflower fall.

watching everything does not seep.
does not make hunger nor appease
knowing, or almost an elk in turmoil:
keys brush in the forest, there in the forest

is no respite nor even a spire seems to grow,
unison between altars, brambles, the rose
whose spinal tropism the breath of minute
the shores of sleep pollinates. & shows

the gloomy firefly of hunger &
a flower is conceived in the head,
into the air it turns its petals,
emulsion where sighs find rest,

being every shield it shows lucidity.
arouses the scents of space,
or rather this not-usual instant:
it mistakes voices & sprinkles

its abyssal brush, from well-
polished stone —did you hear,
behind the hidden door,
a single dandelion?— or

awake & with no more steps.
i can see, asleep, how
the shy blossom shows.

AS IF OUTSIDE TO BE LIGHTER
neither night nor dawn, behind
a curtain of birds the brief
phrase from Pan’s flute, while
passing, over there, memory
of what is not yet here.

made to the grace of sound,
jumble of swallowed verbs, the ear
whose reflection allows an orator:
nothing comes through now, woods
creak, no one leaves again.

in its weight the logical inversion,
the ear uproots sculptures
but as a river, denied by other
fiery voices, in its old inebriation,
asleep knowing, to be awake,
unsure to stay up.

impassive reflection, by remote
memento, the golden sound: the ash
tree like the light in which it bathes,
thirst turns us.

the wave of this phrase is veiled,
kiskadee in day’s womb, body
occupied by no one.

*

Oliverio Coelho (Photo: Lola García Garrido)

When I track Oliverio Coelho down, he’s in China. That’s not unusual for the Argentine writer; he’s often far from home. Sometimes that’s literal—he’s held writing residencies in Mexico, New York and South Korea—and sometimes it’s literary: his stories, of which he’s published one collection (‘Parte doméstico’, 2009), often take place in foreign locales, and when they don’t, a pervasive otherness permeates ‘domestic’ Argentine settings. Among his six published novels, one is called ‘Borneo’ (2004), another, simply, ‘Ida’ (2008)—departure. After his last extended stay in South Korea, he edited an anthology of contemporary Korean fiction entitled ‘Ji-do’ (2009).

Coelho was born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and continues to make his home in the city. When he isn’t writing fiction, or spending time in transit, he’s a contributor to the culture pages of La Nación, El País, Clarín, Perfíl and Los Inrockuptibles. For the latter, he regularly covers the publishing industry, a task which he characterized thusly for Granta magazine, when, in 2011, they named him one of the ‘Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists’: “to my thinking, the best way to play a role in public life nowadays is to risk thinking outside the box and to convey an ethic in any literature-related public involvement.”

In ‘Death of the Critic’, published here in an exclusive English-language debut, Coelho’s out-of-the-box sensibility is on full display. The piece, originally the closing story in ‘Parte doméstico’, was also published last year in Los Noveles, an online literary journal, and this past August in La Nación. Like Coelho’s other Korean tales—in particular ‘Sun-Woo’, a story which will soon be available in English as part of the translated anthology ‘The Future is Not Ours’ (Open Letter Books, 2012)—‘Death of the Critic’ exhibits a cruel world: dangerous for those who are creatively predisposed, bitter for those who aren’t.

Luckily, when I ask Coelho to answer some questions, his disposition is somewhat brighter. “I’m traveling around China,” he tells me. “But I’ll do everything I can to respond in my free time—in general I get back at night full of wonder and write a bit.” He spoke to us via email, full of wonder, and en route back to Buenos Aires.

Your work is just starting to make its way into English—coming out in the Open Letter anthology, and being featured in last year’s Granta #113. But you’ve written a great deal that has yet to be translated. Can you give us a primer on that work? What else would readers find if they were to read the complete collection ‘Parte doméstico’, and not just ‘Death of the Critic’? 

Readers would find a synthesis of my universe. Story collections can sometimes give writers the chance to concentrate their concerns. In my case, the story functions like a laboratory. It’s a place for tests; without these stories I never would have written novels. In a way, the characters are guinea pigs. Through the characters I attempt to explore certain power relations, especially romantic relationships that, in a sense, reflect the social crisis of 2001. The stories were written when Argentina was disintegrating. Those with ‘Eastern’ themes were written later, 2007, 2008… And they relate to the rest of the book through contrast; they are stories that take place in another world, but address the same problem: romantic relationships as mediated by the capitalist logic of success and failure.

What motivates you to write about life outside of Argentina — and, as in the case of ‘Death of the Critic’, Korea in particular?  Is it freeing? What does it help you achieve as an artist?

Having lived abroad, especially in South Korea, allows me to metabolise experiences that changed my literary universe. It’s inevitable that the Eastern way of life would be the subject of my fiction, after living there. I don’t think it has contributed to any artistic achievement, however; more likely it’s just made me more honest with myself about my curiosities and concerns. Nor do I think the experience has been freeing, per se. But it is comforting to know that I have that parallel landscape in which to develop my stories and that I can, whenever I feel like it, leave behind the field of inbred tensions that is Argentina.

Much of your work seems to challenge the distinction between moral and immoral. The protagonist of ‘Death of the Critic’, Min gyu, for instance, is both a “guilty” and “a victim.” Without giving away the ending of the story (though perhaps I just did), tell us a bit about what brought you to create Min gyu in particular, and what you think he’s up to over there in the deserted suburbs of Seoul.

Well, ‘Death of the Critic’ was the first in a series of stories that I never completed and that had to do with men consumed with bitterness. The story originated in a conversation I had with an Indian writer I met in Seoul. One night we had a good laugh speculating on a resentful writer who decides to kill a literary critic who’s ruined his life. Even though the story doesn’t replicate that plot line, I can point to it as the point of departure. Here, the protagonist becomes the killer by chance, in a miraculous way, and cuts short a relationship developing behind his back. But first and foremost, Min gyu is a victim of existence, of the survival of the fittest.

Can you tell us a bit about your influences, Argentine and otherwise, and how these predecessors or peers have influenced your work? Who else should we be reading in order to understand ‘Oliverio Coelho’? 

I don’t think that in order to understand my books you have to trace influences, antecedents, etc. Books are enjoyed or discarded for what they are. A reader is an instinctive creature, not a rational one. Those who look for precursors and influences are literary critics, and because they look for associations that are valid, often end up talking more about their own reading. In other words, I don’t think the writer is the ideal person to detect his influences. One can feel influenced by a writer, but that might not be reflected in the work. And what might be reflected is a writer that you never paid much attention to and who isn’t one of your favorites, but because of a shared temperament is always present. In my case, Céline.

What’s next? Any plans for other work to appear in English? Or for new work in Spanish?

I’ve been working on a novel for a number of months, I’d say more than a year, and still I’m quite a ways from finishing it… I can’t say too much more, there have already been so many changes of direction that any ‘coming attractions’ could spoil the plot. At the same time, I’m also working on a fictional diary that is based to a degree on my recent experiences in Seoul. The protagonist gets evicted and narrates his experiences in the pools, saunas and dating sights for foreigners. Bit by bit, it’s beginning to coalesce around a young, pretty Russian woman who, because she works twelve hours a day, on top of commuting to and from her home, has lost touch entirely with her own sexuality.

A year ago, Buenos Aires was named the UNESCO World Book Capital City, an honor we at The Argentina Independent decided to commemorate by launching a new literary section and, with it, the ‘Author Spotlight’ series. Our goal was to bring stories, poems, plays and other writing by Argentine scribblers into English, and to feature this work alongside original English-language interviews with those contemporary Argentine scribes. In just twelve months, as the famed Buenos Aires International Book Fair has come and gone and come again, we’ve managed to do just that — bringing into English novel excerpts by Guillermo Martínez and Carlos Chernov, poetry by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, theatre by Marcelo Pitrola, short fiction by Inés Fernández Moreno and a series of microfictions by Ana María Shua.

In addition, we’ve featured two authors — and will feature a third next month — whose novels will soon be available in English translation (hint: Ángela Pradelli, Carlos Gamerro, Andrés Neuman). And, as we celebrate the first birthday of this series, we’d like to toast these authors, and their excellent additions to the Anglophone library, alongside a few other Argentine novels we think are worthy of a place on your 2012 Argentine book queue. These five aren’t just the most interesting novels by Argentine writers being published in the US and UK this year, they’re the most interesting novels being published in the US and UK, period. And they are all by Argentine authors that we’d feel remiss if you didn’t know about. So take out your pen and jot these names down, or load them onto your “To-Read” App, or scan them with your Google Glasses, whatever your style may be.

Friends of Mine by Ángela Pradelli

Friends of Mine by Ángela Pradelli
For loyal readers of this series, Ángela Pradelli needs no introduction. An excerpt from her novel ‘Amigas Mías’, translated expertly by Andrea G. Labinger, helped us launch as our first installment a year ago. Now, after much anticipation, the full-length novel from which that excerpt was taken will be released in English from the Latin American Literary Review Press. Called ‘Friends of Mine’, and also translated by Labinger, the novel tells the story of a group of women living in the Buenos Aires province, who meet once a year on 30th December to eat dinner, celebrate the New Year, and reflect on the strange, difficult and wonderful passage of time. Structured in short, lucid fragments, the novel reads like a coming-of-age tale for a group of friends, a neighborhood, and an era of life in middle-class Argentina that has as much resonance today (and outside of Spanish) as it did when it was first published in 2002 and was awarded the Premio Emecé. Re-read our interview with Pradelli for more context, or peruse the sample we published last year. Then head over to the LALRP website to buy a copy for all your friends — after all, that’s what the novel is about.

The Islands by Carlos Gamerro

The Islands by Carlos Gamerro
When we spoke to Carlos Gamerro last year, two of his acclaimed novels were in the process of being translated into English, both by his friend Ian Barnett (who also translated ‘The Peronist Princess’ by Marcelo Pitrola). Last year, the first of those books, ‘An Open Secret’ (Pushkin Press), was released to a critical consensus: The Economist — a publication not known for effluvient rhetoric — declared that Gamerro’s novel had “the makings of a classic,” and the Independent called it “haunting and disturbing.” This isn’t news to us; we’ve been enjoying Gamerro’s brand of darkly comic prose since we published his story ‘Bad Burgers’ in August. Now English-reading fans of his fiction will have another reason to cheer: this May, And Other Stories, a new British publishing concern, will release a translation of Gamerro’s first novel, ‘The Islands’. Like the spiralling narrator of ‘Bad Burgers,’ the protagonist of ‘The Islands’ chases his own trauma down a rabbit hole when he discovers that, despite the passage of ten years, the Falklands/Malvinas War is still raging — a reality he’s not quite ready to confront. Written with Gamerro’s trademark muscularity, we’re certain this new addition to the English-language cannon will only swell his growing fanbase. Head over to the And Other Stories site to pre-order a copy.

Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman

Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
Long considered an “up-and-coming” writer by the Spanish critical press, Andrés Neuman (born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and raised in Granada, Spain) published two novels set in Argentina (‘Bariloche’ and ‘Una vez Argentina’) before his fourth novel (‘Viajero del siglo’) won Spain’s Alfaguara prize and caught the attention of English-language publishers. That book, published as ‘Traveller of the Century’, made its way into the British bookstores last month, and will soon be released in the US. Neuman, who has written poetry (‘No sé por qué’), short story (‘Alumbramiento’) and travelogue (‘Cómo viajar sin ver’), created in ‘Traveller of the Century’ a novel that is at once contemporary and historical: set in Restoration-era Germany, it discusses sexual mores and intellectual disputes in a distinctly modern way. Praise from writers like Roberto Bolaño long ago boosted his reputation in the Spanish-speaking world, but more than acclaim or ambition, it’s the clarity and grace of Neuman’s prose that has earned him high standing among fans. Now, English-language readers will have a chance to assess, and enjoy: check back here next month for an excerpt from ‘Traveller of the Century’ and interview with Neuman.

The Planets by Sergio Chefjec

The Planets by Sergio Chejfec
When Open Letter Books (US) published Sergio Chejfec’s novel ‘My Two Worlds’ in English last year, the English-reading public was introduced, for the first time, to a unique writer: hyper-perceptive, unafraid of interiority, sworn to the incremental drama of hermeneutics. The novel was well received — one critic called the book a “vast and complicated work of literature;” meaningful praise for a novel only 102 pages long. So this summer, be alert for literary excitement when Open Letter releases the second volume of Chejfec in English: ‘The Planets’. First published in Spanish in 1999, ‘The Planets’ was written during the fifteen-year period when Chejfec lived in Venezuela, a temporal and cultural dislocation important to the text. As ‘My Two Worlds’ used ambulatory reflection, ‘The Planets’ uses the act of remembering to elevate a simple story into an elegant register. It’s a mode of literature difficult to master, but worthy of celebration when done right. Head over to the Open Letter website to begin the celebration.

Varamo by César Aira

Varamo by César Aira
As much as there exists a literary rock star for the 21st century, César Aira is it. He publishes a new book nearly every 6 months; each is more beguiling than the last. They’re short, they’re irreverent, their surreal, or anti-real, or unreal, or, beyond real. Sometimes they’re sloppy; occasionally, they feel unfinished — but somehow, either because of, or in spite of all that, they are always worth reading. Already author of nearly 80 books published in Spanish (no one seems to be sure of the exact number), Aira has, for the last decade or so, slowly been making his way into English. Now, New Directions, famed US publisher of Borges, is bringing out a book nearly every year, with five published since 2006. This year, they’ve released ‘Varamo,’ a novel kind of about a Peruvian man who takes up the homemade art of fish embalming, and also kind of about a very slow city-wide car race, and also kind of about the makings of a classic Central American poem, and yet somehow also not about these things at all. ‘Varamo’ is as strange, and as compelling, as Aira’s best work. In fact, it may be Aira’s best work. Or his worst. You’ll have to read all his books to know for certain. Visit New Directions to start with ‘Varamo’.

1.

If a man wanted to hide his guilt, he could camouflage himself.

But if the guilty man is also a victim—he has to disappear, to renounce everything.

Photo by Bloody Marty

Since he was young, practically every day, Min gyu got drunk alone in seedy bars. The reasons can’t be put down here and now, as alcoholism in every man claims different roots, but what’s certain is that in the course of his life, despite everything, Min gyu never suffered for the drink, was never made its fool in public, nor because of it landed in jail. On the contrary, thanks to the drink he tended to benefit in his dealings with glacial Korean women and when it came to writing short stories which were never published.

If not for a wretched accident, Min gyu would’ve had within his reach a moderate literary future, despite his singular lack of style. After a time he would have received some important literary prize, would have bought a house in a wealthy part of Seoul, would have drunk good liquors in peace and not been exposed to wretched traffic accidents.

The accident itself cannot be attributed to the alcohol. Before that day, Min gyu had driven down that road at least a hundred times drunk; his disgrace, therefore, could have come long before, or never, or, more plausibly, while completely sober. It ought to be clear that the accident in question is a minor episode in relation to what it revealed about Min gyu’s life: that he was not the man he’d believed himself to be up till then.

The circumstances of the accident were unimportant as such. As I’ve said, he drove drunk, although with a regular drinker a certain degree of inebriation is natural and even desirable. From Min gyu’s perspective, the sun was setting. According to witnesses and victims, night had already fallen. The route was deserted. Generally, the road that links Wonju to the suburbs of Seoul is empty. The lighting is bad and at every moment whoever might be driving—be he drunk or sober—should heed the shadows that flutter at the road’s edge. A second of distraction combined with an instance of chance and catastrophe is brewing already, like a storm.

The speedometer reached one hundred kilometers per hour; the radio played some unctuous popular song. Along the side of the road planters and greenhouses rose up covered with plastic sheeting for the intensive cultivation of produce. Min gyu lifted his gaze and there, in the rear view mirror, were his features pinched inward as if on the concave bottom of a bottle. A terrible laugh overwhelmed him as he perceived in his face the physiognomy of a dwarf. He squinted his eyes, blinked, looked up and there still, reaching beyond the mirror as if his features were stuck to the glass and the deformed figure were trying to catch sight of something indistinct happening inside the car, he was laughing. His teeth appeared crooked and yellowish. Min gyu felt wretched, he imagined what he saw to be the ultimate reflection of his life, that he was hallucinating his own death. Just at that moment of sinister delight, a strange mass smacked against the bumper and slid beneath the tires. Min gyu didn’t stop: he associated the blood-curdling screams with the phenomenon in his rear view mirror. Only when another body hit and broke the windshield did he manage to stop. In the agonized facial expression something familiar leaked out. Behind the froth of blood smearing the victim’s face, he noted the last blink of an eye. Like resuscitated bodies escaping from a cemetery, numerous battered forms rose from the roadside, between rousing shouts they threw themselves on the car and began to shake it. Then they tried to get in. Min gyu thought about getting out and breaking into a run: all those bloated body snatchers had no chance of catching him. The engine was still running. He revved it. The banging on the hood intensified. A body ricochet off the back window. New shrieks, terrible and crude. He put the gears correctly in first and this time the car went forward instead of in reverse. He took pleasure in watching that hostile pack of rams, howling at the high moon from the middle of the road, recede in his rear view mirror. The glass of the back window was also cracked. After driving awhile he noticed that on the hood there was still a body stuck to the windshield like a giant moth. He pulled onto the shoulder. He got out to evaluate the situation and vomited. He looked for something with which to nudge the body. But along the roadside there wasn’t anything more than desert grass, greenhouses and dust. He resigned himself to tugging it by one of its legs, pulled at an ankle while averting his gaze and… a black sneaker detached itself from the body. In the same way, without looking, he took off a sock, another sneaker, another sock. The body didn’t move. The feet were so cold they seemed porcelain. He yanked the toes, felt a toenail: a human quality. Finally, with a slight shift, the body separated from the windshield and soaked in its own blood slid slowly down the hood. Min gyu tugged again so that the body would finish its slide, and as soon as he heard the crunch of bones on the ground, ran toward the car fearing that with any delay, the body, in an inverse movement, would throw itself back onto the hood.

2.

Photo by Young Ho Lee

No one saw him arrive. Min gyu parked the car on a tract of undeveloped land, one of the many that lie between the small and chaotic settlements that make up the suburbs of Seoul. It was rare for anyone pass by there, but for the occasional huddled farmer coming to fertilize his crops. He almost always left his car in that spot and walked the three hundred meters to the abysmal apartment in the massive mono-complex where his faithful and long-suffering wife, Jeon Dong, would be waiting up for him.

She was in bed, watching television. She pretended to ignore Min gyu as she heard him come in. He undressed, without preamble. Feeling her foot under the covers, he thought of the crushed body on the hood.

“Drunk, again… It’s late…,” and she leaned toward his face, sniffed and declared: “Very drunk.”

Min gyu would’ve liked to tell her what had happened. But the events appeared vague in his mind: a body on a hood, zombies trying to damage his car. He had the impression that his state of excessive intoxication came more from the irrational accident he’d survived than from the alcohol. After her moment of anger, Jeon Dong turned her back to him. He knew that when this happened, she was really expecting an act of sexual solidarity. He’d begin by nibbling her pale ears, embracing her below the waist, pinching and tugging her nipples. At which point she’d always put up a slight resistance, like a writer who sits down to write and considers the possibility of pouring himself a whiskey or checking his email. He’d proceed by conquering that little resistance, holding her down until she let out her first moan, a kind of warble which was followed by a soft squealing, a vibration in her throat and along her shoulders. Now he followed the formula exactly, although this time he decided to position her face up, as if more than ever he needed to be seen and recognized. He felt anesthetized. “I ran down the devil,” he said. She looked at him with a little bit of fright and tenderness, as if she were taking him into her body for the first time.

“Min gyu, if only you were someone else. Not a drunk who wants to be a writer.”

“I am who I am. Take it or leave it,” he answered without thinking.

She didn’t answer. Perhaps she wasn’t ready to accept him just as he was. Min gyu held her and took her brusquely, without opening his eyes and without even a groan. That woman drained away beneath him. The memory of love was as fragile as that of a crime.

3.

Photo by Grimfo

Min gyu woke to the sound of the telephone. Jeon Dong leapt naked from bed to answer it and barricaded herself in the minuscule dining room to talk in peace. The conversation turned out to be a long one, replete with questions, hysterical shouts and whispers. Then she hung up and burst into tears. She paced back and forth. Min gyu, while trying to get back to sleep, couldn’t free his mind from the sound of those desperate footsteps. It gave him a headache, and when she finally came back to the bedroom, he pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t have to rouse himself and console her fully awake. He listened to her crying. He couldn’t keep himself from half opening an eye: she was looking at herself in the mirror that faced the bed. He supposed her crying had lasted so long because the presence of the mirror lent reality to her simulacrum. Then suddenly he became aware of what was really going on and thought to himself that something terrible could have happened. The death of some family member, he immediately imagined. He was now completely awake, so he joined her at the foot of the bed. He waited patiently for her to speak up, to demand the comfort that he’d withheld at first, comfort that would then transform into a wild offering of kisses and caresses.

After a few minutes, he lost hope that the drama would, as was their custom, unleash the usual passionate scene.

“We have to talk. I could never tell you. A while ago at University…,” she paused.

Min gyu quickly considered various possibilities of which the most plausible seemed to be the following: some anonymous person had tipped Jeon Dong off about his romances during their early days as students, back when they’d hardly known each other. But before he could say anything, Jeon Dong burst into tears, and he stammered out:

“I’ve always been faithful; I never cheated on you.”

She twisted her mouth, mockingly, as if what he’d said was obvious. Min gyu tried to hug her, but in his attempt managed to transmit some deeper falsehood, an obligatory affection which she immediately rejected with a slight wave of a hand. When she calmed down, she told him that the phone call had been to tell her of Kim Sung jung’s death. Kim, briefly put, was a renowned literary critic who had been their professor at university and,  around the time that they’d first met in a creative writing class, had eviscerated all of Min gyu’s compositions, methodically, as if the two men had been in competition for the same woman. The same Kim had relegated one of Min gyu’s compositions to tenth place—out of eleven competitors—in the university’s literary competition, and had precipitated the rejection of his first book of stories by Dungji Press with a devastating reader’s report. To make matters worse, Kim Sung jung used to collaborate with all the national newspapers, commandeering a monopoly on “new Korean narrative” with a petulance and arrogance that inflamed Min gyu: promoting the work of every Tom, Dick and Harry; young writers in whom he extolled the aesthetic virtues actually present in Min gyu’s work, the very work Kim gratuitously demolished.

Despite this—and even though they’d once spoken of the animosity he felt for Kim Sung jung—Min gyu answered that no, he didn’t remember him, but that either way he was sorry. Then she hugged him, and apologized, begging him to understand her pain. That very moment, after the word ‘pain’, she said what he’d have preferred to never hear: Kim Sung jung had been a “stabilizing figure,” someone whom she had loved and with whom she was known to have, when he would disappear drunk for days or would go on vacation to his hometown, “intellectual exchanges.” Min gyu nodded, stunned. Had he been drunk, he would have reacted differently. Not in his life would he have thought that Jeong Dong would cheat on him with his greatest adversary, a man so much older, a putrefied literary critic, a professorial social-climber, a frustrated writer. The betrayal was double. Up till then he’d believed that her only “intellectual” relationship prior to their engagement had been a fleeting encounter with a South American professor. He consoled himself with the thought that Kim Sung jung had chosen to become his enemy deliberately, out of jealousy, and not for any intellectual animus, which at least explained the devastating reader’s report and that tenth place finish in the literary contest.

Then, without drying her eyes or begging for forgiveness, Jeon Dong related in detail the contents of the call she’d received: an unidentified psychopath had run down a group of nighttime marathoners. The only fatal victim had been Kim Sung jung, who’d been training with a group of professors from the University of Suwon along the edge of the road. His body had been found ten kilometers from the accident. The criminal hadn’t only fled, but had driven a thousand meters with the body in its death throws on his hood. Apparently, at that point, he’d stopped. According to a witness, he’d ditched the corpse only after first removing its shoes and socks, and immediately, sadistically, running it over again.

“Don’t tell me any more… It’s horrible.” Min gyu gasped, put on his best victim’s face and with a rueful pose told her that from that moment on he would try to be different, that they should forget the problems of the past, the errors committed under the maleficent sway of hatred or perhaps madness. It was time to start over. Immediately he promised, smiling, what she had always wanted to hear: he would no longer try to be a writer.

Leopoldo Marechal is a second-time-around success story; an author acknowledged only retrospectively as one of the most significant names in Argentine writing.

Following on from Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, the Beyond Borges series looks at the prolific poet, occasional playwright, essayist and novelist whose unpopular political stance resulted in his most accomplished writing being deliberately overlooked for decades.

Rediscovered by later generations, his full-length novel ‘Adán Buenosayres’ was one of the first Spanish language texts to have be deeply indebted to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and is today considered one of the pioneering, must-read works in Argentine literature.

Leopoldo Marechal in Buenos Aires

Life and Early Work

Marechal was born in Buenos Aires in 1900; the eldest son in a family of French-Uruguayan and Basque-Argentine descent. He received a modest upbringing in a southern suburb of Buenos Aires and, from the age of ten, spent regular holidays with his uncle in Maipu. These early experiences provided an exposure to rural environments that would influence and specifically feature in much of his writing.

Having already begun the “dangerous habit” of counting syllables with his fingers, he wrote his first poems aged only 12. At 18, and only shortly after the death of his uncle, he suffered the loss of his father – an event that pushed him into a teaching career he would maintain for much of his life.

During the 1920s Marechal became actively involved in the avant-garde journals ‘Proa’ and ‘Martin Fierro’, along with the likes of Macedonio Fernández, Girondo and Borges. Amidst this climate of literary fervour he published his first collection of poetry in 1922.

‘Los aguiluchos’ bore echoes of earlier modernist influences while a second collection, ‘Días como flechas’, was published only four years later but adhered more closely to the avant-garde trends of the time. Though both titles revealed the same influence of nature and expression of passion, the latter demonstrated more of the finely tuned elements that framed it well within the reformist movements of the period.

In 1926 Marechal travelled to Europe where he wrote for several Spanish journals and surrounded himself with the artists and sculptors of the ‘Paris group’. He returned briefly to Argentina but, in 1929, returned to Paris where he completed his third book, ‘Odas para el hombre y la muter’. Marking something of a return to classical forms, the book received recognition in Argentina in the form of the prestigious Premio Municipal de Poesia.

An article by Marechal in the magazine Martin Fierro

As the 30s came around, the writers of the influential Florida group began moving away from the avant-garde, signifying an era of aesthetic conversion that witnessed many about-turns and relinquished ideals.

Marechal went on to publish several further books of poetry and won the Premio Municipal de Poesia a second time in 1940 for his book ‘Sonetos a Sophia’. By the end of the decade he seemed well on track to become one of Argentina’s most accomplished poets, had his political opinions not impinged so badly on his future literary success.

Adán Buenosayres

Despite being the author of three novels, almost 50 years of poetry and several plays and essays, ‘Adán Buenosayres’ is the single novel for which Marechal is now most known. Far longer than many of the celebrated Argentine novels before it, the 1948 edition covered 741 pages and was divided into seven books.

Purposefully named after Adam in a biblical sense, the Adam of Marechal’s novel also happens to be Argentine, and porteño, Parts one to five take place over three days and narrate the adventures of the principal character, while the sixth and seventh books make use of a more intimate first person; the sixth serving as Adán’s autobiography, and the seventh describing his symbolic descent into hell. Since the novel’s prologue informs us of his fate, Adán’s status as a mythical character is almost immediately secured from the offset.

As much poetry as it is prose, and as autobiographical as it is fictional, the mood of Marechal’s classic is one of its most noteworthy aspects. Its sarcastic and mocking spirit goes some way in tempering the melancholy sentiment of the story itself, and a linguistic richness accompanies its enormous flow of images and symbolism. Often compared to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ the novel aspired to do for Buenos Aires, and for the variations of the Spanish language, what Joyce’s novel had done for Dublin.

Marechal's urban novel aspired to do for Buenos Aires what Joyce's 'Ulysses' had done for Dublin (Photo: Kate Bowen)

Rejection and Rediscovery

Had Marechal published his novel ‘Adán Buenosayres’ shortly after he’d begun writing it in Paris in 1930, its success story might have looked different. As it was, by the time the novel was published in 1948, its reception was marred by a general reluctance to detach the work from the political position of its writer.

A century earlier, the controversial ideologies of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento had likely succeeded in garnering more public attention for his historical essay ‘Facundo’, but Marechal’s masterpiece paid dearly for its author’s political allegiances.

Having initially aligned himself with a generally accepted trend of catholic nationalism, the author later declared his allegiances to the government of Juan Domingo Perón – a move that resulted in his work being shunned by his contemporaries for almost two decades.

Although his writing was not directly political, from 1945 there was no going back. Marechal would become known as the Peronist of his generation and, as such, his work would be purposefully overlooked until new political winds took flight.

Besides the favourable opinion of a select few writers and the ardent admiration of  Julio Cortázar, the first publication of Adán Buenosayres slipped into oblivion. Its reissue, almost 20 years later, caught the attention of a younger generation whose historical interest in Argentine literature led to the novel’s resurgence and its current recognition as a pioneering work in Argentine writing.

The novel has since been translated to French in 1995, Italian in 2010 and is currently being translated into English for publication this year.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo are all names you’d likely come across before arriving at the writing of the next author in our Beyond Borges series.

Perhaps better known for being the wife of the former, or the younger and less-famous sibling of the latter, Silvina Ocampo was herself a prolific writer who gained independent recognition as the author of several prize-winning poetry collections and compilations of fantastic fiction.

Portrait of Silvina Ocampo

Know Your Ocampos

Born in Buenos Aires in 1903, Silvina was the youngest of six sisters to bear the already influential family name. Not initially literary-inclined, she originally travelled to Paris to work under the direction of artists such as the Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico and the French forerunner to pop art, Fernand Léger.

In the early 30s, her eldest sister Victoria became the founding editor of the long-running, culturally-significant journal ‘Sur’. It was through this review that, in 1933, Silvina was introduced to both Borges and a much younger Bioy Casares. Despite an age difference of nine years, she controversially became Bioy’s lover when he was just 19. Seven years later, they embarked on a marriage that, although not always faithful, saw them joined as occasional collaborators and lifelong companions.

As a poet, short-story author, translator and one-time playwright, Ocampo wrote incessantly and almost always independently throughout her life, publishing as many as seven poetry collections and around the same number of short story compilations.

In 1940 she collaborated with both Bioy and Borges on an anthology of fantastic literature and later an anthology of Argentine poetry. Although she had already published her first collection of short fiction, ‘Viaje olvidado’, in 1937, critics cite her involvement in this first anthology as having had a visible influence on her style.

Her later collections, including ‘Autobiografía de Irene’, ‘La furia y otro cuentos’, ‘Las invitadas’, ‘Los días de la noche’, and the children’s story ‘La naranja maravillosa’, perhaps exhibit a more prototypical Ocampo.

Writing the Feminine into the Fantastic

Inspired by authors such as Lewis Carroll, the majority of Ocampo’s literary output falls into the category of the fantastic, exploring surrealist ideas such as the manipulation of space and time, memory, mirrors and metamorphosis.

Whilst many of her themes crossed over with those explored by other authors or the fantastic, Ocampo’s treatment of what might have essentially been the same ideas, has been noted for its ingenuity and, perhaps most commonly, for its unusual cruelty.

The murders and other violent acts contained in her writing might not have met with descriptions of such ‘cruel innocence’ had the majority of her stories not presented them through the eyes of children.

Whether written for children or adults, her fiction often featured child protagonists in the recurrent setting of childhood homes and plots that appeared fairy-tale, at least in concept, if not in execution.

Many of Ocampo's stories were set in the childhood mansions of her protagonists. (This still, courtesy of 'Cornelia at her Mirror')

In ‘Biografia de Irene’ a marble statue of a winged horse speaks to a girl and promises to carry her into a fairytale land, and in ‘La torre sin fin’ a boy who makes fun of an artist who visits his house to display his paintings of a strange topless tower finds himself suddenly imprisoned there inside the painting, and although everything he paints comes to life it does not always take on the form he imagined.

Argentine author Julio Cortázar, whose own short stories run in a similar vein to Ocampo’s, commented upon the ‘strangeness of the everyday’ in her writing and her ability to infuse every day objects with a fantastic importance. Certainly, the disquieting nature of her short stories probably does stem from the fact that she wrote about such familiar every day circumstances the reader comes to doubt the occurrence of anything extraordinary.

Often written about alongside another Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, critics have suggested that an understanding of each writer’s attitude to childhood is fundamental to an appreciation of their work.

Claiming that female authors have historically leant towards the fantastic as a form of expression, some critics have also suggested Ocampo’s fantastic literature might have been a manifestation of feminine subversion, citing her treatment of metamorphosis by way of example.

Interestingly, her protagonists can be generally observed as responding differently to both the process of transformation and their new form, dependent on gender. Ocampo’s male characters are often reluctantly transformed to plants, whereas her female protagonists more often than not have an existing relationship with the object of their transformation appearing more welcoming of their transformation to either animal forms or objects that are essentially masculine.

Where her husband had prioritised plot over character, Ocampo favoured style above all else, tackling themes of love and infidelity or sin and forgiveness with an irony, dark humour and  lightness that otherwise might not have existed.

Later Life and Recognition

A poster for the 2010 film 'Cornelia at her Mirror', inspired by OCampo's last book of fantastic fiction

Besides authoring some of the most original and ingenious short fiction Argentina had seen between 1937 and 1988, Ocampo was also highly-regarded as a poet, publishing her first collection of poems, ‘Enumeracio de la patria’, in 1942, and her last, ‘Amarillo celeste’, in 1972. In the middle she was awarded the 1954 Premio Municipal de Literatura for ‘Espacios métricos’ and the 1962 Premio Nacional de Poesia for ‘Lo amargo por dulce’, having won second prize for ‘Los nombres’ nine years earlier in 1953.

In later life she reportedly suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, which seems especially cruel for a writer who had explored the theme of memory in such depth in her work. In her first book ‘Viaje olvidado’ a girl looks to remember the moment of her birth, and in a later story a woman recounts her life story backwards, beginning with the present and eventually dying when she reaches the beginning.

Bioy withheld news of his wife’s own death in 1993 so that a private funeral could be held in accordance with her wishes. Having been associated for more than 50 years with prominent literary and artistic personalities, Ocampo is often described as having lived in the shadow of her sister on the one hand and her husband on the other.

Perhaps content to live as a ‘famous unknown’, some argue that Ocampo was not necessarily subjected to living under these shadows but rather chose to remain there, shying away from the public life that Buenos Aires demanded of its great authors.

Although her sister Victoria probably still stands to be the most talked-about of the Ocampo siblings, Silvina’s impressive literary production at least equals that of her husband Bioy in terms of quantity and possibly even far exceeds him in terms of quality, linguistic ability and influence.

As recognition of Ocampo’s contribution to fantastic literature continues to grow, her influence on other surrealist authors is also becoming more recognisable. Whilst she might always be comparatively unknown, critics acknowledge the value of her writing as a jumping-off point for the works of Borges, Cortázar and other more-recognised masters of the short-story form.