At some point around two this morning I finally got around to reading this thoughtful essay by fellow San Telmo resident Marcelo Ballvé, The Literary Alchemy of César Aira.

Aira is certainly one of the leading voices in contemporary Argentine literature. In what is becoming a tradition among Argentine writers, Aira’s works are not at all traditional treatments of fiction. Marcelo tells us, “Like the storyteller of prehistory, Aira is concerned not so much with verisimilitude or realism as he is with that bewitching kernel of mystery that is at the heart of a narrative.”

Marcelo makes the case that Aira’s book “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is one of the great works of world literature from the last 25 years of the last century, as good if not better than W.G. Sebald or Roberto Bolaño.” That’s a pretty strong statement, particularly considering the Bolaño mania of the past year. (But Marcelo is far from being alone in his praise. The Aira novel was recognized as the most extraordinary book in translation of 2006).

Aira claims to never edit his works, which is a contrast to many writers (myself included) who believe that the art of writing is in the revisions. But Aira takes a refreshingly artistic approach to literature:

“The key to Aira’s curious career, I think, is to be found in his conception of literature as something with more affinities to the realm of action than the inner world of reflection. Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again. Editing is dispensable, so is the search for the “right” publisher.”

Someday when I want to think more about it, there are some intriguing aspects to Aira that foreshadow developments in new media and, perhaps, the future of literature. The lack of editing so that writing retains an always forward motion, a continuum, is today most clearly seen in blogging, a form of writing which is rarely self-edited and by its very chronological nature is in constant movement.

All of which makes me think that Aira would be one of hell of a blogger. (Does he have a blog?) Well, maybe if he was a few decades younger then he would be a blogging, Twittering fool. After all, is literature about writing or creating physical objects known as books?

Went up to San Isidro to visit the home of Villa Ocampo, one of the homes of Victoria Ocampo. The Web site for Villa Ocampo is actually quite good and contains a lot of information that the woman who was a great patron of the arts

It’s a gorgeous house, certainly worth a visit.

If you can make it out to San Isidro, then stop by Victoria Ocampo’s house in Palermo….it’s a very different style.

Finally, finally made it over to the Homage to Girondo at the Xul Solar Museum. Today is the last day of the two month exhibition, so if you didn’t make it then you’ve missed it.

On display were many examples of books by Oliverio Girondo, one of Argentina’s most important poets of the 20th century. Books by his wife Norah Lange were also on display. Many of the items on display came from the collection of their niece Susana Lange. This year marked the 40th anniversary of Girondo’s death.

Also on display were drawings by Girondo. He was definitely no artist, especially when showcased in the same room as the magnificent works by Xul Solar. It was interesting to see some of Girondo’s drafts for cover designs of his books.

The highlight of the exhibition and something that I’ve been wanting to see for a long time is the academician that Girondo used to promote one of his most known books, Espantapájaros. I’ve written before about the publicity of that book when I posted about the house on Suipacha where Girondo and Lange lived. Here is the cover of the book:

And below is the super-sized model for that cover, an object that later graced the entrance hallway of Girondo’s house.

Another view with some of Xul Solar’s paintings on the wall in the background.

Out of the Woods Now is one of those good literary blogs you should be reading if you’re interested in such things…A posting from earlier this week is on The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

Any discussion of the plot would detract from the experience of encountering it for the first time, but suffice it to say that it involves obsession, immortality, fame, love, the parallel destinies of men and the images they create, and a woman named Faustine (which made me think of Goethe and deals with the devil). The invention itself is something we’re on the verge of today–I was stunned when I flipped to the copyright page and discovered that it was first published in 1940 (!).

Irish writer Keith Ridgway has a post on his blog about Borges in Ireland and how a 5 year-old Ridgway met the Argentine writer in 1971.

John Perry, a professor in the philosophy department at Stanford, recently gave a lecture at Amherst College titled ” ”˜Borges and I’ and ”˜I’ ”. (via Perlocutionary).

Since the lecture is by a philosopher and it’s about Borges, you can be certain that it talks about the philosophy of language and “self”. If you’re not into epistemological discussions then you might think that it will be rather tedious listening, but it’s aimed towards an undergraduate audience and Perry wades into the topic rather slowly. Much of the talk is on the simple ways that we use language everyday, such as how we introduce ourselves at a party or how we ask for salt at the dinner table, the usage that we give to proper names and pronouns.

If you’ve not read “Borges and I” then it’s worth a reading or even a re-reading. It’s a short piece, less than 1 page. While “Borges and I” is usually included in The Collected Fictions, it’s really more of an essay, a contemplation about the public persona of Borges the writer.

The Borges work and Perry’s lecture made me think of the nature of celebrity and the impressions, beliefs we form about people in the news. But even on a more ordinary level, what we think we know about others, the people we know, even our friends, our family, our lovers. We probably know less about their motivations than we think we know, yet we often, usually, perhaps always, make assumptions about their behavior based on what we think we know about them.

In his lecture, John Perry said,

I think selves are basically just people, seen as playing the role of being the same person as the subject of some verb, the agent of some activity, the thinker of some thought, the possessor of some emotion, and so forth. My neighbor is just a person, thought of as playing the role of one who lives next to, relative to me. My father is just the person who plays the role of being the male parent of, relative to me. “Neighbor” and “father” are role-words, and so is “self.” On this conception of selves, there is only one self per person, the person himself or herself.

Still, we often use phrases like “the true self” or “the authentic self.”

Perry goes on to describe how “cognitive structures, though no longer my true beliefs, or even really beliefs at all, live a shadowy half-life in the darker regions” of our psyches.

The last line of “Borges and I” famously ends with the sentence, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

It hadn’t occurred to me before but by the time that Borges composed that line he had already gone blind. So, in the physical sense of writing, he actually did not write that line. It was written by someone else, the person listening to him.

The good folks at Three Percent have a couple of mentions about Argentine writer Rodolfo Fogwill whose novel Los Pichiciegos has just been released in English (translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson): Malvinas Requiem: Visions of an Underground War

Three Percent points to a piece in the Guardian which describes Fogwill’s book as “the definitive fictionalised account of the Falklands conflict“.

Rather interesting is a comparison of marketing material written for the U.S. and U.K. markets. Along the way are mentioned Bioy Casares and the TV show Lost. Now, I’m interested in digging up the ways that Los Pichiciegos was marketed here in Argentina.

I’ve never been much interested in reading literature from the perspective of how characters either exercise or are subjected to power in a story’s context. It’s just a little too intense literary study for me but it is an accepted form of scholarship. Yet, the theme of struggle is a key element in life and society. Earlier this year the University of Texas Press issued a book on Women and Power in Argentine Literature: Stories, Interviews, and Critical Essays.

I’ve not actually seen the book and I assume it’s the that type of thing one mostly will find in university libraries but the introduction is available online and provides an overview that is worth reading. Interviews with authors always have the potential for revealing fascinating insights.

The topic of women and power is as complex and diverse as it is fascinating, particularly in a society like Argentina’s, where women are expected to be strong and intelligent, to pursue a career and at the same time be feminine, domestic, and maternal. My observation, after years of research and reflection, is that the women writers of Argentina have excelled in mirroring the many faces of women vis-à-vis power because they have been driven by the desire to understand themselves and their place within the family, the workplace, and society, much like women writers anywhere else. Yet, what makes the case of Argentine women writers unique is a certain ethos of being Argentine that generates a paradoxical self-questioning.

At some point, whenever I get a chance to actually find a copy of this book, I’ll get around to reading it.

TO BE TRANSLATED OR NOT TO BE (pdf) is a new report on the “international situation of literary translation” produced by International PEN and the Institut Ramon LLull (Barcelona). [I first saw mention of this report at the Literary Salon and PEN America]

The report starts with a wonderful and short forward by Paul Auster:

“Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.”

I’ve not yet read the complete, sixty-plus page report. It’s late and I want to go to bed but there are some aspects I wanted to highlight. Early in the report is a section titled English as an Invasive Species. That’s a catchy line that should get the attention of anyone who can read that sentence. The report presents a good discussion on the state of literary translation…a rather depressing read for those of us who care about language and world literature.

Why care about language? The report (p21) says it quite well: “each language embodies a human community’s unique perception and experience of the world, all of it lost forever when the language is lost.”

Case Study on Literary Translation in Argentina

I was surprised and heartened to see that Argentina was included as one of six countries closely examined for its practices in literary translations. (An aside: my friends from Barcelona will be proud to see that Catalonia also was selected as one of those countries. Well, the report was authored by institute in Barcelona and the report even goes so far as to state that Catalonia is a “nation without a state”). Okay, back to Argentina.

The study, written by Gabriela Adamo, starts by linking the rise of publishing in Buenos Aires (as well as Mexico City) with the relocation of Spain’s best publishers to Latin America during the Franco dictatorship. Many major American, English, and French writers were translated first in Latin America, before becoming available in Spain…Faulkner, Henry James, Virginia Woolf.

Then came the ruin of local publishing in Latin America by military dictatorships and economic crises and the shift back to Spain. Essentially, Spanish-language publishing in the world today is controlled by large publishing companies based in Spain.

For works to be translated into English, eyes often turn to publishers and critics in Spain to identify potential authors and titles: “It is not surprising, then, to note how desperate Latin-American writers are to see their works published in Spain, which they regard as the only real gateway into the international world… …a great number of people in the international publishing world still see [Latin America] as the big backyard of Spain.”

The Presence Behind the Book

I knew that book designers are horribly paid and poorly treated by Argentine publishers, but evidently the same is true for the people who actually translate the literature into Spanish.

As far as Argentine writers being translated into other languages, it’s most likely to be French, Portuguese (Brazil), German, or Italian. Getting translated into English is very difficult. This is a publishing problem. Personally, I’m continually astounded at the quantity and range of writing I’m coming across by Argentine and other Latin American writers.

The report indicates that the problem is largely due to the lack of foreign rights departments among Latin American publishers, but that there are a couple of initiatives aimed at promoting Argentine writers to foreign publishers. In another post, I’m going to have some further thoughts on this topic.

The case study ends with the assertion that there are many promising younger writers in Argentina, along with this suggestion: “The best way to confirm this is to walk around the always abundant Buenos Aires bookshops.”

One of my favorite writers that I’ve started to read during these past couple of years living in Buenos Aires is not an Argentine but an Englishman who spent some time here: Graham Greene.

He’s a huge name and I should have read him years ago but somehow never got around to it.

“In a way what one forgets becomes the unrecognised memory of the future.” That’s Graham Greene talking to Alex Hamilton during a 1971 interview recently reprinted in the Guardian.

The novel that Greene was composing at that time was The Honorary Consul, which is set not in Buenos Aires as one might expect but along the frontier with Paraguay. In the Guardian interview, Greene talks a little about the origin of the book in a chance encounter: “Recently I was in a town in North Argentina where I didn’t know a soul. I came down from my hotel room for a quiet dinner by myself and a mysterious figure came and said he had an invitation for me to camp outside the city.”

And for those interested, here are my impressions of The Honorary Consul.