Southeaster
Page 3
[I see myself in the small things and small lives, the ones that leave no residue of history… the small things that happen to a chap who doesn’t even have a name, converge and disperse on the river-time with the stories of others that are as trifling as his.]
And Southeaster’s landscape of the river offers the perfect location for such a story:
No hay nada que dure sobre este paisaje de olvido, no hay nada que se afirme y resista. Él mismo cambia de forma, tentando continuamente bordes y orillas distintas. Un río nuevo para cada historia.
[There is nothing that lasts on this scene of forgetting, nothing stands firm and endures. It changes its face, continually trying to draw borders and shorelines. The river is new for each story.]20
This image of flow and flux is related to perception and to the nature of writing. Writing is re-creation, not simple description, for there is no objective reality: Lo que existe en todo caso, es una pura fluencia, un caos de estímulos y sensaciones, al que nuestra subjetividad le otorga sentido [What exists after all is pure flow, a chaos of feelings and stimuli, bestowed with meaning by our subjectivity].21 There is a tension in the writing, between a desire for precision and an awareness of flux and flow, which talks of wider issues of engagement, the satisfaction of small tasks in opposition to fatalism and subjectivity. The rhythms of the writing and the shifting narrative perspectives are thus essential to Conti’s overall purpose, and Jon Lindsay Miles’ splendid translation is particularly sensitive here.22
This interview from the early sixties ends with a statement that lyrically encapsulates the novel we have just read.
Hay algo erratil en todo el asunto. Los barcos de humor vagabundo, los tipos que vienen y se van, la espera interminable de algo borroso que arguardamos del tiempo o del agua, el viaje que siempre hemos sonãdo, la ciudad en la espalda, gentes y lugares distintos que presentimos detrás de ese horizonte que en los días grises se confunde con el cielo, pero sobre todo esa sustancia movediza que penetra las horas y los días y que destila ansiedad…
Es la misma nostalgia vagabunda de Kerouac… el tema del ’homo viator’, del tiempo que pasa y nos vuelve ajenos, nos adelgaza en láminas de olvido el esfuerzo por aferrarnos sobre algo sustancialmente movedizo, dejando pistas y rastros de nuestra presencia que se vuelven testimonios de nuestra mayor ausencia, los pequeños objetos poseídos, las cosas que cubrieron o prolongaron o auxiliaron a mi cuerpo, esas pacientes cosas a las que yo he asignado un sentido exclusivo, un uso preciso, inclusive un carácter personal e intransferible: en fin, todos esos vestigios a través de los cuales alguien podrá acaso reconstruir mi rostro, la presión de mis manos, el roce de mis pies, la dirección de mis deseos.
[There is something capricious in all this. The boats with their wandering nature, the blokes who come and go, the interminable waiting for something unclear that the time or the water will bring, the journey we’ve dreamed of forever, the city behind us, different people and places we feel are there beyond that horizon, which on grey days is mixed with the sky, but, more than all this, that substance like quicksand that runs through the hours and the days and exudes a disquiet…
It’s the same nostalgia for wandering Kerouac knew… the theme of the ‘homo viator’, the time that goes by and leaves us estranged, that takes our efforts to hold on to something that’s always essentially shifting, and thins it to layers of forgetting, leaving tracks and prints of our presence that turn into proofs of our much larger absence, the small objects possessed, the things that conceal or sustain or give aid to my body, those long-suffering things that I’ve given a personal meaning, a use that’s required, a personal nature, even, unique, that can’t be exchanged: anyhow, all those remains that someone might use to bring back my face, the press of my hands, the touch of my feet, the course of my longings.]
Thanks to Jon Lindsay Miles’s careful translation, readers in English can at last immerse themselves in the subtle, beautifully wrought, journey of the voyager, ‘homo viator’, whose identity is defined as, and in, movement.
JOHN KING
Leamington Spa,
March 2013
Notes
1 CP Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’, in E Keely and P Sherrard, eds., Six Poets of Modern Greece, London: Thames and Hudson 1960, p. 42.
2 Haroldo Conti, ‘Tristezas de vino de la costa, o la parva muerte de la Isla Paulino’, Crisis 36 (April 1976), p. 51. In this Afterword, all translations appearing inside square brackets are by Jon Lindsay Miles.
3 Ibid, p. 57.
4 See Domingo F Sarmiento, El Carapachay, Buenos Aires: Eudeba 2011, pp. 52–53.
5 See Victoria Ocampo, Autobiografía, Vol 2: El imperio insular, Buenos Aires: Sur 1980, pp. 65–75.
6 Quoted in Rodolfo Benasso, El mundo de Haroldo Conti, Buenos Aires: Galerna 1969, p. 146.
7 Hernán Benítez, mentioned earlier in this paragraph, introduced Conti to the literary criticism of another occupant of the Seminario Metropolitano Conciliar de Villa Devoto, Father Leonardo Castellani, a controversial nationalist philosopher and writer. (See Haroldo Conti, ‘Era nuestro adelantado’, Crisis 37 (May 1976), p.43.) Conti was abducted and disappeared on 5th May 1976, some thirty years after leaving the seminary and only days after his short note on Castellani appeared in the magazine Crisis. Two weeks after his disappearance, General Videla, who had led the military coup on 24th March 1976, invited four writers to have lunch with him, to give the impression that all was normal in a society gripped by fear, assassination, disappearance, censorship and arbitrary arrest. One of those invited was Father Castellani. The magazine Crisis, in its penultimate issue before being forced to cease publication and its editors escaping into exile, interviewed Castellani about the lunch, and he replied: ‘I tried at least to take advantage of the situation with the Christian concern that I carried in my heart. Someone had visited me days before, who, with tears in their eyes and plunged in desperation, had begged me to intercede on their behalf for the life of the writer Haroldo Conti. I knew nothing more than that he was a prestigious writer and had been a seminarist in his youth… I noted his name on a piece of paper and gave it to Videla, who took it from me respectfully and assured me that peace would return to the country soon.’ Padre Castellani, ‘Algo más que libros’, Crisis 39 (July 1976), p. 3.
8 Ibid, p. 156.
9 Haroldo Conti, handwritten note, La Rioja, June 1967, published in Crisis 16 (August 1974), p. 44.
10 In Argentina, the highly influential magazine Primera Plana would put certain boom writers on the front cover (primera plana) and do close readings of their work, often accompanied by interviews placing them en primer plano [in the foreground].
11 Quoted in Héctor Guyot, ‘Haroldo Conti y el río de la vida’, La Nación 17th October 2009.
12 Haroldo Conti, ‘Compartir las luchas del pueblo’, Crisis 16 (August 1974), p. 42.
13 Juan Carlos Martini, ibid, pp. 40–41.
14 Benasso, p. 152.
15 See note 10, above.
16 Ibid, p. 153.
17 Haroldo Conti, ‘La breve vida feliz de Mister Pa’, Crisis 15 (June 1974), p. 64.
18 Ibid, p. 67
19 In Benasso, pp. 157–8.
20 Ibid, pp. 158–9.
21 Ibid, p. 153.
22 See also the analysis by Aníbal Ford which helps inform this section: ‘Homo viator. El conflicto entre estrategias literarias y etnográficas en Sudeste de Haroldo Conti’, in Eduardo Romano, compilador, Haroldo Conti, alias Mascaró, alias la vida, Colihue: Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, Buenos Aires, 2008, pp. 245–67.
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