No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)
Page 23
Eduardo Javier Manjares. Spanish writer and editor, born in Russia in 1939. After writing his first Catalan volume and an essay on the English translation of the poet Bernart de Ventadorn, Manjares founded—in more than one continent—quite a number of publishing houses with the honorable aim of reviving that exquisite though forgotten trade of literary piracy. Within Spain’s piratical publication industry, his collections, Caliban, Etiquette, Distance, and—the most frequently discussed—Estrambote were unequaled. In 1975, he published The Last Days of Ernest Fenollosa, an imaginary chronicle about the sufferings of the man who made Ezra Pound believe he could translate Chinese poetry. Then, in 1978, there was Southeast Postal, a major collection of masterworks—half of them cryptic, half touristical, the latter composed in melodic hendecasyllables—was inspired by a trip to various places in China and India. In one story, there’s an Asturian living in Albi; in another, a Manchegan living in Laos; and in yet another, a Valencian in Cambridge and London. Such geographical versatility or promiscuity was perhaps the most appealing aspect of the collection, whose title is taken from one of the stories. The author himself believes this to be the case. Later, he began manifesting a double incapacity—as author and publisher—to the latest literary trends. His final publication (under the pseudonym: Andrés Zubillaga), Concise Dictionary of Detectives, was prompted by his passion for the kind of data that’s correct, exact, the kind that makes a man seem wise. His hatred of progress, of technology, the Internet, made him a pariah. “I’ve been using an Underwood typewriter since I was twelve. The only literature I understand and admire is the acoustic kind: inspiration without style, reality and typing. But now that there’s a fashion for imprecision, gracelessness, and such a paucity of great literary role models, and now that the Internet whips up the masses in an atavistic frenzy, I’ve become in my antiquity an ogre under a bridge, or less dramatically, a footnote.
Note: In 1956 in Buenos Aires and 1962 in Gerona (postmarked Bilbao), respectively, Nicasio Urlihrt and Javier Manjares published similar works under the same pseudonym, Macabru (See Macabru). The reason being that both Nicasio and Javier liked to be called Macabru in their respective cities. Macabru, an exotic, vaguely oriental appellation.
Cristóbal Niaras: expounding on the work and reputation of a critic of Niaras’s eminence would exceed by far the space designated for these merely informative outlines, but because this rector’s professional competence has been brought under continual scrutiny ever since his journal put that special issue in circulation …
Amadeo Arancibia Loayza (Buenos Aires, 1940—Buenos Aires, 1999). Discreet, fantasmal, and very prolific, Amadeo was known by the members or inductees at Agraphia as “Dos de Nosotros” or “Two of Us.” [because] He was fat, victim of a hereditary obesity that caused him much professional inconvenience, in spite of his exquisite Spanish. “A translator of disarming honesty and a writer of such reticence” according to NU, “he deserved an honorary box in the River Plate theatre of neglect …” Only a single collection of poems: Vereda de los impares.
Neville Orpington: See Museum, Sherbet Aria. Along with Hector Hugh Monro (Saki) and Arthur Ronald Annesly Firbank, Neville Orpington was a cynosure among the group of English eccentrics that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. He came from a wealthy family, proud of its distinguished lineage and the fact their rustic roots remained firmly planted in the English countryside, despite the deracinating effects of the industrial revolution. The way he managed his fortune, squandering it in London in little over a decade, was what set him apart from his predecessors. This young dreamer disposed of his inheritance with Mediterranean, epicurean conviction, a treasure that took at least five generations of parsimonious Protestants to hoard. His only literary associate was the misanthropic Barbellion, who wrote The Journal of a Disappointed Man, who had a passion for entomology that accorded with Orpington’s mania for collecting bric-a-brac. Orpington dedicated his last collection of short stories to him. More than merely a snob or an exhibitionist, Orpington’s vanity and egocentrism were so great he would not deign to perform in public, which led to a paradox: private exhibitionism.
The complete list of Orpington’s works is brief: After Euphues, Nissus in Brobdignag, Maybe I’m Amazing, Svelte Lavendar and her Slender Sisters. “Pimlico,” which he wrote under a heteronym [Beauclerk], was the only story he took the trouble to rewrite thirty-three times: he called them his “Diabelli Variations.”
Remo Sabatani [born in Gualeguaychú, Entre Ríos, from thence, it’s all just myth]: once touted to be the world’s greatest writer, he dashed that promise by only delivering at the end of his life what he called his “demora en tinto” or “belated ink,” a wondrous achievement of arrogant display and inanity. The most mysterious of Agraphia’s contributors, he was the model of the secluded writer for many of the stories in the anthology. According to his relatives, he is currently living in Davos. [[He’d be roughly the same age as Urlihrt, 73 or 74.]] Like other contributors, he had an evangelical enthusiasm for founding magazines and journals, above all throwaways: The Manchurian Candidate, Gaucho Marx, Brother Marx …
Sabatani, Remo: Stepping into the Dubious Daylight, Plan for a Plagiarism, He who Counts the Syllables, Sonnets and Falsonnets, Notebook in Extremis, Novel with Three Endings and Seven Beginnings, The X-Positions.
Bruno Scacchi: sizes and excesses (always either too big, too small, too much, too little) …
Lino Scacchi: a shy and reticent author of works Urlihrt valued for their “laconic richness.” An illustrator and caricaturist (in pen and pencil), he was overshadowed by his overrated younger brother, Bruno. Nondescriptions [1972], Idiomaties [1979], and Nondescriptions and Idiomaties [1986].
Elena Siesta: see Cora Beatriz Estrugamou
Federico Prosan: FP’s career really only begins, happily for him, around the time Agraphia begins its decline. Or as he boasted: Too young to be around, too old to be expelled … FP had therefore been “without acquaintance, without welcome, without farewell.” Nevertheless, it was he who played the greatest role in disseminating most of the journal’s “secrets” and those of the group behind it. Although Lester later denied it, Prosan, due to his remarkable academic delectation, thought himself a disciple. FP’s books have achieved recognition in central Europe, Spain, even England and the United States. Instead and Otherwise, two collections of alternative versions of stories he’d already written, achieved—perhaps because the originals had been ignored—enormous success, both critically and commercially. Furthermore, he [also] compiled an anthology of the mistaken story, which was based on his hypothesis that every good collection contains “one incorrigable or irredeemable error.”
César Quaglia Quiroge Valdés, see Zi Benno
Elijah Levi Sapirstein; see Lord Swindon, in Museum
Sal Simpson (see apocryphal biography in Sherbet Aria): pseudonym of Ciaran MacDuff, who was born in Ystradgynlais, Wales, in 1929, and died in Topanga Valley, California, in 1992, where he founded, twenty years before, the influential Tantrum Press, a publishing house that dedicated itself, from the very beginning, almost exclusively to indignation, a mission that today has spread to the world wide web via The Internail, a business run by his wife’s adopted son, Yusuf Ystrad. After writing many serious novels that garnered little attention, he wrote a series of nine novels introducing a new character—Priscilla Grayce, alias Venus Constrictor—a kind of femme fatale, whose popularity guaranteed him not only prosperity, but exile and death, the latter preceded only two months by his companion, Memsahib Banian.
Una Traherne (better known as Arnu Popish Lemniscate): Brief Biography of Imagination, Principles of Uncertainty Beyond the Dream, Theory and Practice of Jeopardy in Wales, Jaundice, From Anagnorisis to Delirium Tremens. [[Another of Eiralis’s errors, attributing Una’s works to Eliphas.]]
Born in Wuthering Heights, Una was educated by an indulgent Presbyterian instructor and thought discipline by the preacher of a provincial vicarage. T
he great prestige of her treatise, Visions of Imagination Beyond the Dream, may be the result of its being attributed to her mortal enemy, Eliphas Morph …
Belisario Tregua: [is] known—insofar as an artisan can be known—for his translations that, over the course of nearly three decades, led to the homogenization of all mystical literature published in Buenos Aires. The Dreadmist, a magisterial tome of disenchantment, describes all the liturgy and bacchanalia that typified Argentina’s dark ages. His only publication, 13 Attempts to Abolish the Present, is, despite its ingenious premise, one of the worst books to read in the Argentine literary canon.
After his book of poems, Prosodia, went unnoticed, he began writing briefs for current affairs magazines. Shortly afterwards, he published a book, False Steps, a collection of short stories, remarkable for their sober style, precision, liveliness, in which—whether by conscious effort or an impulse resulting from a combination of the dream life and the encyclopedia of anxiety—each word seems to be in the wrong place … The journal Scalp. In 1989, OL moved to Italy, where he launched the publication, Popolo Norte. His Eyelet for a Pendulum collects together all his journals, diaries, and musical criticism: the ostentatious volume that X, the skeptic, who was a lot closer to Z of “All your nerves” compiled for Tintagel, publishing house of Eduardo Javier Manjares’s … from page to friar, and onwards from there
In 1997, Faber & Faber published Instead—The B Side of the World Book of Lies … Instead Alternate Takes [in America], Tantrum Press Otherwise & Instead: Both Sides Now. Alternate Takes of America
Nicasio Urlihrt (pseudonym of Mario Arrón Teischer) (Nurlihrt, Septimo Mir, Uter Pegasus, Upper Lippius, Aspargus, Hesper Vegetalis, Everlasting Koba) The one who counts the beats and syllables, indisputable representative of the greats of obscure literature, Nicasio originally wanted to be among their detractors and antagonists. It’s no surprise he produced an excessively refined and corrected volume of poetry with the title, Between Clearings, 1958–1991, from which he excluded all the “social poetry” he’d written in the last four years. He wrote at my side …
Pushkiniana (III?)
Stanza operated on (as they say)
Be reasonable,
Luini: Agraphia reposes.
(luckily their projects are all
Barratries of prose.)
But the Stanza will prevail,
The arpeggio that addresses
The slighted submission you bore
To that blindest of publishers.
Parasites of prestige
They keep yours well hidden
It seems (to your great disadvantage).
So the lineage led to litigation
—Kleptolalia, Cryptogamia—.
That perfidious defamatory game.
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Delayed relief in the story of Rebatet’s music:
“Boulez—who was not yet thirty—provided an example, which fitted well with the accounts of his countless enemies, especially the ‘classical’ dodecaphonists, of those sessions he devoted to vomiting out diatribes: ‘Let’s leave them to surrender themselves, alone or in groups, to frenetic, arrhythmic masturbations. They don’t ask more of us: they know only how to count to twelve, and then in multiples of twelve. Nothing even remotely interesting may remain.’ ” (Compare with Oliverio Lester’s preface.)
Final. All in: The Legend of the Writers without Stories
(in the reproaches of the title, Joseph Roth (Holy Drinker). Not wholly feasible)
Certitude not yet reached
Ekaterinodar, April 23, 1899 [sic]
While the revolution (if one can call it that) was progressing, Ouspensky—before meeting Gurdjuieff, and before he was Ouspensky—lived in Ekaterinodar, “the cheapest place in Russia,” he wrote, a place where it was possible to indulge one’s tastes, to luxuriate, a city where he dedicated himself to observation, so that he could note how it contrasted with the ferocious cost of living, for example, and consequent spiritual enervation that typified the rest of mother Russia. Such is life. That wasn’t Europe. Or was it? And did it really matter? Ouspensky, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, whom everyone in that great wasteland nonetheless denigrated—everyone in that Grand Hotel Abîme, property of Lukács and Houdini—was at least famous in Moscow, his native city, famous and respected and referred to by his given name—perro pila—by the police—manto negro—because … Because, when drunk, instead of provoking fights, he’d endeavor to stop them.
In the roguish and puerile kingdom of speculation and despection.
Please, don’t tell me about the translations. I don’t want to know. To be informed of the disastrous oversight of writing without an agent or publisher. I don’t care if Prosan is translating it for both Gallimard and Faber & Faber. In fact, I don’t even consider the news to be bad. I have none of the dermatological symptoms of envy. I was born and raised—what a disappointment—having never experienced an outbreak. Nothing, nada, zilch. The definitive proof of the decline is, after all, the dodecaphony of the fault: The loss of the kingdom that was only for me.
One time, we were the last ones left, waiting for a performance of I know not what. Tango bar. Eduardo Rovira. Café Concert. Gustavo Kerestezachi. A swap, some tickets in exchange for a notice (an ad, placed, in case I ever became famous in Spain). It was a Friday. The “we” were Nurlihrt, Luini, and me. We were the last ones there, waiting for who knows what. Friday nights, said Luini, bring promises of naked shoulders and champagne, and that’s what we like. Let’s say Viamonte and Reconquista. We went down quite a few steps, staggering, tarrying, reeling, because we decided to go drunk, so even those few steps we managed to negotiate without a hitch, seemed like many. A scene within touching distance. An upright piano. We took our seats and asked for the most expensive. A woman took care of it, a lady who was surely famous and whom we treated as if we knew she was famous. Then the waiter came, whom we treated as if we were the ones who were famous.
An adult male was singing. He had striking eyes and a hippopotamus’s gaze. He was holding a glossy bag for some reason, and was wearing a horrible violet and beige cravat. We’d seen him before on occasion. He’d grown so fat in the last few months, he was struggling to sing, whether standing or sitting. Grizzled and rotund, with two lateral streaks of dandruff on the collar, he tried to appear relaxed speaking English, although he mispronounced almost every consonant and distorted all the vowels. Like Charlie Parker, he was lacking a canine, which lack its base metal replacement threw into relief. There I met my tenant, my landlady here: Chiquita Zucco Lezcano, whom the reader—although I don’t provide a key—will recognize as being better known by the name, Ilaria Prior.
DON’T BOTHER ME ANYMORE WITH YOUR DOUBTS AND JUST PAY THEM FOR THE TRIP. IF YOU DID IT WITH THE MAGNANIMOUS AND SPECULATIVE IGNORANCE OF AN INVOLUNTARY PARIAH, LEAVE IT TO THEM TO DO THE WORK OF TRULY APPRECIATING IT. BLESSED BE THE LAST PAYCHECK.
Colony. December 15, 1958 (sic)
Serendipity. I am going: to Sarandipti del Yi. Island.
Arrecife. Castling (no traveling to the North Pole on a tricycle: (??!) To Sri Lanka in a skiff like back in the days of yore. I dressed in manly robes. Horripilated. Arundel. From here. Dying of pain, since they don’t keep out the cold. Hither: Ekaterinodar, the paradise (which is ever the cheapest principality, thanks to speculative business dealings, and hence, the wealthiest in Europe, but the condominium still managed between the Alpine and Uralic authorities still isn’t mine: I [who] inherited nothing. Adir. Nadir. (Note adir is a verb and nadir not.) Abur. So long. No more the old oversight of Juvenal’s satire. I want to stay asleep. Sleep the siesta. To love. To fear. Elena systole, Elena diastole. Rítmo hesicástico. Suddenly I noticed—yes sir, pray tell—that it’s a matter of conversion (that no, that he hasn’t seen) the light of implacable Zion, having seen the abyss, the serrated cesura, sitzfleisch, he waits to see his friend to hand him the handsaw (toothed. The stammering fern.) Gather the diminishing desire to finish! At
this time of night, this Edomitish night, in the Washington Barbot, político colorado, I welcome you to my Bar Mitzvah. Ruined by the sight of this chain of hotels—of which the one that now shadows me isn’t even famous—I give up. Cualunque. On embarking, on taking a leap, I’d like to make my way gropingly when—as I already said—I head for Sri Lanka. Back in Serendipity del Yi. In a skiff. A rolling skiff or gunboat, the means of escape, and to some—some followers—the means of giving up. Followers like a supporting cast. I who once had asthma. Asthma and Family, book of a graduate friend I once had, who, once in a while, did corrections for me. Corinaldesi, proceeds from the neglected friend. Grébano! But who will have done—I now wonder—the technical revision (as we said before)? What neglect! Which reminds me, the appointment I made—to please the others— for a medical checkup is still pending, although it’s still some time away. My art doesn’t stop for checkups. It doesn’t leave footprints. Not a single lively idea lies in its wake. How marvelous! It finishes them off without having to kill them.
1997–2003
About the Author
LUIS CHITARRONI was born in Buenos Aires in 1958. He is a writer, critic, and editor, and has to date published two novels and two collections of nonfiction and critical writing.
DARREN KOOLMAN is a poet and literary translator from Spanish, French, and Dutch.
Selected Dalkey Archive Titles
MICHAL AJVAZ, The Golden Age.
The Other City.
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, Grabinoulor.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY, Kangaroo.
FELIPE ALFAU, Chromos.
Locos.
IVAN NGELO, The Celebration.
The Tower of Glass.