César Aira's forward march

"I don't read very much contemporary literature. There is so much to read. In the past, I remember that one lady told Borges that she read him, that she admired him so, and Borges asked her: But how come? Are you already done with all the good writers? (laughs) I march to that drum."

—César Aira: My ideal is the fairy tale

La villa

The Hare reissued

In March 2012, in my review of Varamo, I wrote in in lieu of a field guide:

If the critic Ignacio Echevarría (via Caravana de recuerdos) was asked, the single most essential Aira was La liebre, which fortunately has already been translated. A good choice, I must say. The Hare, at a fair novel length, has the heft and substance of a long sojourn. Its adventures hover perilously between high and low entertainments, hanging as if at an angle of repose, at any moment at risk from falling off a cliff.... A lightning charge striking with all its pent-up electrical energy.... A short circuit of brain synapse.... A numinous moment in time.... And I will have to say that the prose of translator Nick Caistor, which was slightly inelegant and unpolished and neutral and wry, lent a certain understatement to the statement. It was Aira without the airbrush of beautiful writing, not the superhero but his alter-ego. In other words, this reader was not after exercises of perfection or near-perfection in a novelita. Let's face it. The long novel was the true test of a writer's métier. Arguable point, of course. But the form of the long novel, where anything can go wrong and the trappings of didacticism were ever present, where the temptation to over-deliver was stronger, where the writer struggles much harder to avoid false moves than make the right ones, the long form could provide a breath of fresher Aira. Publishers, take note. Go for the longer Aira, they were bound to be more spontaneous and more driven. And go for the critics' favorites. It would not hurt to consider "translating" the opinions of Spanish writers and critics.

In June 2013, New Directions is reissuing The Hare and publishing it for the first time in the US. How cool is that?

The Hare

Coming in June 2013 from New Directions.

(Thanks to Mike P)

Aira on past tense

In the May issue of the Colombian magazine El Malpensante, Guillermo Martínez questions your idea of “diminishing returns” and its influence on cultural criticism and narrative in Argentina.

[Translator's Note: Writing about the “myth of the avant garde” in literature, Aira has said, “To go just one step beyond, as Proust did, requires an unheard of effort and an entire life’s sacrifice. The law of diminishing returns is in effect, by which the innovator covers nearly the entire field in his initial gesture, and leaves those who come after him with an increasingly smaller space, where it is difficult to move forward.”]

I didn’t know Martínez was criticizing me again. The last time I saw him, I advised him not to write his stories and novels in the present tense. Maybe he took it hard. I think almost all the prose works being published by young writers in Argentina are written with the verbs in the present tense. I don’t know why these authors don’t realize how much that detracts from their writing. The story becomes flat, it loses perspective, it takes on an oral tone, but a cheap kind of oral tone, like a witness to a car accident being interviewed by a television reporter.

- from a Two-part interview with César Aira

The ghost's member

COVER FOR THE HUNGARIAN EDITION OF LOS FANTASMAS BY CÉSAR AIRA (VIA)

"The naked men shouted louder and louder as if competing with each other. They were dirty like builders, and had the same kind of bodies: rather stocky, solid, with small feet, and rough hands. Their toes were spread widely, like wild men's toes. They were behaving like badly brought-up children. But they were adults. A builder who happenned to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to a length of two yards, then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls and the stairs without marble paving, up and down the empty elevator shafts, like the lowest string of a Japanese harp." (from Ghosts, trans. Chris Andrews)

The art of self-blurbing

Caravana de recuerdos reviews César Aira's 1981 "Gothic" novel Ema, la cautiva. The review includes a translation of the author's letter to the "agreeable reader" at the back of the Spanish book.

Translation talk with Chris Andrews

You could almost argue that [domesticating translation] brings the languages closer together, because it makes the original language version more familiar in a way. You can immerse yourself in the story when you’re not being alarmed by syntactic unfamiliarity.

You could make an argument for a certain degree of domestication in a first translation of an author to give the author a good chance of getting out there into the reading public. And I think what happens when an author becomes famous and well-loved and had a durable appeal, is that often a retranslation will be more foreignising — and this has happened recently with Dostoevsky, for example — people have retranslated Dostoevsky in a more foreignising way.

And does that alienate people?

Sometimes it alienates readers who are used to the earlier version. There’s also the issue of things being retranslated more for publishing reasons rather than literary reasons. There are already good translations out there but publishers know they can turn a dollar if they say, ‘this is the new and definitive version’, people will buy it.

More at Seemed like a good idea at the time.

What to translate

2. What do you think should be the most important criteria in choosing books to translate into English?

Maybe that it be astonishing and that nobody is or could be writing anything like it in English. Sorry, that makes two.

From a short interview with translator Katherine Silver at Publishing the World.

César Aira's favorite Brazilian writers

Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, Guimarães Rosa, Dalton Trevisan, Sérgio Sant’Anna, João Gilberto Noll.

-from an interview in O Globo (in Portuguese, but try Google Translate)

A panel on writing, editing, and publishing literature in the Americas

Craig Epplin: César Aira is the writer I thought of when I heard the topic for tonight’s discussion, in particular, a passage from one of my favorite novels by him, a novel that hasn’t been translated into English, called The Flyer.  And in the passage, the novel itself is a flyer, a long flyer that spins out of control and becomes a novel, and at one point the narrator tells us how he is composing this, and he is carving the blocks, he is carving his own font, and then he’s going to print it out using a mimeograph, because he can’t afford a typewriter and he can’t afford to make photocopies.  So in this little scene, writing, publishing, and editing, it was all there.  I thought we could start with this general question: How do you see these three practices reflected in your own work?  Writing, editing, and publishing.

Read the full panel on "Writing, Editing, and Publishing in the Americas" here. It features John Reed, Justin Taylor, Carlos Labbé, and Andrés Neuman. Craig Epplin moderates.

On why César Aira doesn't run out of fictional material

He accepts invitations.

When the Buenos Aires International Film Festival invited him to be a member of the jury, nobody seriously expected a positive answer. Much to the organizer’s surprise, however, César Aira accepted the invitation and turned out to be an extremely discerning, competent and witty juror. Afterward he disappeared as discreetly as he had appeared.

Half a year later, the festival was surprised to receive a short story by Aira entitled Festival.

Festival may not be coming out in English anytime soon. But here's another story of Aira's appropriation of a true story he heard from Kent Johnson (here--somewhere in the comments, retold here) as basis of the opening of one of his recent books (not sure which).

Marcela Valdes on César Aira

In The Nation, Marcela Valdes situates César Aira's fiction within the political history of Argentina.

Diary of Hepatitis, a novella by César Aira, translated by Forrest Gander, is "on deck".

Ghosts, the animated short

Or trailer.

Ghosts from susie kirkwood on Vimeo.

Created by Susie Kirkwood and Jill Summers. Original score by Daniel Knox. Based on Ghosts by César Aira, trans. Chris Andrews.

(via The Millions)

Miraculous cover, 2

PRAYING GLOVES OVER DISCARDED WALKER?

P.S. For the record, I finished reading Varamo and didn't like it.

Aira contra Marías

It's one of the breathtaking literary fights of recent memory. In the Insatiable Booksluts' Death Match series, the métier of Argentine boxer César Aira was pitted against Spanish slugger Javier Marías. The prose in contention? Aira's Varamo and Marías's Bad Nature, complete with a vintage rating system and a well-served prize trophy.

Watch the electrifying rounds and find out the (very close) results here.

Miraculous cover

Design: Gonzalo Muiño

Art direction: Rodrigo Corral

(link)

Eloísa Cartonera and César Aira

It may seem odd that the text I chose to translate, El Cerebro Musical by César Aira, is bound by a cardboard cover. It is difficult to make out the title and author that are hand-painted on the cover in red and orange against a yellow background, mirroring the red lettering on the cardboard itself. One can still read the address in Buenos Aires where the box was made, and the words "INDUSTRIA ARGENTINA" are still legible under the title. The barcode on the back is not a proof-of-purchase of the book, but rather of some lost transaction made by the supermarket Día. It is a flimsy cover, hardly protecting the text within, but no other copy of this book has these same features. This uniqueness is what has made Eloísa Cartonera, the publishing house in Buenos Aires that creates these cardboard books, an inspiration to other "paper picker presses" throughout Latin America, the subject of documentaries, and the starting point of my own investigation.

...

Much like Eloísa Cartonera, Aira seems concerned with "much more than just books." He saturates the markets with books marked with his name, if only to demonstrate that no book is the Aira. There is a certain disposable quality to this saturation of the market and it becomes a personal choice which Airas are worth reading and which are 'throw-aways.' [Eloísa Cartonera] converts what was thrown away into a piece of art. Coupled together, Aira and Eloísa Cartonera break down the components of the book into their simplest forms—cover and text—in order to suggest how stories are ephemeral, just like the cardboard ...

- from a thesis called "On Eloísa Cartonera and César Aira: Much More Than Just a Translation of El Cerebro Musical" by Stephanie Reist, Williams College. Eloísa Cartonera is a small publishing house and cooperative in Buenos Aires; it specializes in books bound in cardboards. Reist's study covers the emergence of "cartoneros", issues on translating Aira, and a full translation of Aira's story "The Musical Brain." The story appeared in the New Yorker last month in Chris Andrews's translation. The thesis is available (pdf) here.

César Aira on Argentine literature

On his books:

I must say that all my books are experiments. They are thought as such, but they are not done with methodical seriousness of a scientist. They are, rather, done with the non-methodical seriousness of a crazy wise person or a boy who plays with a chemistry set and mixes two substances to see what happens.

On postmodernism:

My motto continues to be the famous verse of Baudelaire: “To go ahead and always in search of the new.” That attitude is not postmodernist. I believe that postmodernism undoes that, erecting a species of supermarket where they organize the culture of the past in one aisle, the one of now on that other aisle, and the one to come in yet another compartment. With them it is a matter of formulating combinations at random. That is not me.

On Borges:

I was too young and even so I felt all the greatness, the elegance, the exquisite quality of his texts, almost like a poison because later on all others seemed not to be of the same caliber. All writers in Argentina have had to find themselves against Borges.

I saw that the only option was an anti-borgean path, in which I went to Rimbaud: life, life that enters and is one with literature. Borges is another thing: he is cold; he is an Everest of intelligence and lucidity uncontaminated with reality. But I have made peace with Borges.

On Juan Jose Saer and Ricardo Piglia:

In the first place, Saer and Piglia are ten years older than I, from another generation, another atmosphere, another world. In fact, I read them as a youngster. Piglia is a serious writer, an intellectual. I appreciated Saer very much; he is almost a classic modern Argentinean, he is also a serious writer, but I have looked for other models. Saer no longer attracts me; with time I have been moved away from that serious, responsible position towards society.

On Manuel Puig, Alejandra Pizarnik and Osvaldo Lamborghini:

I found them brilliant models, for different reasons, of life, of attitude. Sometimes one takes a model and later does all of the opposite, but the model continues acting on us. 

On 19th century Argentine Literature:

The best thing is the gauchesca, our great invention, and within it the “Martín Fierro,” a book we no longer think of as such because it has been turned into an Argentinean fetish. Without a doubt, it has great literary merits. In the twentiehth century, all good Argentine writers looked for that point of connection.

On Borges-Bioy Casares-Silvina Ocampo:

We went downhill from there, or to paraphrase Oliverio Girondo, you can say the best Cortázar is a bad Borges. It is hard but an unavoidable truth.

On Roberto Arlt:

Paradigms are repeated every time, the right and the left exist everywhere, but also there are intermediate lines, like Roberto Arlt. He for me is a great one. Good, it would be necessary to say one of the best, the other being Borges. So different and similar. My work comes from that intellectual, borgean line, but with vigorous arltian affluences. 

On Alejandra Pizarnik:

I wrote a couple of books on Alejandra Pizarnik, one is a study on her poetry, done with the intention to redress an imabalance, because with Alejandra that myth of distress has been created, of the sleepwalker, the small shipwreck, etc., so all her criticism fell in that metaphorical field, of her as a celebrity and it does not do her justice.

On Ernesto Sabato:

And yet it surprises me a little that somebody like him can be taken so seriously. He has very laughable edges, that vanity, the “malditismo,” that tragic figure that does not match with his personality.

On Julio Cortázar:

There are some stories that are good, but as I said, his best is a bad Borges, or a mediocre Borges. Uglier in Cortázar is the prologue for the edition of the Ayacucho Library stories of Felisberto Hernandez, of a paternalistic tone, where he practically comes close to say that the greater merit of the Uruguayan writer was to seek him, when in truth Felisberto is a brilliant writer to whom Cortázar could not aspire at least to shine his shoes.

More topics in "César Aira: Against Everybody" at Latino Weekly Review (October 2004).

Limpidity and deformity

One quality that’s distinctive among writers of an experimental bent is his limpidity: his prose rarely draws attention to itself; most of the time, the reader is fully occupied imagining what is being recounted and described. Aira has said that the “correctness” of his prose, which he has sometimes rebelled against (as in “How I Became a Nun”), may have been a side effect of his work as a translator. But as anyone who has read him knows, the “correctness” is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well … deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in “The Musical Brain”.

- Chris Andrews talks about his translation of "The Musical Brain" (subscription only) by César Aira, at The New Yorker blog. Read more from the interview here.