Exchange: Fraia vs. Xerxenesky
In early 2014, Brazilian writers Emilio Fraia and Antônio Xerxenesky exchanged emails. They spoke about travels and ruins, contemporary art according to Vila-Matas and Vargas Llosa, and the reception of Latin American literature in Brazil.
Read their correspondence here.
From: Emilio Fraia
Dec 30, 2013
Nesky,
Early this morning, I logged into Facebook and saw a picture of you flipping in the air, about to jump into a pool. First of all, I was happy to see that you are (1) doing all right, (2) on vacation, and (3) practicing your somersaults. Then, I thought about that feeling you get when something is about to happen: the surface of the water is still and, in a split second, everything is moving.
It’s been thirty days since I arrived in Mexico and that’s the standard feeling I get from this trip. It seems something is about to happen all the time. I’m in Tulum, Quintana Roo State, at a place called Pico Beach. Sun, sea, heat, and a drink called Ojo Rojo (Red Eye)―and, yes, topless is real. It’s a good place to write and live an underwater life; I’ve been waking up at about six every day. Yesterday, I decided to extend my stay here. That seems to be one of the advantages of traveling without a real plan: the possibility of enjoying a place and making yourself comfortable.
My next-door neighbor at the cabin is from Argentina, Adan, and he’s crossing Mexico on a bicycle, selling chocolate―it’s all organic and he makes it himself. Adan is slim, has a gap between his front teeth, and wears his hair long in a ponytail. He’s always wearing the same shirt: a green sleeveless shirt with a killer whale drawn on it. He told me that he had no place to stay when he arrived in the city. Then he met this American couple that had rented the cabin for a month. For some reason, they had to go back to the United States and, since they had paid for it anyway and there’s no reimbursement during the peak season, they offered him the place. And here’s the best part: there’s a kitchen in the cabin, where Adan can make his organic chocolate, hippie-style. And his chocolate is good―I tried it yesterday!
These travelers, the “couch-surfing” people, they spend years traveling, going from one side to the other, non-stop. It’s as if all those characters in living in exile in Bolaño’s books had traded places with them. I was thinking about the motivation behind it, which is not political in nature (at least not directly,) and that would drive someone like Adan to travel this way. A little while ago I read this essay titled “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” written by Lebanese American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book cover reminded me of one of those manuals written for businesspeople, but the contents were very good. The author attempted to develop a concept that is the opposite of fragility, but this opposite idea wouldn’t be robustness or resistance. This is the idea: there are things that not only resist, but also benefit from conflict; they grow or change when they are exposed to random, disorderly scenarios.
I asked Adan why he decided to go out in the world all by himself. He didn’t have a rehearsed answer, but I could see through him, here and there, that he is addicted to uncertainty. He started out his trip thirteen years ago and never stopped―since then, he’s only been back to Argentina twice. He enjoys getting somewhere without knowing for sure what’s gonna happen; then he stands there, still, to assimilate it and see how things will fall into place. You could say it’s very Zen of him to do so and, maybe, traveling by himself is a way of exercising this side of his character, because there’s always something that happens and creates ripples on the surface of the water.
Last Tuesday, when I was on my way over here, I took the plane in San José del Cabo, in Baja California, and had a layover in Mexico City, where I had some coffee and did looked at a brief weather forecast for the trip. I’ve been in the country for over a month now and there has been no rain so far. When I arrived at the Cancun Airport―Tulum is over eight miles from Cancun―I went over to this place where pants, shirts, books, socks, and underwear parade on a conveyor belt inside leather or fabric containers—that’s what we call luggage, bags, and backpacks. I stood there, playing the waiting game. The luggage went round and round and people fished out their things until the crowd started to dwindle.
Everything was going well, but then I understood that, for the first time in my life, I was about to go through that full-circle experience of losing my luggage. There was only a faded, half-full black backpack left to be picked up, going round and round the belt. Then an airport employee came over and grabbed it. I went to the little opening where luggage comes from and stuck my head in there. It was already dark outside and there was nothing, nobody, just a rusty cart that probably brought in all the luggage―except mine. Has that ever happened to you? It’s devastating. I went back and forth five times and then, on the other side of the room, this chubby, mustachioed guard came in. I walked toward him. I told him what had happened. The little guard yawned several times at negative speed. He contacted the airline counter through his radio. Then, he said an employee by the name of Oliver was on his way. After a very long wait, Employee Oliver appeared. I filled out a form. I pointed at a drawing that closely resembled my backpack (I found out it fits the “sports backpack” category.) Oliver made a series of phone calls, until my luggage was located. It was on another airplane that was about to leave the Mexican Capital City. If I wanted to, I could go to a hotel (in this case, my cabin) and the airline would be responsible for delivering my luggage. Since luck wasn’t really on my side, I thought it was best to wait at the airport. Eat a hot dog and die. That would be a dignified end to my life.
After all, I could be telling you about some of the wonderful things I’ve lived these past twenty-nine days, but it’s always more fun to talk about things that went wrong. Maybe that’s also why Adan travels: so that things can go wrong at some level (seeking adventures in a world where promised adventures never seem to be fulfilled.) Besides, nobody wants to hear about stories that do not contain one of the following: (1) ruin, (2) tears, or (3) characters that get beaten up from beginning to end. I guess all good novels are like that, right? It’s better to be involved with uncertainty.
Now the wind has changed; it seems we’ll get some rain after all.
Happy New Year, my friend Nesky.
Emilio
From: Antônio Xerxenesky
Jan 2, 2014
Dearest Emilio,
First of all, I’d like to put an end to your illusions: I don’t practice somersaults by the pool. The photo turned out amazing; I can’t see where my arms are, in which direction I'm moving, if I’m gonna crack my head on the deck or dive into the water on my back. Reality isn’t as thrilling. We were at Galera’s house―one of the first places where I saw you in the flesh, where we started this whole story of “being friends”―and Natão, everyone’s buddy, really wanted to test this camera that captures zillions of frames per second. And there I went, attempting a clumsy jump, a failed flip, and went into the water on my back first with a painful splash. However, when you isolate that frame I posted to Facebook, it looks like I accomplished an astonishing maneuver. People say that, on social networking websites, we are able to build an idealized narrative of who we are. You could say that’s what I did. But the truth is that I really like posting preposterous things to Facebook. I don’t understand that bunch of authors who overcrowd my wall posting only intelligent comments critiquing everything that’s out there. It seems none of them do somersaults by a pool.
Man, you’re really having some adventures―actually, you mentioned the word “adventure” a few times on your letter. And you talk about lonely trips and nomads. It sounds like a world of fiction. Traveling was never an easy feat for me. The first time I left Latin America it was 2013―I went to France last May. I never had any fetish for Paris or French culture; I can’t remember why Gabi and I chose France among so many countries. It must have been because we like coq au vin and wine.
You told me about the drama of losing your luggage. It never happened to me and now I’m afraid it will. I’m really terrified of certain things, and I believe not even years of therapy would be enough to cure it. I was unconsciously sure, for example, that I would be detained at Immigration, even though all my documents were in order, even though I’m a middle-class Caucasian and was wearing a blazer. Of course I went through Immigration without any worries, but this voice inside my head kept repeating, “It’s not gonna work. They won’t let you in. You’ll be interrogated. And if you go in, you’re gonna miss your connecting flight. If you make it to your flight, the plane is gonna crash. If you arrive safely at your destination, your luggage won’t be there.” And so on and so forth. One of the reasons why I only really managed to go on a trip in 2013, at twenty-eight years of age, was because my girlfriend was holding my hand every step of the way.
Actually, it’s at Immigration checkpoints that you see all the racial tension that seems to dominate Europe. While a white guy like me goes through without a second glance, no inspections needed, anyone wearing a burqa is questioned for minutes on end. In Paris, Arabs and Blacks are found in the ghettos and seem to be treated with fear and disdain by some Parisians. I may be wrong, but that’s the feeling I got. By the way, Paris is a disappointment. It’s the legitimate case of a city that has been ruined by predatory tourism. Even if you avoid the most obvious places, it seems there's nowhere safe. And I believe those who live there have developed certain disgust for tourists. And they’re right to do so. I saw so many people being rude that I could write five letters just mentioning examples. It’s impossible not to remember what Foster Wallace once said: “The places we visit would be so much better without our presence.”
Please, don’t get me wrong. I can’t imagine you or your buddy Adan acting like obnoxious tourists. I’m just talking about this uncomfortable feeling I get when I’m at a place that is so cliché. That’s why the cities I enjoyed the most were those in the countryside of France. And that reminds me of what you said about “adventure.” It seems that, when you’re traveling, there’s this dialectic war between “adventure” and “comfort,” between exploring small cities in Mexico and staying at a cabin, or laying out on a beach chair in a paradise-like resort. I didn’t go through anything crazy and stayed on the side of comfort in France, but it’s funny to think that the coolest part of our trip was when Gabi and I took the less obvious route. We were in Dijon and decided to try that famous Burgundy wine. Our hotel offered these tourism packages, a nice little bus with AC that would take us to a château. We thought about purchasing the package, but they were fully booked. What did we do then? We discovered this château that would welcome foreigners a few towns over from where we were. We took the train to the outskirts of the city, then got on a bus that would only come by ever so often. When we got on the bus, it was crowded. By the time we stepped down from the bus, there was nobody else in. The little city was at the end of the line. We stepped down from the bus and there was nothing around us. Nothing! I mean, the green fields were there. There was a house way off in the distance. There were grapevines. And a lame dog. We walked around aimlessly until we found this half-deaf grandma sitting in a wheelchair. She gave us directions to the château, despite our poor French. We knocked on the door and drank some of the best wines of our lives.
This is an extremely bourgeois adventure, no doubt about it. But, for heaven’s sake, we were in France and we like wine. Everything we’d done was terribly bourgeois, and I’m telling you this experience because, despite visiting one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, we manage to find ourselves lost in a foreign land for a moment, and that felt special because the damn Arc de Triomphe is boring as hell.
“Adventures.” Heh.
Saludos,
Nesky
From: Emilio Fraia
Jan 3, 2014
Nesky,
Thank you so much for your report. I thought about some alternative endings: you and Gabi knocking on the château’s door and drinking the worst wines of your life. Or, later on, after that whole epic bus/train ride, you find the place disturbingly empty, and it looks like people left in a hurry for obscure reasons. Or you check in with Foursquare and end up being followed by an assassin wearing a white blazer, like the Miami Vice guys. As for Adan, the Argentine who's staying in the cabin next door, well, he could keep traveling the world, turning cocoa butter into organic chocolate and, in the end, realize that his ideal “adventure” had never really been fulfilled; that his experience was below the fictional expectations he once had; that, one way or another, at some level, everything comes down to being disappointed. Still, he wouldn’t stop traveling. He’ll fix his bike (there’s something wrong with the chain) and he’ll keep going strong, pedaling forward. Some sort of “I can’t keep going, I gotta keep going.”
Here, on this side, I went to visit the Palenque ruins in Chiapas. And, man, how beautiful it is to see this type of desolated landscape, where nature is taking over the remains of buildings! It gives you a sense of how fleeting things are. Especially power. Seeing all those decayed temples and thinking that they were once majestic buildings erected by people who enslaved and/or devastated neighboring tribes, who took over a place like that in a specific moment in time when they saw someone else as their enemies, etc. It’s almost a corporate environment, but Mayan bosses have names like K’inich Janaab’ Pakal.
After some time, I sat down on the steps of a pyramid―it was hot as hell―and I started playing this game in which I’d take pictures that would only show the ruins and the temples in the middle of the jungle, without any person in sight. I’d wait for the perfect moment, the right angle, and when there was no one else left on the frame, click, click, click, I’d take the pictures. These are the stupid things we play when we’re alone (practicing a secret life, as you know well.) But the buses kept on coming. There were so many people. Later on, looking at the pictures closely, we could say that my attempt at capturing that world prior to when tourists started to come wasn’t exactly a success. And, even if that had been a success, there would still be one person left: me. Deep down, I think we’re all obnoxious tourists, sharing our uncomfortable, eventful escapades as the obnoxious tourists that we are.
I had never thought about it: Brazil is a country with no ruins, isn’t it? It goes without saying that anything that kind of looks old among us ends up being restored. Man, it would be cool to have some places like that, which are abandoned, falling apart. Don’t you think? As far as I’ve seen, there’s the Garcia D’Ávila’s castle in Bahia, a couple of prisons: one on Ilha Anchieta, in Ubatuba, and one on Ilha Grande, in Rio. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but these prison ruins are spectacular, a great specimen of our past―albeit a recent past. The latter is at one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen, Dois Rios, a three hour’s tough walk from Abraão, the village where most people stay on Ilha Grande. It was there that Graciliano Ramos was locked up in the 1930s. Madame Satã was held there too. And that was the place where I got this one tick up my leg that gave me a fever. I thought I was gonna die! Since you’re my friend, I’ll spare you the details of this story.
Last Saturday I got an email from Flora, a friend who lives in Germany. It had been a while since we talked. In her message, she said she had moved in with her boyfriend and they were living in a reservation surrounded by lakes, about an hour outside Berlin. It’s a three-story house, they have three dogs, and there are two guest rooms. She said they’ll soon welcome artists going through some hard times, authors with a writer’s block, etc. They’ll provide organic meals, a fireplace, and charades for entertainment. Then she told me she needs to have surgery. I wrote her back, narrating some recent episodes from my life, and telling her that I’d had appendicitis. We were very close for quite some time; Flora used to date a friend of mine, Arthur. So, as I was writing, it was as if I had gone back to that time, when we spent New Year’s Eve in Cajaíba, looking at plankton at the beach at night, which is something similar to standing before the ruins of a temple or the prison on Ilha Grande―okay, it isn’t such a nice view, but it’s this sort of connection, in the present, with the fiction we call “past.” It was a little nostalgic at that moment, but not in a way that “things were better back then;” it was just about being aware that time goes by and things are taken to a different level, become more complex, have more layers added to them.
I thought about this story I read the other day. In 1914, Giacometti sculpted his first bust while observing a model. His brother posed for him. He said that, at first, he got extreme pleasure from it and felt as if it would come easily to him, that he would be able to sculpt more or less what he was looking at. Fifty years later, he goes to his study and spends a week trying to recreate that bust, as he had done in 1914, with about the same dimensions the first one had. While he was under the impression that he was doing exactly what he wanted in 1914, he was unable to do so again later in his life. He said that, thinking back on it, he was never able to sculpt a bust from observation again, not in its most basic sense. If he looks at a bust from far away, he sees a sphere; if he looks at it up close, it’s no longer a sphere and it becomes an extremely complex, deep thing. If he faces it, he forgets about the profile; if he looks at it from the side, he forgets what the face looks like. Everything becomes disconnected, complex, and he can’t perceive the whole thing anymore. Too many stages. Too many levels. I guess that’s what it is.
Hugs. I must go to my indolent lunch.
Emilio
From: Antônio Xerxenesky
Jan 6, 2014
Dear Emilio,
I’ve never visited any ruins. I mean, I’m here digging out some old memories, some strolls I took through the countryside of Rio Grande Sul, and... I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve seen any. Maybe just in movies. Maybe I’ve never stopped to think about ruins. But the things you told me brought to mind that critically acclaimed movie The Great Beauty, directed by Paolo Sorrentino, which I went to see last week. I thought it was a pitifully bad movie; I felt like leaving halfway through, that’s how bad I thought it was. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way about a movie. It’s a sub-Fellini with the aesthetics of a perfume commercial. It wants to pay tribute to 8 ½, but it doesn’t have a fifth of the visual accuracy. Brace yourself for many tracking shots made at dusk!
However, what really irritated me about the movie wasn’t even that. It was this advocacy for “old Roma,” for old values. For ruins. The movie shows a contrast between the new decadents and the sacred ancients. On one side, you have horrible pop music, priests taking advantage of others, and Berlusconi-like parties; on the other side, you have the beauty of the Coliseum, the classic Roman architecture, the haunting presence of Fanny Ardant. In a scene that I believe to be the worst one in the entire movie, a girl has this artistic performance with a bunch of cans of paint, and the protagonist jokes about how she makes millions doing it. He’s bored out of his mind, so he decides to walk away from the performance and show his wife what he considers to be the most beautiful side of Rome, a “secret” side: statues from the last century enveloped by the most melodic church music of all time.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing tradition, or the music―the soundtrack is beautiful, featuring Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. I’m only criticizing this unwillingness to appreciate what is contemporary. It’s really, really easy to joke about contemporary art. In every biennial art exhibit organized in São Paulo (or Porto Alegre,) we always have to put up with a series of jokes about how someone thought the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall was actually part of the artistic installation, yada, yada, yada... I think a more dignified effort would have been to find value and reflect on what’s out there, because there are many good things out there, be it in art, or pop music. Saying that we live at a time of great cultural and moral decline―which seems to be the message behind that Sorrentino’s film―is such a trivial and lazy way out...
I’m no contemporary art expert, and I acknowledge that I often mistake Waltercio Caldas for Cildo Meireles, and that many times I walk through an exhibit that makes no sense to me. However, I see a significant value in a project like Inhotim’s. Have you been there?
Man, I believe Inhotim is the best-kept secret in Brazil. I mean, people in our work environment will say, “Doh, Inhotim is no secret, everybody knows about it!” But go ask your parents, cousins, or friends who are not in the literary, journalistic, editorial areas. They don’t know where Inhotim is! It’s incredible that we have such a place in Brazil. A vast museum outdoors. A museum where you can jump in a pool that is a work of art. A museum that allows artists to let out their most megalomaniac side. They have some installations that I don’t really care for, but that have impressed me precisely because of their greatness, such as Matthew Barney’s huge tractor taking down a tree inside a mirrored dome.
Maybe the work of art that I remember the most at Inhotim is the Sonic Pavilion, created by Doug Aitken, from California. It’s a glass-covered pavilion with a hole in the middle. This hole is 656 feet deep and, at the bottom, Aitken placed microphones to record sounds that come from the bottom of the Earth, as well as all that fuss that reverberates through the pavilion. What does the bottom of the Earth sound like? It’s terribly grave and weird. It reminds me a little bit of the drones that are used so often in experimental music. I think I’m able to reproduce a similar sound wave with my synthesizer, but that would have been an artificial sound that didn’t come from the bottom of the Earth―and that makes all the difference. You could only understand it if you sat down on the floor at the Sonic Pavilion to listen to it.
And we can find it in Brazil, a six-hour drive from São Paulo. I apologize for my fascination with it, but I think it’s incredible. Too bad those who slander contemporary manifestations will never get near a place like that.
Let’s schedule that lunch, for God’s sake!
Regards,
Nesky
From: Emilio Fraia
Jan 9, 2014
Nesky,
Are you familiar with Kenneth Tynan’s Law on Responsible Cinema? It says all movies that try to seriously diagnose Contemporary Human Issues are bad. Only period pieces, comedy, satire, and thrillers are worth watching. Note: According to Tynan, Citizen Kane is half period piece, half satire. In other words, I agree 800% with you. And, on further thought, the synopsis for The Great Beauty could have been something like this: The Great Beauty (Italy-France, 2013, 142 min.) On his 65th birthday, a ‘bon vivant’ author questions the paths his life has taken and finds the antidote for the empty, frivolous art of his time with a flight of flamingos made on a Windows 95 machine. I’m yet to recover from that flamingo scene; what a hideous thing that was!
Yes, I went to Inhotim last year. I liked everything you mentioned. And there’s also Lygia Pape’s Pavilion. Man... I wish I could write like her―so simple, elegant, and geometrical. Another work of art that had an impact on me was that of Cristina Iglesias, from Spain. I don’t know if you remember, but it’s in the middle of a clearing, amid a thick grove. It’s a sculpture made of polished steel, a maze: outside, the walls reflect the surrounding vegetation; inside, textures imitate roots, leaves, and tree trunks. You can hear water flowing the entire time you’re there. And, right in the middle of it, after you’ve gone through the corridors―some of them with dead ends―you can turn around and go in again, so you can get to a water pump.
But, before you get to the installation, you have to walk down a trail for about ten minutes. That’s actually fun too. It’s like a surprise awaits you at the end of the trail, as if a narrative―that of the trail in the middle of the grove―were interrupted and taken over by another one―that of a large sculpture, a strange object, a labyrinth of mirrors.
I’ve been thinking about stories like that, which suddenly become other stories. That’s something that often happens in Onetti’s short stories. There’s always someone telling a story, imagining it, making things up, and reminiscing. It’s the story being told, imagined, and made up that comes to the foreground and ends up working like some sort of commentary to the primary story, which remains there, concealed, preparing an ambush. There’s something like it in Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingravidos. Did you read it? I believe this book was overlooked in Brazil. The narrator, a female, tries to write a novel and becomes obsessed by Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, so his voice ends up taking over the plot and gets mixed up with her memories. The juxtaposition of those two narratives creates an effect that I believe to be excellence at its best.
And, man, this past week was intense. I had a million things to take care of. I must have gone to the notary’s office at least five times! And then there’s the demise of replying to emails. You reply to five, ten messages and they multiply themselves into fifteen, twenty! I’ve also reviewed the translation of one of my short stories, which will be included in an anthology of Brazilian authors to be published by Alfaguara in Argentina. And I’m trying to finish my book, too...
Actually, I was happy to hear that you’re translating Kassel no invita a la lógica, the new book by Vila-Matas. It has something to do with this contemporary art thing, right? Are you enjoying it? I like the way Vila-Matas approaches the subject. His Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil is a hell of a book. I like the idea of portability: writing for fun, and writing stories that can easily fit into a briefcase―even though, of course, writing isn’t exactly fun and there are excellent novels that are extremely heavy, don't you agree? Well, in Explorers of the abyss, there’s that famous short story with Sophie Calle. It’s all infinitely much more interesting than Mario Vargas Llosa’s vision of contemporary art, just to mention an example of a heavy-weight who “slanders contemporary manifestations.” Look, don’t get me wrong, I love Vargas Llosa; The Time of the Hero, The Cubs and Other Stories, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter are books that make the heart inside this prose writer skip a beat. However, his most recent book, The Civilization of Spectacle... I just can’t... I understand the effort to preserve the tradition of novels and all, but you just can’t have it as a boxing match like that.
I read a recent interview about Kassel in which Vila-Matas quotes an interview with David Foster Wallace. I’ll transcribe it here, as a way of saying, “Until next time, Nesky.” Here it goes: “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” It’s a little literary and cheesy, right? I don’t know... I think I’ve made it this far and, in the end, I’m almost acquitting those flamingos, the perfume ad, and Windows 95.
Hugs, and keep up the good work.
Emilio
From: Antônio Xerxenesky
Jan 11, 2014
Dearest Emilio,
I’m happy to see that we agree in the cinematography department, even though I was expecting some sort of wild disagreement, something that would have made this last letter a forum for dispute and quarrel.
As for Cristina Iglesias’ installation, I couldn’t remember it. I had to Google it to confirm whether I had visited it at Inhotim. The truth is that I walked through the labyrinth without understanding absolutely anything about it. When that happens, I’d rather not even look up the press release explaining it. These informative texts whose purpose is to explain a work of art always use a bunch of academic lingo about “the relationship between man and space” and tend to be nauseating to me. It’s funny how we had such completely different reactions to this work of art. Had you not mentioned it, I wouldn’t have even remembered that mirror-like green place.
I’ve been meaning to read Luiselli for quite some time now. I don’t think she was overlooked around here. Several friends have told me about the book. The truth is that almost all Latin authors not named Roberto Bolaño end up being read less than they should in Brazil. I believe we’re more influenced by U.S. Trends; even European best-sellers that become a hit in Brazil come with the stamp of approval from the Americans: Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald... Here’s a cruel question: would Roberto Bolaño have become such a hit in Brazil if he hadn’t enjoyed tremendous success in the United States? Of course I may be acting a little paranoid about it...
I’ve yet to read Luiselli because I’ve forgotten what it feels like to read a book for pleasure, a novel that I'd pick on a whim. You know how it goes: I work eight hours a day, then go home after business hours to work a little more on something else―in this case, Vila-Matas’ translation―then I still have to write a review or an article, or read a book to compose the so-called “anonymous book flap.” Gosh, I've realized I need to find time to read something to research my future novel! And I also need a little bit of time to watch a silly movie or series, play video games, exist, eat a hamburger, and brush my teeth.
I need to find a way to make my day last 30 hours. Or change my lifestyle.
Going back to Vila-Matas: translating Kassel is no easy feat. It’s not because the book poses inherent challenges, even though I’ve come across many expressions that are particular to Barcelona and that I had never heard of before. It’s just that Vila-Matas is so present in my life that translating him becomes an intimidating task. It doesn’t mean that I worship him blindly; as happens with every author I really admire, I question my faith in them periodically. I often feel that metaliterature and self-fiction end up taking a lot of the humanity out of books, that they lack some three-dimensional characters. I admit, I think “Dublinesque” and Aire de Dylan are books with little vitality. However, this new one I’m translating is incredible; it’s Vila-Matas at his best. And, if I believed in synchronicity, I’d say the world is trying to tell me something by having this book fall into my lap. Vila-Matas is dealing with several subjects I’ve been obsessed with lately: advocating for contemporary manifestations―which we’ve talked about in our letters―, Walser’s walks, Wittgenstein’s reclusiveness. By the way, the last book I read 100% for pleasure was Wittgenstein’s incredible biography written by Ray Monk. The fact that you mentioned Historia abreviada hit the bull’s eye: Vila-Matas is great at dealing with contemporary art, especially Duchamp’s disciples.
All in all, Kassel is an excellent book and I hope my translation does it justice. I don’t know if you agree but, for me, translating is a little like writing fiction: throughout the entire process, I think it’s turning out horribly, that I’m a fraud about to be found out. Then, when I sit down to review it calmly, I’m able to evaluate the final result in a more realistic way. A recent exception was when I translated Rodrigo Fresán’s The Bottom of the Sky. When I was done, I was sure I had been faithful, that Fresán sounded natural in Portuguese, that the result was a novel translated without accents and, at the same time, faithful to the original. I wish it could always be that way.
I’ve just double checked how extensive this letter got and I realize I’m taking too much of your time and space, like an Oscar winner who makes a long speech and ignores the orchestra playing louder and louder. I wish I could find a sentence on this subject (a quote would be appropriate,) an observation, something to finish our letter exchange on a great note. I can’t think of anything. I’ve been feeling anxious, I don’t know the difference between weekdays and weekends anymore, I’ve been working too much and reading too little for pleasure. Please, let’s schedule that lunch, an extremely long and useless lunch, a three-hour-long lunch with some coffee at a second location, and pistachio ice cream at a third location. I think I need that.
It’s been a pleasure.
Nesky
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Tryno Maldonado vs. Álvaro Bisama]
[Emiliano Monge vs. Juan Cárdenas]
Read their correspondence here.
From: Emilio Fraia
Dec 30, 2013
Nesky,
Early this morning, I logged into Facebook and saw a picture of you flipping in the air, about to jump into a pool. First of all, I was happy to see that you are (1) doing all right, (2) on vacation, and (3) practicing your somersaults. Then, I thought about that feeling you get when something is about to happen: the surface of the water is still and, in a split second, everything is moving.
It’s been thirty days since I arrived in Mexico and that’s the standard feeling I get from this trip. It seems something is about to happen all the time. I’m in Tulum, Quintana Roo State, at a place called Pico Beach. Sun, sea, heat, and a drink called Ojo Rojo (Red Eye)―and, yes, topless is real. It’s a good place to write and live an underwater life; I’ve been waking up at about six every day. Yesterday, I decided to extend my stay here. That seems to be one of the advantages of traveling without a real plan: the possibility of enjoying a place and making yourself comfortable.
My next-door neighbor at the cabin is from Argentina, Adan, and he’s crossing Mexico on a bicycle, selling chocolate―it’s all organic and he makes it himself. Adan is slim, has a gap between his front teeth, and wears his hair long in a ponytail. He’s always wearing the same shirt: a green sleeveless shirt with a killer whale drawn on it. He told me that he had no place to stay when he arrived in the city. Then he met this American couple that had rented the cabin for a month. For some reason, they had to go back to the United States and, since they had paid for it anyway and there’s no reimbursement during the peak season, they offered him the place. And here’s the best part: there’s a kitchen in the cabin, where Adan can make his organic chocolate, hippie-style. And his chocolate is good―I tried it yesterday!
These travelers, the “couch-surfing” people, they spend years traveling, going from one side to the other, non-stop. It’s as if all those characters in living in exile in Bolaño’s books had traded places with them. I was thinking about the motivation behind it, which is not political in nature (at least not directly,) and that would drive someone like Adan to travel this way. A little while ago I read this essay titled “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” written by Lebanese American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book cover reminded me of one of those manuals written for businesspeople, but the contents were very good. The author attempted to develop a concept that is the opposite of fragility, but this opposite idea wouldn’t be robustness or resistance. This is the idea: there are things that not only resist, but also benefit from conflict; they grow or change when they are exposed to random, disorderly scenarios.
I asked Adan why he decided to go out in the world all by himself. He didn’t have a rehearsed answer, but I could see through him, here and there, that he is addicted to uncertainty. He started out his trip thirteen years ago and never stopped―since then, he’s only been back to Argentina twice. He enjoys getting somewhere without knowing for sure what’s gonna happen; then he stands there, still, to assimilate it and see how things will fall into place. You could say it’s very Zen of him to do so and, maybe, traveling by himself is a way of exercising this side of his character, because there’s always something that happens and creates ripples on the surface of the water.
Last Tuesday, when I was on my way over here, I took the plane in San José del Cabo, in Baja California, and had a layover in Mexico City, where I had some coffee and did looked at a brief weather forecast for the trip. I’ve been in the country for over a month now and there has been no rain so far. When I arrived at the Cancun Airport―Tulum is over eight miles from Cancun―I went over to this place where pants, shirts, books, socks, and underwear parade on a conveyor belt inside leather or fabric containers—that’s what we call luggage, bags, and backpacks. I stood there, playing the waiting game. The luggage went round and round and people fished out their things until the crowd started to dwindle.
Everything was going well, but then I understood that, for the first time in my life, I was about to go through that full-circle experience of losing my luggage. There was only a faded, half-full black backpack left to be picked up, going round and round the belt. Then an airport employee came over and grabbed it. I went to the little opening where luggage comes from and stuck my head in there. It was already dark outside and there was nothing, nobody, just a rusty cart that probably brought in all the luggage―except mine. Has that ever happened to you? It’s devastating. I went back and forth five times and then, on the other side of the room, this chubby, mustachioed guard came in. I walked toward him. I told him what had happened. The little guard yawned several times at negative speed. He contacted the airline counter through his radio. Then, he said an employee by the name of Oliver was on his way. After a very long wait, Employee Oliver appeared. I filled out a form. I pointed at a drawing that closely resembled my backpack (I found out it fits the “sports backpack” category.) Oliver made a series of phone calls, until my luggage was located. It was on another airplane that was about to leave the Mexican Capital City. If I wanted to, I could go to a hotel (in this case, my cabin) and the airline would be responsible for delivering my luggage. Since luck wasn’t really on my side, I thought it was best to wait at the airport. Eat a hot dog and die. That would be a dignified end to my life.
After all, I could be telling you about some of the wonderful things I’ve lived these past twenty-nine days, but it’s always more fun to talk about things that went wrong. Maybe that’s also why Adan travels: so that things can go wrong at some level (seeking adventures in a world where promised adventures never seem to be fulfilled.) Besides, nobody wants to hear about stories that do not contain one of the following: (1) ruin, (2) tears, or (3) characters that get beaten up from beginning to end. I guess all good novels are like that, right? It’s better to be involved with uncertainty.
Now the wind has changed; it seems we’ll get some rain after all.
Happy New Year, my friend Nesky.
Emilio
From: Antônio Xerxenesky
Jan 2, 2014
Dearest Emilio,
First of all, I’d like to put an end to your illusions: I don’t practice somersaults by the pool. The photo turned out amazing; I can’t see where my arms are, in which direction I'm moving, if I’m gonna crack my head on the deck or dive into the water on my back. Reality isn’t as thrilling. We were at Galera’s house―one of the first places where I saw you in the flesh, where we started this whole story of “being friends”―and Natão, everyone’s buddy, really wanted to test this camera that captures zillions of frames per second. And there I went, attempting a clumsy jump, a failed flip, and went into the water on my back first with a painful splash. However, when you isolate that frame I posted to Facebook, it looks like I accomplished an astonishing maneuver. People say that, on social networking websites, we are able to build an idealized narrative of who we are. You could say that’s what I did. But the truth is that I really like posting preposterous things to Facebook. I don’t understand that bunch of authors who overcrowd my wall posting only intelligent comments critiquing everything that’s out there. It seems none of them do somersaults by a pool.
Man, you’re really having some adventures―actually, you mentioned the word “adventure” a few times on your letter. And you talk about lonely trips and nomads. It sounds like a world of fiction. Traveling was never an easy feat for me. The first time I left Latin America it was 2013―I went to France last May. I never had any fetish for Paris or French culture; I can’t remember why Gabi and I chose France among so many countries. It must have been because we like coq au vin and wine.
You told me about the drama of losing your luggage. It never happened to me and now I’m afraid it will. I’m really terrified of certain things, and I believe not even years of therapy would be enough to cure it. I was unconsciously sure, for example, that I would be detained at Immigration, even though all my documents were in order, even though I’m a middle-class Caucasian and was wearing a blazer. Of course I went through Immigration without any worries, but this voice inside my head kept repeating, “It’s not gonna work. They won’t let you in. You’ll be interrogated. And if you go in, you’re gonna miss your connecting flight. If you make it to your flight, the plane is gonna crash. If you arrive safely at your destination, your luggage won’t be there.” And so on and so forth. One of the reasons why I only really managed to go on a trip in 2013, at twenty-eight years of age, was because my girlfriend was holding my hand every step of the way.
Actually, it’s at Immigration checkpoints that you see all the racial tension that seems to dominate Europe. While a white guy like me goes through without a second glance, no inspections needed, anyone wearing a burqa is questioned for minutes on end. In Paris, Arabs and Blacks are found in the ghettos and seem to be treated with fear and disdain by some Parisians. I may be wrong, but that’s the feeling I got. By the way, Paris is a disappointment. It’s the legitimate case of a city that has been ruined by predatory tourism. Even if you avoid the most obvious places, it seems there's nowhere safe. And I believe those who live there have developed certain disgust for tourists. And they’re right to do so. I saw so many people being rude that I could write five letters just mentioning examples. It’s impossible not to remember what Foster Wallace once said: “The places we visit would be so much better without our presence.”
Please, don’t get me wrong. I can’t imagine you or your buddy Adan acting like obnoxious tourists. I’m just talking about this uncomfortable feeling I get when I’m at a place that is so cliché. That’s why the cities I enjoyed the most were those in the countryside of France. And that reminds me of what you said about “adventure.” It seems that, when you’re traveling, there’s this dialectic war between “adventure” and “comfort,” between exploring small cities in Mexico and staying at a cabin, or laying out on a beach chair in a paradise-like resort. I didn’t go through anything crazy and stayed on the side of comfort in France, but it’s funny to think that the coolest part of our trip was when Gabi and I took the less obvious route. We were in Dijon and decided to try that famous Burgundy wine. Our hotel offered these tourism packages, a nice little bus with AC that would take us to a château. We thought about purchasing the package, but they were fully booked. What did we do then? We discovered this château that would welcome foreigners a few towns over from where we were. We took the train to the outskirts of the city, then got on a bus that would only come by ever so often. When we got on the bus, it was crowded. By the time we stepped down from the bus, there was nobody else in. The little city was at the end of the line. We stepped down from the bus and there was nothing around us. Nothing! I mean, the green fields were there. There was a house way off in the distance. There were grapevines. And a lame dog. We walked around aimlessly until we found this half-deaf grandma sitting in a wheelchair. She gave us directions to the château, despite our poor French. We knocked on the door and drank some of the best wines of our lives.
This is an extremely bourgeois adventure, no doubt about it. But, for heaven’s sake, we were in France and we like wine. Everything we’d done was terribly bourgeois, and I’m telling you this experience because, despite visiting one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, we manage to find ourselves lost in a foreign land for a moment, and that felt special because the damn Arc de Triomphe is boring as hell.
“Adventures.” Heh.
Saludos,
Nesky
From: Emilio Fraia
Jan 3, 2014
Nesky,
Thank you so much for your report. I thought about some alternative endings: you and Gabi knocking on the château’s door and drinking the worst wines of your life. Or, later on, after that whole epic bus/train ride, you find the place disturbingly empty, and it looks like people left in a hurry for obscure reasons. Or you check in with Foursquare and end up being followed by an assassin wearing a white blazer, like the Miami Vice guys. As for Adan, the Argentine who's staying in the cabin next door, well, he could keep traveling the world, turning cocoa butter into organic chocolate and, in the end, realize that his ideal “adventure” had never really been fulfilled; that his experience was below the fictional expectations he once had; that, one way or another, at some level, everything comes down to being disappointed. Still, he wouldn’t stop traveling. He’ll fix his bike (there’s something wrong with the chain) and he’ll keep going strong, pedaling forward. Some sort of “I can’t keep going, I gotta keep going.”
Here, on this side, I went to visit the Palenque ruins in Chiapas. And, man, how beautiful it is to see this type of desolated landscape, where nature is taking over the remains of buildings! It gives you a sense of how fleeting things are. Especially power. Seeing all those decayed temples and thinking that they were once majestic buildings erected by people who enslaved and/or devastated neighboring tribes, who took over a place like that in a specific moment in time when they saw someone else as their enemies, etc. It’s almost a corporate environment, but Mayan bosses have names like K’inich Janaab’ Pakal.
After some time, I sat down on the steps of a pyramid―it was hot as hell―and I started playing this game in which I’d take pictures that would only show the ruins and the temples in the middle of the jungle, without any person in sight. I’d wait for the perfect moment, the right angle, and when there was no one else left on the frame, click, click, click, I’d take the pictures. These are the stupid things we play when we’re alone (practicing a secret life, as you know well.) But the buses kept on coming. There were so many people. Later on, looking at the pictures closely, we could say that my attempt at capturing that world prior to when tourists started to come wasn’t exactly a success. And, even if that had been a success, there would still be one person left: me. Deep down, I think we’re all obnoxious tourists, sharing our uncomfortable, eventful escapades as the obnoxious tourists that we are.
I had never thought about it: Brazil is a country with no ruins, isn’t it? It goes without saying that anything that kind of looks old among us ends up being restored. Man, it would be cool to have some places like that, which are abandoned, falling apart. Don’t you think? As far as I’ve seen, there’s the Garcia D’Ávila’s castle in Bahia, a couple of prisons: one on Ilha Anchieta, in Ubatuba, and one on Ilha Grande, in Rio. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but these prison ruins are spectacular, a great specimen of our past―albeit a recent past. The latter is at one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen, Dois Rios, a three hour’s tough walk from Abraão, the village where most people stay on Ilha Grande. It was there that Graciliano Ramos was locked up in the 1930s. Madame Satã was held there too. And that was the place where I got this one tick up my leg that gave me a fever. I thought I was gonna die! Since you’re my friend, I’ll spare you the details of this story.
Last Saturday I got an email from Flora, a friend who lives in Germany. It had been a while since we talked. In her message, she said she had moved in with her boyfriend and they were living in a reservation surrounded by lakes, about an hour outside Berlin. It’s a three-story house, they have three dogs, and there are two guest rooms. She said they’ll soon welcome artists going through some hard times, authors with a writer’s block, etc. They’ll provide organic meals, a fireplace, and charades for entertainment. Then she told me she needs to have surgery. I wrote her back, narrating some recent episodes from my life, and telling her that I’d had appendicitis. We were very close for quite some time; Flora used to date a friend of mine, Arthur. So, as I was writing, it was as if I had gone back to that time, when we spent New Year’s Eve in Cajaíba, looking at plankton at the beach at night, which is something similar to standing before the ruins of a temple or the prison on Ilha Grande―okay, it isn’t such a nice view, but it’s this sort of connection, in the present, with the fiction we call “past.” It was a little nostalgic at that moment, but not in a way that “things were better back then;” it was just about being aware that time goes by and things are taken to a different level, become more complex, have more layers added to them.
I thought about this story I read the other day. In 1914, Giacometti sculpted his first bust while observing a model. His brother posed for him. He said that, at first, he got extreme pleasure from it and felt as if it would come easily to him, that he would be able to sculpt more or less what he was looking at. Fifty years later, he goes to his study and spends a week trying to recreate that bust, as he had done in 1914, with about the same dimensions the first one had. While he was under the impression that he was doing exactly what he wanted in 1914, he was unable to do so again later in his life. He said that, thinking back on it, he was never able to sculpt a bust from observation again, not in its most basic sense. If he looks at a bust from far away, he sees a sphere; if he looks at it up close, it’s no longer a sphere and it becomes an extremely complex, deep thing. If he faces it, he forgets about the profile; if he looks at it from the side, he forgets what the face looks like. Everything becomes disconnected, complex, and he can’t perceive the whole thing anymore. Too many stages. Too many levels. I guess that’s what it is.
Hugs. I must go to my indolent lunch.
Emilio
From: Antônio Xerxenesky
Jan 6, 2014
Dear Emilio,
I’ve never visited any ruins. I mean, I’m here digging out some old memories, some strolls I took through the countryside of Rio Grande Sul, and... I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve seen any. Maybe just in movies. Maybe I’ve never stopped to think about ruins. But the things you told me brought to mind that critically acclaimed movie The Great Beauty, directed by Paolo Sorrentino, which I went to see last week. I thought it was a pitifully bad movie; I felt like leaving halfway through, that’s how bad I thought it was. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way about a movie. It’s a sub-Fellini with the aesthetics of a perfume commercial. It wants to pay tribute to 8 ½, but it doesn’t have a fifth of the visual accuracy. Brace yourself for many tracking shots made at dusk!
However, what really irritated me about the movie wasn’t even that. It was this advocacy for “old Roma,” for old values. For ruins. The movie shows a contrast between the new decadents and the sacred ancients. On one side, you have horrible pop music, priests taking advantage of others, and Berlusconi-like parties; on the other side, you have the beauty of the Coliseum, the classic Roman architecture, the haunting presence of Fanny Ardant. In a scene that I believe to be the worst one in the entire movie, a girl has this artistic performance with a bunch of cans of paint, and the protagonist jokes about how she makes millions doing it. He’s bored out of his mind, so he decides to walk away from the performance and show his wife what he considers to be the most beautiful side of Rome, a “secret” side: statues from the last century enveloped by the most melodic church music of all time.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing tradition, or the music―the soundtrack is beautiful, featuring Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. I’m only criticizing this unwillingness to appreciate what is contemporary. It’s really, really easy to joke about contemporary art. In every biennial art exhibit organized in São Paulo (or Porto Alegre,) we always have to put up with a series of jokes about how someone thought the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall was actually part of the artistic installation, yada, yada, yada... I think a more dignified effort would have been to find value and reflect on what’s out there, because there are many good things out there, be it in art, or pop music. Saying that we live at a time of great cultural and moral decline―which seems to be the message behind that Sorrentino’s film―is such a trivial and lazy way out...
I’m no contemporary art expert, and I acknowledge that I often mistake Waltercio Caldas for Cildo Meireles, and that many times I walk through an exhibit that makes no sense to me. However, I see a significant value in a project like Inhotim’s. Have you been there?
Man, I believe Inhotim is the best-kept secret in Brazil. I mean, people in our work environment will say, “Doh, Inhotim is no secret, everybody knows about it!” But go ask your parents, cousins, or friends who are not in the literary, journalistic, editorial areas. They don’t know where Inhotim is! It’s incredible that we have such a place in Brazil. A vast museum outdoors. A museum where you can jump in a pool that is a work of art. A museum that allows artists to let out their most megalomaniac side. They have some installations that I don’t really care for, but that have impressed me precisely because of their greatness, such as Matthew Barney’s huge tractor taking down a tree inside a mirrored dome.
Maybe the work of art that I remember the most at Inhotim is the Sonic Pavilion, created by Doug Aitken, from California. It’s a glass-covered pavilion with a hole in the middle. This hole is 656 feet deep and, at the bottom, Aitken placed microphones to record sounds that come from the bottom of the Earth, as well as all that fuss that reverberates through the pavilion. What does the bottom of the Earth sound like? It’s terribly grave and weird. It reminds me a little bit of the drones that are used so often in experimental music. I think I’m able to reproduce a similar sound wave with my synthesizer, but that would have been an artificial sound that didn’t come from the bottom of the Earth―and that makes all the difference. You could only understand it if you sat down on the floor at the Sonic Pavilion to listen to it.
And we can find it in Brazil, a six-hour drive from São Paulo. I apologize for my fascination with it, but I think it’s incredible. Too bad those who slander contemporary manifestations will never get near a place like that.
Let’s schedule that lunch, for God’s sake!
Regards,
Nesky
From: Emilio Fraia
Jan 9, 2014
Nesky,
Are you familiar with Kenneth Tynan’s Law on Responsible Cinema? It says all movies that try to seriously diagnose Contemporary Human Issues are bad. Only period pieces, comedy, satire, and thrillers are worth watching. Note: According to Tynan, Citizen Kane is half period piece, half satire. In other words, I agree 800% with you. And, on further thought, the synopsis for The Great Beauty could have been something like this: The Great Beauty (Italy-France, 2013, 142 min.) On his 65th birthday, a ‘bon vivant’ author questions the paths his life has taken and finds the antidote for the empty, frivolous art of his time with a flight of flamingos made on a Windows 95 machine. I’m yet to recover from that flamingo scene; what a hideous thing that was!
Yes, I went to Inhotim last year. I liked everything you mentioned. And there’s also Lygia Pape’s Pavilion. Man... I wish I could write like her―so simple, elegant, and geometrical. Another work of art that had an impact on me was that of Cristina Iglesias, from Spain. I don’t know if you remember, but it’s in the middle of a clearing, amid a thick grove. It’s a sculpture made of polished steel, a maze: outside, the walls reflect the surrounding vegetation; inside, textures imitate roots, leaves, and tree trunks. You can hear water flowing the entire time you’re there. And, right in the middle of it, after you’ve gone through the corridors―some of them with dead ends―you can turn around and go in again, so you can get to a water pump.
But, before you get to the installation, you have to walk down a trail for about ten minutes. That’s actually fun too. It’s like a surprise awaits you at the end of the trail, as if a narrative―that of the trail in the middle of the grove―were interrupted and taken over by another one―that of a large sculpture, a strange object, a labyrinth of mirrors.
I’ve been thinking about stories like that, which suddenly become other stories. That’s something that often happens in Onetti’s short stories. There’s always someone telling a story, imagining it, making things up, and reminiscing. It’s the story being told, imagined, and made up that comes to the foreground and ends up working like some sort of commentary to the primary story, which remains there, concealed, preparing an ambush. There’s something like it in Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingravidos. Did you read it? I believe this book was overlooked in Brazil. The narrator, a female, tries to write a novel and becomes obsessed by Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, so his voice ends up taking over the plot and gets mixed up with her memories. The juxtaposition of those two narratives creates an effect that I believe to be excellence at its best.
And, man, this past week was intense. I had a million things to take care of. I must have gone to the notary’s office at least five times! And then there’s the demise of replying to emails. You reply to five, ten messages and they multiply themselves into fifteen, twenty! I’ve also reviewed the translation of one of my short stories, which will be included in an anthology of Brazilian authors to be published by Alfaguara in Argentina. And I’m trying to finish my book, too...
Actually, I was happy to hear that you’re translating Kassel no invita a la lógica, the new book by Vila-Matas. It has something to do with this contemporary art thing, right? Are you enjoying it? I like the way Vila-Matas approaches the subject. His Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil is a hell of a book. I like the idea of portability: writing for fun, and writing stories that can easily fit into a briefcase―even though, of course, writing isn’t exactly fun and there are excellent novels that are extremely heavy, don't you agree? Well, in Explorers of the abyss, there’s that famous short story with Sophie Calle. It’s all infinitely much more interesting than Mario Vargas Llosa’s vision of contemporary art, just to mention an example of a heavy-weight who “slanders contemporary manifestations.” Look, don’t get me wrong, I love Vargas Llosa; The Time of the Hero, The Cubs and Other Stories, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter are books that make the heart inside this prose writer skip a beat. However, his most recent book, The Civilization of Spectacle... I just can’t... I understand the effort to preserve the tradition of novels and all, but you just can’t have it as a boxing match like that.
I read a recent interview about Kassel in which Vila-Matas quotes an interview with David Foster Wallace. I’ll transcribe it here, as a way of saying, “Until next time, Nesky.” Here it goes: “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” It’s a little literary and cheesy, right? I don’t know... I think I’ve made it this far and, in the end, I’m almost acquitting those flamingos, the perfume ad, and Windows 95.
Hugs, and keep up the good work.
Emilio
From: Antônio Xerxenesky
Jan 11, 2014
Dearest Emilio,
I’m happy to see that we agree in the cinematography department, even though I was expecting some sort of wild disagreement, something that would have made this last letter a forum for dispute and quarrel.
As for Cristina Iglesias’ installation, I couldn’t remember it. I had to Google it to confirm whether I had visited it at Inhotim. The truth is that I walked through the labyrinth without understanding absolutely anything about it. When that happens, I’d rather not even look up the press release explaining it. These informative texts whose purpose is to explain a work of art always use a bunch of academic lingo about “the relationship between man and space” and tend to be nauseating to me. It’s funny how we had such completely different reactions to this work of art. Had you not mentioned it, I wouldn’t have even remembered that mirror-like green place.
I’ve been meaning to read Luiselli for quite some time now. I don’t think she was overlooked around here. Several friends have told me about the book. The truth is that almost all Latin authors not named Roberto Bolaño end up being read less than they should in Brazil. I believe we’re more influenced by U.S. Trends; even European best-sellers that become a hit in Brazil come with the stamp of approval from the Americans: Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald... Here’s a cruel question: would Roberto Bolaño have become such a hit in Brazil if he hadn’t enjoyed tremendous success in the United States? Of course I may be acting a little paranoid about it...
I’ve yet to read Luiselli because I’ve forgotten what it feels like to read a book for pleasure, a novel that I'd pick on a whim. You know how it goes: I work eight hours a day, then go home after business hours to work a little more on something else―in this case, Vila-Matas’ translation―then I still have to write a review or an article, or read a book to compose the so-called “anonymous book flap.” Gosh, I've realized I need to find time to read something to research my future novel! And I also need a little bit of time to watch a silly movie or series, play video games, exist, eat a hamburger, and brush my teeth.
I need to find a way to make my day last 30 hours. Or change my lifestyle.
Going back to Vila-Matas: translating Kassel is no easy feat. It’s not because the book poses inherent challenges, even though I’ve come across many expressions that are particular to Barcelona and that I had never heard of before. It’s just that Vila-Matas is so present in my life that translating him becomes an intimidating task. It doesn’t mean that I worship him blindly; as happens with every author I really admire, I question my faith in them periodically. I often feel that metaliterature and self-fiction end up taking a lot of the humanity out of books, that they lack some three-dimensional characters. I admit, I think “Dublinesque” and Aire de Dylan are books with little vitality. However, this new one I’m translating is incredible; it’s Vila-Matas at his best. And, if I believed in synchronicity, I’d say the world is trying to tell me something by having this book fall into my lap. Vila-Matas is dealing with several subjects I’ve been obsessed with lately: advocating for contemporary manifestations―which we’ve talked about in our letters―, Walser’s walks, Wittgenstein’s reclusiveness. By the way, the last book I read 100% for pleasure was Wittgenstein’s incredible biography written by Ray Monk. The fact that you mentioned Historia abreviada hit the bull’s eye: Vila-Matas is great at dealing with contemporary art, especially Duchamp’s disciples.
All in all, Kassel is an excellent book and I hope my translation does it justice. I don’t know if you agree but, for me, translating is a little like writing fiction: throughout the entire process, I think it’s turning out horribly, that I’m a fraud about to be found out. Then, when I sit down to review it calmly, I’m able to evaluate the final result in a more realistic way. A recent exception was when I translated Rodrigo Fresán’s The Bottom of the Sky. When I was done, I was sure I had been faithful, that Fresán sounded natural in Portuguese, that the result was a novel translated without accents and, at the same time, faithful to the original. I wish it could always be that way.
I’ve just double checked how extensive this letter got and I realize I’m taking too much of your time and space, like an Oscar winner who makes a long speech and ignores the orchestra playing louder and louder. I wish I could find a sentence on this subject (a quote would be appropriate,) an observation, something to finish our letter exchange on a great note. I can’t think of anything. I’ve been feeling anxious, I don’t know the difference between weekdays and weekends anymore, I’ve been working too much and reading too little for pleasure. Please, let’s schedule that lunch, an extremely long and useless lunch, a three-hour-long lunch with some coffee at a second location, and pistachio ice cream at a third location. I think I need that.
It’s been a pleasure.
Nesky
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Tryno Maldonado vs. Álvaro Bisama]
[Emiliano Monge vs. Juan Cárdenas]
