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Monday, July 9th, 2012
There is another variant of the Bartleby syndrome which I have not seen yet in Vila-Matas' enumeration -- one which seems to me like it must be pretty well-represented in the history of letters: writing the wrong book. Two, and possibly three characters in the story I am writing (and it goes without saying, possibly this applies to myself as well) spend their lives working hard on the wrong book.* They are not exactly emulating Bartleby -- they are after all striving to create, to produce -- but in terms of actual output it comes to very much the same thing.
Maximiliano Josner Ãvala is a gifted poet, one who, however, never pursues poetry; he believes his calling is to theology and to metaphysics, and he works all his life writing a manuscript which will never be published. He leaves behind him thousands of pages, but his only publication is his thesis on the traditions and institutions of the indigenous tribes of Peru.
Ãvala's young disciple Miguel Arroncoyo de Matoa is manically devoted to his teacher's philosophical work, and is too shallow of a thinker to really see the holes in it. He is also a seeker after fame, one who is bound to be disappointed; his dream is to use Ãvala's manuscript as a stepping-stone to his own success in the field. He publishes some fragments of poetry from Ãvala's journals with his own commentary, as a way of preparing the ground for what he considers the more important work, and then spends the remaining decades of his life attempting unsuccessfully to tame the monster manuscript. The volume of poetry does not make much of an impression, and is pretty well forgotten by the time Bolaño finds a copy of it in the university library in Santiago.
Bolaño includes some references to Ãvala in the poems in La universidad desconocida, which is how Peter Conlay, a young man in upstate New York, catches wind of his existence. He finds a copy of Finidades on Abebooks and falls in love with Ãvala's voice. So the question becomes, can Peter's translations succeed in introducing this forgotten and foreign poet to the world? Or is he too working on the wrong book? I see Peter as having things in common with both Ãvala and de Matoa...
 *And have I mentioned how it is tripping me out, that I picked up Bartleby y compañÃa just when I was starting to piece this story together?
posted evening of July 9th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, July 8th, 2012
...Why did I write? At the end of the day, the normal thing is to read. My accustomed answer was twofold: that firstly, my poetry consisted -- though I did not know this -- of attempts to invent a personality for myself. ...And furthermore, that it was based on an elementary confusion: I believed I wanted to be a poet, but essentially what I wanted to be was a poem.
-- Jaime Gil de Biedma
quoted in Bartleby y compañia
Mi intenta en decir «últimamente sobre nada» fuera igual que cuando yo decÃa antes, «escribir sobre escribir sobre»; la iteración se puede infinitamente reflejar: una reflexión de la realidad y de una realidad reflejado. Si los espejos el otro precisamente alinean, si la recurencia puede proceder sin fin, últimamente se produce el contrario exacto de la realidad descrita, asà precisamente nada. (Lo anterior es válido en doble en relación a «hablar sobre escribir sobre...»)
posted evening of July 8th, 2012: Respond
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Welcome to visitors from Caravana de recuerdos -- I am glad to be observing Spanish Lit Month this July along with Richard and the rest. Reading Bartleby y compañÃa, watching CrÃa cuervos... And principally I seem to be using this Spanish Lit Month as an occasion to create some Spanish language poetry (and/or prose, hasn't really gelled into one or the other yet) of my own! Perhaps this will interest you, perhaps not -- this link will (loosely) track that project. For the time being, I'll be writing all or most of my posts going back and forth between English and a clumsy, stilted attempt at Spanish; hoping people will bear with me...
 Some archival material that may interest you: Slavko Zupcic, The Art of Resurrection and Our Lady of the Dark Flowers both by Hernán Rivera Letelier, endless nattering about Borges... A poem I quite like from Unamuno, and some from Pablo Antonio Cuadra. A few fun Argentine stories.
posted afternoon of July 8th, 2012: 3 responses
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Mi esperanza es (supongo) que esa especie de composición (intento decir, el movimiento de imagen vaga, abstracta, nada muy especÃfica, en combinación con ritmo escuchado -- justo al español, sin intervencÃon de inglés en la medida en que soy capaz de eso) vale la pena si nada más, en la instrucción idiomática... El español que hallaré con ese método de instrucción sonará muy ajeno, muy forzado, y de vez en cuando incoherente, pero también (tal vez) muy distintivo, una voz verdadera/engañosa. No tengo idea qué destinación busco, vamos a ver luego, cuando llegamos.
Mi tÃa descansa, su cara resplandece
Con luz infinita y magia y misterio
Viva retrato de dios
Hija
posted afternoon of July 8th, 2012: 1 response
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One day,  -- the next, 
posted morning of July 8th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, July 7th, 2012
... His second book was even more successful than the first, professors in North American, and some of the most distinguished ones among the academic world of those long-past days, wrote enthusiastic reviews, wrote books about the books which were commenting on the Fox's books.
And from this moment on, the Fox felt -- with good reason -- that he was content; the years passed by without his publishing anything.
Well, people started talking. "What's up with the Fox?" -- when he showed up right on time for cocktails they would come up to him and be like, You ought to publish something more.
-- But look, I've already published two books.
-- And good ones, too! -- would come the reply -- That's exactly why you should publish another one!
And here the Fox did not say anything, but thought to himself: "What they're really looking for, is for me to publish a lousy book. But because I am the Fox, I'm not going to do it."
And he didn't. "Fox is the smart one."
The Black Sheep and other fables
Augusto Monterroso
 It's the funniest thing -- somehow I had gotten it into my head that the title of Bartleby y compañia was Bartlett y companÃa -- this despite many times of reading the correct title, and of writing it out, and even of ordering it on Amazon [and it occurs to me now that I have not really read anything, anything that sticks in my memory, about it, just references to the title]... thinking it had something to do with the quotations dude. (And to be sure there are a lot of quotations in the text -- that's not really here nor there though.) This is my introduction to Vila-Matas and it sure is a pleasant one. The idea of "un cuaderno de notas a pie de página que comentaron un texto invisible" is just about exactly what I am wanting to be reading right now -- and here I am experiencing that reverse-projection which I refer to as identification with the text in spades, I feel like the first chapter of the book is written in my voice. Thanks for the impetus, Richard. (And I am going to throw caution to the wind disregarding the hinted warning in Jean de la Bruyère's epigraph. Tal vez soy yo entre los otros a quienes la gloria consistirÃa en no escribir, pero...)
posted afternoon of July 7th, 2012: Respond
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It's foreign, outlandish, in Spanish extraño,
the moving hand writes and escribe la mano
you play with your meanings and juegas con rima
built up from an image, imagen encima
posted morning of July 7th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, July 6th, 2012
Still not sure what to call this project. At first it was a poem, then a story, now something is nagging at me to think of it as a book, a novel! I wonder if there will actually be that much material in it... Details of the work keep cropping up and interesting me and changing, I want to look at the project as a whole for a minute. The idea is that Peter, a conflicted youngish man with anxieties and a love of Spanish poetry and a love for his girlfriend, Laura, who also has some anxieties, though different ones; Peter is making a project of translating poetry from this 19th-C. Chilean poet Maximiliano Josner Ãvala. And woven into this is a back-story about Ãvala's work being mostly unpublished, and about Ãvala's life and work. Everything is still very unfocused; I'll be thinking over the next couple of weeks how to bring portions of it into focus.
posted evening of July 6th, 2012: Respond
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Está bien te dices
Déjalo sencillamente
Transpirar acerca de ti
Solamente hunde
En el momento ajeno
Luego harás.
Se llama ésto «técnica»,
Técnica desechable.
posted evening of July 6th, 2012: Respond
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Thursday, July 5th, 2012
La cuerda corta: finidades, la poesÃa de Maximiliano Josner Ãvala fue 1914 publicada en la prensa Universidad Técnica del Estado, editado y con introducción del colega y discÃpulo de Josner Ãvala, Miguel Arroncoyo de Marcoa. Fue el único libro de Josner Ãvala desde su tesis Sobre las tradiciones y instituciones de los peruanos indÃgenos casi 40 años antes, y fue publicada unos seis años despues de su muerte inoportuna. Su opus magnum, un tratado acerca de la divinidad del tiempo, nunca se completase.
La ambición de Miguel Arroncoyo editar y publicar ese tratado puede bien haber influido el escogimiento de poemas que componen las Finidades -- esas 229 estrofas representan las miles de páginas de los diarios que fueron donados a la biblioteca de la universidad, en armonia con el último testamento de Josner Ãvala. De Marcoa las define en su introducción como «poemas breves y crÃpticos sobre magia» y como una «investigación en la divinidad»; pero las leyendo en el contexto de los diarios, se muy fácil entienden como notas personales, pensamientos sobre su infancia y su orfandad, la pérdida de la madre y luego de los abuelos.
posted evening of July 5th, 2012: Respond
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