🦋 Christ in Elqui
 I bought a book last night on the strength of its cover -- The magnificent cover photo (a still from Buñuel's Simon of the Desert) made me pick it up and read the back cover, made me buy the book and start reading... It is an homage to NÃcanor Parra's Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui, about a young man from Chile's Elqui Valley who discovers that he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Very dry humor and lovely prose.
Here is a bit of linguistic confusion I found entertaining -- early in the novel the narrator is talking about Christ's difficulties with his good-for-nothing apostles, who are always stuffing themselves, guzzling liquor and smoking -- he compares this with the Messiah's ascetic ways using a quick shift from third to first person, which is made more subtle and confusing by Spanish's imperfect tense. In Spanish, the first person singular imperfect and the third person singular imperfect are usually (maybe always?) the same. So when Letelier writes
Él, por su parte, que debÃa ser luz para el mundo, no fumaba ni bebÃa. Con un vaso de vino al almuerzo, como exhortaba en sus prédicas, era suficiente. Y apenas probaba la comida, porque entre mis pecados, que también los tengo, mis hermanos, nunca figuró la gula. Tanto asà que a veces, por el simple motivo de que se olvidaba de hacerlo, se pasaba dÃas completos sin ingerir alimentos.
The first sentence is obviously the narrator speaking, because its subject is "Él". The second sentence is still referring to Christ in the third person, speaking of "sus prédicas". The beginning of the third sentence looks like it is still doing so until we get to "mis pecados" and "los tengo", and realize Christ is speaking now. Then in the fourth sentence we are back to third person as evidenced by the use of "se" instead of "me" -- I found it surprising what a small proportion of the words in this passage distinguish between the two voices.
posted afternoon of Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
➳ More posts about The Art of Resurrection
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I agree with you about the shift in "person" from the first to the second sentence, but I think that the third sentence (with se) expresses generalities, like "on" in French, so the statement is not strictly attributable to either the narrator or to (the) Christ ("one forgets to eat", etc), because if could apply to both as well as to any number of generic persons.
posted evening of November 11th, 2010 by marie-lucie
sorry, I meant the third and fourth sentences.
posted evening of November 11th, 2010 by marie-lucie
Oh cool! That's what I had thought the first time I read the third sentence but when I went back and tried to translate it I was thinking I had been mistaken. (pensaba que equivocaba)
posted evening of November 11th, 2010 by Jeremy
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