No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Read Free Page B

reference to a seventh-century monk by the name of Cosmas, and his having written a book inspired by scripture, entitled Christian Topography , in which he denies the sphericity and oblateness of the earth, describing this heresy as a pagan superstition, and proposes instead a world shaped like a parallelogram, having one side twice the length of the other. Who knows where I find my factoids. I compared Cosmas’s opus, which I’d never seen, to Marina’s unavoidable [all-too-urgent, all-too-assertive] book … its exhausting pursuit of so much as a single idea. I wrote that Marina’s book, entitled The Estate of Heaven —in which there wasn’t a word that couldn’t have been dispensed with—was a groundbreaking work, for it described on the verso and recto of each page a twofold world, a contingent rather than a necessary world: a cosmogony very like the one described in the Topography ; that for Argentinian writers (having no choice but to implicate myself, since I’m a member of that tribe) Heaven would become an unavoidable point of reference. I also replied, in passing, to a comment made by Insúa Alvizur to the effect that our generation (the observation was a general one, but I took personal umbrage) would be condemned to merely aping our predecessors, to producing crude imitations of what others had done before us, if better … To making faces, as Insúa Alvizur put it: to putting on masks, not the least bit unsettling, because everyone’s seen them before. I used as many quotations as could reasonably be included in a foreword (for, as we used to say, in order to shed light, we have no option but to cite). Whatever space I had left was devoted to the ever-shrinking world of Argentinian literary criticism, into which I take credit for introducing, in this piece, a vastly important term: “vestigial.”
     
    As soon as I sent in my contribution, I waited … waited, having sacrificed any last inclination toward fairness or sincerity, for Marina to call and say thanks. But she never did, so things went on as before.
    All the characters from R.E.’s stories gather together in the end for the naming (of the story). What about the poems? A dilemma.
    The stories of Francisco Eugenio Répide Stupía were written by a literary virtuoso in a style that betrays the recklessness of an apathetic plagiarist. Marina’s betray the same quality of listless intensity, the better to conceal all evidence of her poems having been written in a shitty apartment complex in a city she liked to call “a principality of proles.” Marina’s primary preoccupation seems to have been with choosing words that sounded nice (and she had no trouble finding them—how acoustics betray us!), without regard for their definitions or the context in which they were to be used. If anything redeems them—their only saving grace—it is a certain stubborn elegance, what Charles Tomlinson called the principle of gentility , a certain exaggerated sophistication that persists despite all the solecisms. In the eighties, or anyway the early eighties, Marina started out—like so many of us—translating the poems of John Ashbery for this or that poetry journal. And, you know, it’s still going on: for at least fifteen years now, no journal or review can call itself literary without printing at least one translation of a John Ashbery poem. Funny.
     
    Marina’s English, fortified by her years in East Anglia, Urbana, and Ann Arbor, where the various jobs she’d held had only helped fortify her ennui, proved a useful tool in translating all that imprecision, suspicion, and vagueness into an even vaguer Spanish, worthy of the local literary magazines, who are wont to applaud these qualities, mistaking them for ambiguity and semantic richness. Luckily, I got to know her while she was still free of those parasites of prestige, while she was still a perfect, irresistible ape of idleness, the sort of person Shakespeare (on whom, like so many others,