Savage Theories
Page 22
Just then, Pabst and Kamtchowsky took each other’s hand; something had told them that it would be a very romantic thing to do.
10
At long last, Augustus has agreed to meet me. We’ve set a date: this coming Tuesday. I’m extremely nervous, but I’m trying to keep myself under control. I’ve been working a great deal. At night I try to read as little as possible—when I read, ideas assault me constantly. But I must calm myself, must proofread, must think accurately and precisely. I cannot rule out the possibility of the existence of errors. (Perhaps I should recheck the page numbering?) I am tempted to print out everything in My Documents, the entire compendium of my thoughts on everything I’ve read as an adult, the totality of my anthropological intuitions, outlines of the new theories on which I’m working, my sociological history of perversity. But no. It would be better to summarize. To put things in order, to connect, to compose, to renumber. Augustus originally proposed that I stop by his office on Monday, but I suggested making it Tuesday, the day I clean the fish bowl, so that I can take Yorick with me, and show him the department.
Endnotes
i. Knights of the Round Bed, Injection Experts, The King of Urges, A Slip of the Surgeon’s Hand, and I’ll Break Your Ratings Wide Open: a series of Argentine sex comedies from the late 1970s and early 1980s, directed by Hugo Sofovich, most often starring Jorge Porcel and Alberto Olmedo.
ii. Fun for the New Recruits, Big Rambo and Little Rambo: First Mission, and Recruits Attack!
iii. Bosques de Palermo is a large urban park on the north side of Buenos Aires. It was built on land seized from Juan Manuel de Rosas, a 19th century governor, following his defeat at the Battle of Caseros.
iv. “I don’t pretend to own you / I am nothing, I have no pride.” From the song “Sabor a mí,” a bolero written by the Mexican composer Álvaro Carrillo, and popularized by the Mexican group Trío Los Panchos.
v. “Who is worth more, a simple girl like me or you so proud, / or is your fragile beauty worth even more? / Think carefully, because deep down in the pit / we’ll all be dressed the same.” The song in question, “Ódiame,” is based on a poem written around 1920 by the Peruvian poet Federico Barreto. The song itself, originally a Peruvian vals, was composed around 1950 by the Peruvian composer Rafael Otero López. It was popularized throughout South American some twenty years later by the Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo. Many other versions exist, including a bolero composed by the Cuban singer Bienvenido Granda.
vi. The quote comes from the 2 April 1972 edition of Potere Operaio del Lunedì, a weekly pamplet produced by Potere Operaio, the radical left-wing Italian political group out of which the Red Brigades were born. The Spanish translation comes from Montoneros, la soberbia armada by Pablo Giussani, who found the original quote in Giampaolo Pansa’s Storie italiane di violenza e terrorismo (Laterza, Bari, 1980, p. 33).
vii. Rosas’s paramilitary security force was called the Mazorca, the name a pun uniting mazorca (an ear of corn—a common ruralist symbol) and más horca (“more gallows”).
viii. The bolero in question is “Se te olvida,” popularized by Trío Los Panchos. Lines 1–4 are identical to those of the song. The wording of lines 5–8 is correct, but the narrator has changed the punctuation, and with it the meaning. Small changes were made to the wording of lines 9–12.
ix. The cadence calls of the leftist urban guerrilla group known as the Montoneros were shot through with references to historical, political and military figures. They were also rife with sexual and military slang, and with insults directed at other political groups. Roughly:
We aren’t rent-boys, we aren’t druggies,
we are the soldiers of FAR and Montoneros.
x. Roughly:
Neither votes nor boots / but guns and balls.
Come here, El Brujo, come here El Brujo come here / your ass is going to end up looking like the Tango de París.
Traitor Rucci / give our best to Vandor.
We the people are asking you for it / we want the head of Villar y Margaride.
Hard hard hard / those are the Montoneros / who killed Aramburu.*
Five for one / you’ll end up with none.
Loyal Mugica / we are going to avenge you.
What beautiful teeth you have / said Rucci to Perón / Perón answered with a smile / Ha ha! You’ll die just like Vandor.
Voting urns are the path to government / weapons are the path to power.
Smoking a cigar / I say fuck Aramburu / and if that makes them mad / fuck Rojas too / and if that makes them even madder / Fuck the Libertadora commandos.
Smoking a cigarette / I say fuck Santucho / and if that makes them mad / fuck Estrella Roja too / and if that makes them even madder / fuck the Left and all its commandos.
Look look look / what a beautiful thing / Peronists and Marxists / working for the socialist Fatherland.
We are going to build the Peronist Fatherland / we’re going to make it Montonero and socialist.
We’re going to make it a country of fighters / harmonious and custom-built.
If we aren’t the people, who could the people be?
Abal, Medina, we want cocaine!
Quit busting my balls / there’s only one Evita.
Fight fight fight / don’t stop fighting / we’re going to string up every gorilla.
With the bones of Aramburu (bis) / we will build a ladder (bis) / so that Evita our Montonera / can come down from Heaven.
What’s going on, General? / The government is full of gorillas.
Yes sir, General, we agree / the gorillas agree too, and the people will fight.
What’s going on, General? / We can’t afford anything even with the raise.
I’ll give you I’ll give you / beautiful Fatherland / something that starts with p . . .
The union bureaucracy / it’s going to end, it’s going to end.
This little piggy went to market / Now the people are leaving.
Youths: Present! / Perón, Perón or death.
It isn’t time to vote / it’s time to fight.
Spilled blood is non-negotiable.
If Evita were alive she’d be a Montonera.
*To which the unionist right wing responded, from the other side of the plaza, “Hard hard hard / the socialist Fatherland fucks them in the ass!
xi. Founded in 2001, Los Pibes Chorros are among the pioneers of a style of music called cumbia villera, which was born in the slums of Buenos Aires. Musically, it traces its roots to rock, rap, and reggae, and, somewhat less directly, to tango, punk, and narcocorrido. The lyrics often deal with poverty, drug abuse, and prostitution. They make ample use of Lunfardo, an argot that developed in the prisons of Buenos Aires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lunfardo is shot through with various forms of wordplay including a form of syllable reversal called vesre (where, for example, “muchacho” becomes “chochamu,”) and with slang terms derived from Italian, French, Portuguese, and Guaraní. It is thus something of a challenge to translate. The lyrics quoted here might be rendered, very roughly, as:
The kid thieves are here
we want to see all your hands in the air
because the first one to act like a snitch
is going to get the shit beat out of them.
xii. “Scram, idiot, scram.”
xiii. “(T)he city enclosed to the north and east by a belt of water and mud”: from “El Matadero,” a short story by Esteban Echeverría, who was a central figure in the Romantic movement in Argentina.
On Translating Pola Oloixarac
by Roy Kesey
At last, at last: I finally get to speak to you directly about Pola Oloixarac and her magnificent debut novel, Savage Theories. Please know that I’ve been wanting to this whole time. Wanting to explain jokes of hers that have no English equivalent I could find. Wanting to explain the four
layers of meaning she managed to fold into a given sentence where I was only able to fit two. Wanting.
That kind of explanation—of apology, really—has no place in the text, of course. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t quite help myself. In those cases, there are endnotes, which I tried to keep to the barest minimum, and failed. Ah, the endnotes. Should you happen to be in the market for information on the punning titles of Argentine porn, or clues to the historical-geographic curiosities of modern-day Buenos Aires and environs, or long loose translations of Montonero cadence calls, you are very much in luck.
Fortunately, the sense of displacement that many readers feel moving from text to endnote and back again has its parallel in the work itself: the experience of reading Oloixarac in Spanish is an immensely rich one precisely in spite and because of the sense of displacement one feels on a regular basis. At times this is a function of the novel’s jumps in time: the impossible but right meld of the ancient and the contemporary, with all manner of bridges built between. In other moments it is a function of jumps in space: we are whisked with little warning from New Guinea to Buenos Aires to the long-vanished African kingdom of Dahomey, with detours to, among other places, Paris and Zimbabwe and upstate New York, Crete and Athens and Rome in their respective A.C. heydays, and, in the end, back to Buenos Aires in our current era of MMOGs and DNS cache poisoning.
In fact, most of the action in Savage Theories takes place in the Argentine capital, and most of the main characters might best be described as children of the Years of Lead—the sons and daughters of those who survived the Dirty War, the twelve years (give or take) of state-sponsored terrorism in Argentina during which the military government and its right-wing death squad allies hunted down left-wing dissidents, guerrillas, students, journalists, and trade unionists, among others. This recent savagery darkens the novel’s present, but it is hardly the book’s only spilled blood. Savage Theories can be read as a history of a very specific sort of violence: the kind that is formative, for individuals, for cultures, and for our very species. One of its main through-lines theorizes as to how the relationship between predator and prey evolved across millennia, how it was transmitted across generations, and how it helps us to identify the very moment in which the human race began.
Savage Theories also creates a series of displacements through the arts and sciences. Marine biology gets a turn on stage, as do psychology, biochemistry, and linguistics; there is an obsession with film, with pop music, with painting and photography. Mostly, though, the novel sprouts from ground fertilized with anthropology and political philosophy, with nods to, among others, Sun Tzu, Hobbes and Montaigne, Marx and Freud, Spinoza and Leibniz, Wittgenstein, McLuhan and Althusser.
Occasionally, however, those nods are head-fakes, passages purposefully and pointedly misquoted, which brings us to the matters of voice and tone. The novel works primarily in a satiric key, and everyone comes in for their licks, but even the characters who live mainly for the pleasure of feeding their own bitterness and jealousy—which is to say, most of them—eventually find some measure of grace. Moreover, it is a satire shot through with a certain big-hearted love (and, let it be said, with sex that runs the gamut from pleasantly disturbing to delightedly transgressive.) And it resides in language that ranges fluidly from transparent to scientific to philosophical and back again, with occasional plunges into the darkest depths of poker-faced academic doublespeak.
If I were going to include a paragraph about “the greatest challenges I faced as the translator of this work,” this is where it would go, but I suspect you’re already getting the picture.
It is a great privilege to be writing this note, much as it was a privilege to spend so much time inside Oloixarac’s work, and, even more so, to be the first translator to bring her into English at book-length. I hope I have carried the novel’s displacements in successfully, because they are the heart of her project here. I hope her humor comes across, no matter how dark its contexts. I hope I have done right by her explorations of the many, many ways love can go wrong, and the few ways it can go right.
Oloixarac’s second novel, Las constelaciones oscuras, has already been published. It is every bit as rich and enfoldingly complex as Savage Theories, and there is, I am certain, still more to come. We are witnessing the birth of something special, and I am proud and grateful to have played a role in widening the world of readers who can look forward to losing themselves in her work.
Acknowledgments
Other books and authors make cameos in this book. Pabst paraphrases René Girard’s interpretation of Paolo and Francesca from his To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology, as well as Malcom Gladwell’s rendering of two behavioral experiments in The Tipping Point. Blood Rites, by Barbara Ehrenreich, is paraphrased on two occasions at the beginning of the book, as is the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for “Beast” in the third part of the book. Also in the third part, a paragraph of Caesar Augustus’s diary (The Deeds of the Divine Augustus, in the English translation by Thomas Bushnell) is rendered with slight modifications of meaning. In Vivi’s diaries, the Levi’s jeans poem about the disappeared is reproduced almost verbatim from an ad run in Siete Días magazine in 1974; the horoscope and the woman’s magazine advice are taken from 1970s original magazines that I found in the Hemeroteca (journals section) basement of the National Library of Argentina in Buenos Aires. The instructions and suggested readings for urban guerrillas come from a June, 1970 photocopy of Carlos Maringhella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. In the game Dirty War 1975, the description of a guerrilla girl in a flowing white dress belongs to Rodolfo Walsh’s letter upon the killing of his daughter Vicki. I am indebted to many books and press articles about the 1970s in Argentina: Rodolfo Walsh’s war writings, the Lucha Armada en la Argentina magazines, La Voluntad (Caparrós and Anguita), Montoneros, final de cuentas by Juan Gasparini, to name a few; the ultimate bibliography on the topic exists somewhere, but the juicy parts are probably still hidden among Henry Kissinger’s love letters.
Many friends have helped and inspired me while working in this book. I would like to bid special thanks to the editors at editorial Entropía in Argentina, Gonzalo Castro and Juan Manuel Nadalini, who believed in the book from the start, and to Ana S. Pareja, editor of Alpha Decay in Spain. I’d like to thank Isabelle Gugnon, the French translator at Seuil, and to the immensely gifted, radically generous and laborious Roy Kesey, the translator of the present edition. Many artists and people working and thinking in Buenos Aires have inspired lines in the book: Maxine Swann, Jorge Eugenio Dotti, Dick el Demasiado, Pablo Messutti, Elsa Druccaroff, and Miguel Tomasín; my gratitude is with you all. Miguel is the Down syndrome drummer of one of my favorite cult bands in Buenos Aires, Burt Reynols Ensamble, and he is the inspiration for my Miguel—a true rock star. I went to say hello backstage once in the ’90s; I don’t think I was ever snubbed in a bigger way. The hack to Google Earth is based on an advisory for DNS cache poisoning written by Emiliano Kargieman and Ivan Arce in 1996; to this day, this continues to be an infrastructure problem for the Internet. My lovely aunt Martha, who was kidnapped and disappeared in 1975 by the Perón government, and later went into exile in Peru, was also a presence I’m indebted to, as well as my mother, who was a member of the Partido Comunista Revolucionário at the time and cemented, against her will, my fascination with the Dirty War years. Thank you Martin Caparrós and Juan Antin, who lent me their precious houses to write. Thank you nice librarians on the 5th and 6th floor of the National Library in Buenos Aires. For the present edition, I’d like to thank Hari Kunzru and Katie Kitamura, and very specially my editor Mark Doten and the team at Soho Press. Ultimately, I am grateful to my love and lionheart EK.
his book with friends