The Valkyries

Baruch is a friend of the Valkyries but theirs is no ordinary friendship, the kind of friendship between people who meet up from time to time and go to the cinema together or have an ice cream in a local cafe that’s not too crowded to talk about this and that and gossip about a common acquaintance. No, their friendship has something a bit wild about it. Baruch has a small property at the foot of the valley on a green slope which descends to a stream. There are some fruit trees growing on the property, otherwise it is mainly an area of woodland. It is here where the watch-maker and the Valkyries meet up. The latter always arrive on horseback with such a deafening roar that it makes the whole valley shake. Armour-clad and with unkempt hair they are rather old but still rather agile and rowdy like young girls. The watchmaker waits for them in the middle of the field and the Valkyries straddle beside him brandishing their spears in the manner of the Indians of the New World yelling like lunatics “Ho hai! Ho ho hai!. Hi Baruch! Hoio tohoio ho ho hai!” They are very fond of him, they’ve known him since he was a child.

It’s not as though the Valkyries have a lot to do, nowadays, except visiting their friends. There are seven of them, all spinsters and they only eat bread, even stale bread. So when Baruch hears them coming, he gets out his shopping bag of old bread and takes it along with him. While the Valkyries are making a commotion around him with their white hair fluttering in the wind, he breaks the bread and flings it a few metres as though they were hens and they then gather up the bread with the point of their spears. The Valkyries satisfy their primal hunger in the way most becoming to their almost godly nature.

Wilcock quotes deemed offensive by the Guardian and my modest experiment.

It appears that moderators of comments at the bottom of the page of a newspaper article tend to lack humour. I'd placed a couple of pieces (http://juanrodolfowilcock.blogspot.ru/2013/11/juan-rodolfo-wilcocks-practical-advice.html and http://juanrodolfowilcock.blogspot.ru/2013/11/juan-rodolfo-wilcock-on-how-to.html ) by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock adding them as comments to newspaper articles on subjects which had some relevance. While some newspapers never added the comment (OK, fair enough), to my astonishment I found that the Guardian which always adds comments automatically after posting  found my comments so shocking that not only did they moderate them but put me in their special purgatorial state of "pre-moderation" (one step before being banned and reserved for angry trolls and spammers). 

Curious to know why the humour of a writer- a friend of (and highly rated by) Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Bolano, Vittorio Gassman, Roberto Calasso among many, many others) should induce a status of  comment non grata in the Guardian. 

So I've decided that my next step is to collect quotes from satirical authors and world classics (including Shakespeare, Dante, and Cervantes)  maybe modifying them slightly to make them relevant to the article in question (but without making them personally insulting in any way as well as avoiding obvious sexism, homophobia and racism)- and see which respected authors get one banned from commenting in these newspapers. What kind of satire is off limits for the Anglo-Saxon news makers?

I'd be fascinated to hear from anyone else trying something similar.

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's practical advice for eliminating critics

One should carefully grease one's body with hot tar before going to bed, making sure that one carries out the same procedure on member's of one's family (wife, sons and in-laws if they are still alive). Thus oiled the entire family- tenants or proprietors of the house- should roam the rooms, toilets and stairs of said home, preferably barefoot and in their underpants, chanting psalms, pounding saucepans and generally making as much noise as possible until all the critics in the house come out of their hideaways and proceed to head to the kitchen. The stunned reviewers can then easily be caught with fine nylon nets expressly placed in a large bottle with at the bottom some very fine erucic acid for the critics. Another system involves introducing a kilogram of small frogs set at a regular distance from each other in a long thread of resistant hemp, previously immersed in softened and marinated tar. The greedy critics will precipitate on the frogs attracted by the scent and will find themselves transfixed with a notable saving of time and of tar.   

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock on how to administer a literary award.

The authors are each placed on their bed, on a slightly hard mattress with their head lightly raised and a small pillow under their pelvis, their legs akimbo and half bent, their shirts stretched down from their breastbone with the legs half-covered. The authors must breathe calmly, relax their muscles and let things happen while keeping their peace of mind. A bowl will be held between their legs.

After a break for a consultation the jury will take the well-oiled literary award and suddenly insert it in one of the writers, gently pushing it forward. The prize will usually move forward for about 10 to 12 centimetres without any difficulty. If it encounters any resistance then it should be withdrawn a little, be lightly shaken and then pushed back in delicately, applying to the writer a few rotatory movements until he has been totally awarded.

The other writers can in the meantime get dressed again. After the operation the literary prize will be washed with care, dried and put back on the shelf ready for further adventures.

(From Frau teleprocu).

The tale of Juan Rodoldo Wilcock's talking cat.

Vittorio Gassman (above) in his memoirs 'A Great future behind me' tells the tale of when the Italian actor Gigi Proietti (below) went to Velletri to visit Wilcock in his nearly empty house, almost without furniture and "full of small mysteries". Wilcock was the translator of Shakespeare's Richard the Third which was being staged by Luca Ronconi. Proietti wanted to talk to Wilcock about a translation of Marlowe's Faust.

"Wilcock explained his ideas in a calm voice" - Gassman writes - "when a cat crossed the room and said in a clear voice I'm leaving because you lot are boring me shitless. Wilcock continued talking as though nothing had happened. After a minute Gigi could no longer contain himself and asked, astounded "But ... I've just seen a cat pass, right?" "Yes, yes it's my cat" "I thought so, yes, but does he speak?"  And Wilcock answered dryly "Yes, but not always. As we were saying, Faust...

Vittorio Gassman was also to write a poet about Juan Rodolfo Wilcock and his cat entitled a "Meta-milonga for Rodolfo Wilcock and his cat" . Later it will appear in translation on this blog.

A verse of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's.

Don’t stay far away from me for long 
unless you want memory to devour all 
and leave no space for the present, 
I often see you now beneath the trees, 
the streets repeat you, the bathtub, 
rooms, records, and the sea’s the same 

From Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Poesie (Adelphi, 1996)


Translated by Alexander Booth in the newsletter of the Friends of the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome.

And here is a link to the piece about Juan Rodolfo Wilcock and others at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome:  http://cemeteryrome.it/press/webnewsletter-eng/no18-2012.pdf 

Roberto Calasso on Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

Roberto Calasso (one of Italy's most important contemporary writers and publishers), in his clear and vivid style which has always characterized him, gives a very intriguing and highly original portrait of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock. 

As an epilogue to his Obras Completas, Borges dictated the entry Borges of an Encyclopaedia Sudamericana of 2074 that begins like this: "Author and autodidact...". Juan Rodolfo Wilock, a unique guest of Italy, of its language, of its literature who has recently died, was perhaps our only writer from whom one could have imagined an entry in an immaginary encyclopaedia about himself of such delight. yet every imitation, in this case, would be in vain. We can only remember, with regret, that Wilcock appeared in this country and that it related to him rather like fascist Italy with the great engraver escher: if Escher knew how to live in Italy without being noticed by anyone, Wilcock has managed for years ever to be included in the Stock Exchange catalogues of our dull and ponderous reviewers.

He arrived in Rome in the Fifties as an Argentinian author, close to Borges and his friendly plotters, together with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo. Yet all this was then, in part, too little known and in part too imprecisely talked about. therefore the most immediate and inevitable perception that people had of Wilcock was about his style. The complete absence of intellectual priggishness "the aristocratic enjoyment in displeasing" which he often felt and in a grand manner, with his irony lurking around to ambush in each and every syllable, his sheer impatience for the set phrase and the cliche of the spirit- all this was quickly noted often with some kind of fearful perplexity.But these qualities acquired their real sense and flavour only if one went further to discover that which,I believe, only few friends understood: that eccentric and solid wisdom, that admirable self-sufficiency which were the most fundamental elements in Wilcock's character. "He loved Wittgenstein, poetry and reading the Scientific American" (that is how Marcel Schwob could have described him) and these three elements were enough to give him a base of happiness. He knew, as so few others did, how not to depend on others and on the world. From when he started to write in Italian he managed to transmit in his writing that trace which belonged to his gestures, that impression that one got from his person. Therefore his Italian is like a small tropical island laden with old and thick vegetation caught up in the torrent of a river poisoned by the stench of industrial waste and which flows through a thin and insolent countryside. Far too few, unfortunately, have yet tried to set foot on that island. And it isn't out of the question that, as in other cases, the fame of Wilcock will reverberate in Italy from outside, for example, from France where they are starting to read him far more than other illustrious writers who  occupy the book shop
windows over here in Italy. Wilcock was successful in mixing his manner of writing with his way of living. For a short while he was to substitute Chairomonte as a theatre critic for Panunzio's Il Mondo and going to the theatre annoyde him immensely. Therefore, for a number of weeks, he wrote of inexistent shows with a sober precision. This was how the figure of the Catalan theatre director, Llorenz Riber, the author of rare and striking theatre productions, with their productions in tangiers, Oxford and Latina came to be born. His most memorable venture was the production of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations which Wilcock would tirelessly recount the plot. Still at the Mondo, Wilcock would for years sign articles both under his own name as well as that of Matteo Campanari. In the articles signed under the name of Wilcock he was polemicise with the idea of Matteo Campanari who would respond polemically. But apart from this more secret inventions of his, Wilcock wrote about everything in the most varied of forms. It is easier to list what he didn't write about or list what he didn't attempt than what he did. From his magsterial translation of the start of Finnegans Wake to that of the theatre of Marlowe, from the chronicles (immaginary or not) of science and literature, to aphoristic musings to the wildest fantastic constructions (which were, in a certain way, his everyday reality), to encyclopaedic footnotes to poems.

Indeed, because after having published numerous poetry collections in Argentina (I'll recall one here called Sexto simply because it was his sixth collection of verse) Wilcock managed to change his skin and to become an Italian poet. These are verses yet to be discovered and I would place him as one of the few in these last years in Italy that we'll be happy to remember. Even because from them, from their rhyhtm, from the intensely refined choice (and therefore barely perceptible) of vocabulary, that serenity of his speaks directly to use, that freedom from that which hinders the spirit, that lifestyle which it was impossible not to love in Wilcock:

To live is to travel through the world
crossing bridges of smoke;
when one reaches the other side
who cares whether the bridges collapse
To arrive at some place
one needs to find a landscape
It's of no importance if disembarking from the carriage
one discovers that this was simply a mirage.

A Biography of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

April 17, 1919 Juan Rodolfo Wilcock is born in Buenos Aires to an English father, Charles Leonard Wilcock and to an Argentine mother, Aida Roemgialli, of Italian and Swiss origin.
He finishes his schools and studies at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Buenos Aires.
In March 1940 his first collection of poetry - Libro de poemas y canciones- is awarded the Martin Fierro Prize by the Argentine Writers' Society and then in March 1941 he is also awarded the Premio Municipal.
Between 1941 and 1942 he forms a friendship with Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges. Years later around 1967 Wilcock will write: "These three names and these three people were the constellation and the trinity from whose gravitation I drew that light-footed tendency (that can be observed in my life and my works) to raise myself above, however modestly, my grey and human starting level. Borges represented the total genius, indolent and lazy; Bioy Casares represented active intelligence, Silvina Ocampo was between those two the Sibyl and the Magician who for them resembled in her every move and in each of her words the strangeness and mystery of the universe. I, in this spectacle an unknowing spectator remained fascinated by it and I cherish the undescribable memory one who can treasure the mystic happiness of seeing and hearing the  the game of lights and shadows which were established by a certain divine trinity".
From 1942 to 1944 he edited the literary review Verde Memoria and then from 1945 to 1947 the review Disco.
At the beginning of 1943 he graduated in Civil Engineering and so entered as an engineer for the state railways. He took part in the rebuilding of the Transandies railways and the building of the railway between San Rafael and Malargue. He resigned in the middle of 1944.
In 1945 he published at his own cost two books of poetry: Ensayos de poesia lirica and Persecucion de las musas menores.
In 1946 he published Paseo Sentimental which is awarded the 1946 Fascia d'Onore by the Argenitnian Writers' Society.
Towards the end of 1946 he published Los hermosas dias.
 In 1951 he goes on a long voyage to Europe accompanied by Silvina Ocampo and Bioy Casares, arriving for the first time in Italy.
In 1953 his sixth volume of poetry is published entitled Sexto.
Between 1953 and 1954 he resides in London where he was as a translator for the Central Office of Information and as a literary, music and art critic for the Latin American Service of the BBC. He then returned to Buenos Aires.
He transfers to Rome in 1955 where he teaches French and English literature and works for the Argentinian edition of the Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.
He was a literary critic for the Prensa of Buenos Aires and worked with nearly all of the important Spanish American literary reviews. He translated more than thirty books into Spanish from English, French, Italian and German.
In June 1957 Wilcock returned to Italy and lives in Rome. He publishes various articles, essays, short stories, poems for the review Tempo Presente and then for the Mario Panunzio's weekly Il Mondo. In this early period in Rome he makes friends with Nicola Chiaromonte, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Ennio Flaiano. Elemire Zolla, Roberto Calasso, Ginevra Bompiani and Luciano Foa'.
Later he will write for Florence's newspaper La Nazione, for the weekly L'espresso and for the Roman dailies La Voce Repubblicana, Il Messaggero, Il Tempo and for other literary reviews.

"I think that if I had to help someone understand what I am and who I am as a writer (Wilcock will write replying to an interview) I would emphasize two points which for me are fundamental: I am a poet and I belong to European culture. As a poet in prose I originate through simple paths from Flaubert who generated Joyce and Kafka who generated us (all this should be understood allegorically because these people represent epochs, whole ways of thinking). Borges wrote "Flaubert was the first to enshrine in his prose the creation of a purely aesthetic work" and Flaubert wrote the same thing "Metric combinations have been exhausted but not those of prose". As a European writer I have chosen Italian to express myself because it is the language closest to Latin (maybe Spanish is more similar but the public of the Spanish tongue is barely the spectre of a phantasm). Once the whole of Europe spoke Latin but today it speaks dialects of Latin: the passiflora in English is called passion flower, for me they are one and the same word. Therefore the language chosen only has a relative importance, what really counts is not to lapse into folklore which can not be transferred. For me English is now too folkloric; not to mention English spoke in the United States. In those languages when one starts to fly on one's own one soon becomes levelled after just a hundred and twenty five words. It is as though a chess player was told: 'Here we only play according to our own rules, with a single knight and without rooks". Maybe Beckett doesn't realise this but he writes almost entirely in Latin; his poem Sans from 1970 goes far further back in time, it seems Sumerian, even pictographic".
In 1975 Wilcock made a request for Italian citizenship. By a decree of the Head of State this was conceded to him post mortem on April 4 1979.
Wilcock died on March 16th 1978 in his country house in the comune of Lubriano (in the province of Viterbo) in Upper Lazio. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

The Mirrors

Confined to bed by an illness, Lorbio has put up two large, parallel mirrors in the hospital ward: one covers the left wall and the other the right wall. In this way the convalescent sees himself mirrored from head to toe from one part of the room to the other and so can delude himself that he is in a ward for three patients, rather with many more beds, in the company of other patients who moreover bear a striking resemblance to himself. Lorbio has named his neighbours Lefty and Righty: Righty seems slightly younger than him and Lefty is the elder of the three. Otherwise all three carry out the same tasks, or almost, at the same time with the same movements. In this sense one can say that no-one has ever seen three warders reach such perfect harmony. And what’s more they are very discrete: if Lorbio speaks with Righty, Lefty turns his head the other way; and Righty does the same as soon as his fellow warder addresses Lefty. When Lorbio gets up to show Lefty the new Tarzan novel that his female cousin brought him and he offers it to him to compare it with the other one that Lefty received just a little earlier from his cousin, Righty quietly gets up and turning his shoulders towards them both also shows his own Tarzan novel to the other neighbour. And it is not a case of him alone because in the enormous hall, as far as the eye can see, all the convalescents have risen at the same time to compare their Tarzan novels. But Lorbio takes no notice of those further in the distance, first of all because he has bad eyesight and then he doesn’t even know who they are nor what their names are.

Sometimes when the sister arrives Lorbio, to play around a bit with her, pretends not to see her, greeting the sister of Righty instead who at that very moment has entered through the other door: Righty has immediately understood the joke and instead of greeting his nurse says hello to Lorbio’s. And so as not to fail his comrades, Lefty turns to the other side and greets another sister who has entered by yet another door. Lorbio rather enjoys this greeting joke, especially when the nurses, perhaps because they are jealous beings and are not very happy when their patients pretend to ignore them, all shake their heads together and the entire hospital ward seems to tremble under the wings of a limitless flock of linen albatrosses.

A few times Lorbio, from the same bed has tried to teach Lefty the game of morra, but without any luck as after their leprosy left both of them without any ears they are both deaf, and so for that matter is Righty. So in spite of them moving in unison, in reality each one of them is constrained to live, as it were closed within themselves. At night, though, it is as though they were all together. Lorbio has a candle: when the pain doesn’t allow him to sleep he lights his candle and in the festive light of all those candles lighted at the same time, astride the bed, he hitches up his nightgown and dances in a daredevil manner, a dance imitated by all the other patients of the hall, also standing on their beds: they call it the dance of the candles.

A Conservative

A rather common idea of how the universe works would go like this: there are nebulous infinities which detach themselves from each other at remarkable speeds and amidst these nebulae, lost in this cosmic explosion, is ours, the so-called Galaxy. This Galaxy spins around like a flat disc and contains billions of stars amongst which is found, even though barely visible and distant from the centre, the sun. And around this sun moves the earth. To me it seems quite obvious, however, that the sun is not a star but the sun, as anyone can check for themselves. Every morning it appears from behind these hills and then it goes down behind those other hills over there at night just as the stars are nothing else but shining dots, the proof of which is that they are only visible at nighttime.  The Galaxy in question can be nothing other than the moon which heralds rain. As far as the nebulae are concerned they are so nebulous that they can only be seen in photographs. Now, it is an established fact that one can’t trust photographs of the sky very much- usually they don’t even show up the evil spirits that, as we all know, fill the spaces where they do nothing but beckon to us attempting to seduce us in a thousand ways. They would like to make us leave this solid earth, rendered fertile by the bodies of our ancestors, simply out of their mean-spirited joy of seeing us descend into the empty darkness.

Alas, there are many today who genuinely wish to leave the earth, deceived by a series of optical illusions and even of illusions of other kinds. I, however, have chosen, one of these days, to take a stroll around my garden, naturally taking every kind of precaution.

The Reader

A large hen occupies the apartment: she is so large that she has already demolished several doors in order to pass from one room to another. It is not as though she’s edgy. Nonetheless she is an intellectual hen and spends nearly all of her time reading. In actual fact, she is a consultant of the publishing house A. The publisher sends her all the novels that appear abroad and the hen reads them patiently with her right eye since she she can’t read them with both of her eyes at the same time: her left eye stays closed under her beautiful grey velvety eyelids. From time to time the hen mumbles something inaudible because the print is too small for her, or else she makes a clo-clo sound and flaps her wings, but no one can work out whether she is doing it out of joy or out of boredom. However, when she doesn’t like a book, the intellectual hen will eat it. Later, the publishing house sends an inspector to gather up the remaining titles that the hen has left strewn all over the house – and publishes them. This in the past gave rise to certain complications: some books had been found inside a wardrobe after they had already been published by another publishing house with a most regrettable success. In spite of these facts she is the most influential hen of the book trade.

We don’t what to do with her: apart from knocking down all the doors, she dirties all the rooms and the maid has threatened to leave if the hen doesn’t go. Yet she is such an intelligent animal, her judgements are so exact, her daily habits are so routine. At six in the evening she mounts the sofa and perches on it, shuts her eyes and falls asleep no longer disturbing anyone else. She doesn’t even move to exercise her bodily needs. In the morning we get up and find her in the dining room intent on reading the latest Russian writer from Siberia or the upcoming Latin American star. And she has never once laid an egg.

My copy of Wilcock's Lo Stereoscopio dei Solitari signed by Slavoj Zizek.

Here's my copy of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's collection of seventy portraits of solitary beings. It was signed by Slavoj Zizek during a convention of Hegelianists in Moscow at the Philosophy Institute. The conference was held barely 150 metres or so from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. As the conference took place just after the jailing of the Pussy Riot trio all I could think about that day was the idea that the Hegelianists should march to the Cathedral and occupy it, led by Zizek himself. Alas, this did not come to pass. Curiously, the book that Zizek signed before mine was a copy of a Zizek book that the person was going to deliver to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in jail.  

Two short reviews of the earlier English translation of The Temple of the Iconoclasts.

Compellingly whimsical, alienated, pseudo-scientific, bizarre: all these adjectives describe this fiction in the form of a short reference work, the first book by admired Argentinean-Italian novelist Wilcock (1919-1978) to be published in English. Wilcock's early career in Argentina brought him close to the young Borges, and fans of Borges, Italo Calvino or Stanislaw Lem will recognize Wilcock's methods. The book (his best known in Italy) consists of short essays describing the lives of obsessive eccentrics, some real and some imaginary, with each entry giving significant dates, major works and summaries of the relevant obsessions. Some of the real people here seem stranger than fiction: Roger Babson was a rich American pseudoscientist who directed a foundation dedicated to isolating a gravity ""atom"" and finding a substance that could resist it. Another all-too-real oddball is John Cleves Symmes, whose arguments for a ""Hollow Earth"" inspired a story by Poe. Wilcock's greatest aesthetic successes come with the characters he makes up from scratch. Catalan director Llorenz Riber believed he was a rabbit, and therefore brought rabbits onstage in his avant-garde interpretations of Europe's classic plays: he also adapted, for the stage, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, in order to depict the thinker's famous ""duck-rabbit."" Wilcock's inventions get stranger as he moves on: ""At the age of fifty-nine, the Belgian Henry Bucher was only forty-two."" The telepathic hypnotist Jos Vald s y Prom sabotaged an 1878 congress of theologians and scientists by taking over their minds. So Wilcock proceeds, through 30 other oddly comic entries. Venuti renders Wilcock's Italian into lucid, captivating English, and offers a biographical introduction. Lovers of postmodern mind games should certainly start seeking out Wilcock's work--assuming they can be sure it really exists. (Apr.)

Reviewed on: 01/03/2000  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-56279-119-3

Review by Phoebe-Lou Adams in The Atlantic (May 2000)

The late J. Rodolfo Wilcock was born in Buenos Aires and belonged to the literary group surrounding Jorge Luis Borges. The connection shows, although Wilcock's short, obliquely satirical pieces lack Borges's depth of unnerving implication. Wilcock describes imaginary sciences and philosophies with deadpan sobriety and wild terminology. These inventions are individually piquant, but become surfeiting if swallowed in one gulp.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/05/brv.htm

Monty Python, pale imitators of an Argentinian genius.

Maybe it's actually time to let the British know that Monty Python (seen as the very best of British humour in recent decades) was nothing other than a poor cousin of the humour of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock. Here are my arguments:

1) Juan Rodolfo Wilcock worked as a translator and commentator for the BBC in the early 1950s. Something of his spirit there must have worn off and infected the humourless Brits who worked there which was transmitted to one or more of the Monty Python team;

2) Juan Rodolfo Wilcock was, of course, a literary translator of no mean ability. His translations included works by a number of Irish writers. It's a well-known fact that English authors have no humour of their own and have always had to expropriate the humour of the Irish (Swift, Wilde, Shaw etc);

3) Wilcock worked with Jorge Luis Borges when he wrote in Spanish. The Monty Python team probably had no idea who Borges was;

4) English humour has long been as dead as the proverbial parrot- for decades. It is a well known fact that they steal other countries' islands (cue Las Malvinas, Gibilterra etc) but a lesser known fact that they also steal other people's humour. 

Therefore, as I believe I have shown without any shadow of a doubt, the Monty Python team are a bunch of scoundrels who have stolen poor Juan Rodolfo's intellectual copyright. If I were in London at the moment I'd plan an occupation of the BBC and disrupt the Python reunion. Bastards! 

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's Business Card

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock:
Inventor of authors on demand.

The Angel.

The angel Elzevar is unemployed. The only skill that Elzevar has is that of transmitting messages but there are none to transmit so the angel roams around the large municipal rubbish dumps rummaging for stale food and scraps of fruit. An angel has to eat something. At night-time Elzevar tried to hang around the riverside in the role of factotum prostitute. Indeed Elzevar knows how to perform a number of tricks and Elzevar’s angelic condition means exemption from moral scruples of any kind. Nonetheless, more often than not the encounter ends badly when the client, sooner or later, comes to discover that Elzevar is sexless. It appears that in certain trades the sexual organ is particularly required, perhaps even indispensable. In order to placate the disappointed client, Elzevar gives him a demonstration of some flying skills- the angel levitates first to the right and then to the left ruffling the patron’s hair as though coming from a light breeze. But the punters at the riverside require something more concrete than a simple exhibition of Elzevar’s levitational skills- one of them bit the angels ankles during flight: another client – a bald-headed man sporting a wig called Elzevar a sodomite and a third denounced the angel to the police on the basis of the contravention of an article of the Penal Code punishing fictitious procurement of clients and another two articles of the Code of Aerial Navigation regarding urban flights without documents. After this Elzevar had to relocate to another bight of the river previously patronised by families and by fishermen with fishing rods even during the night.

These drawbacks, a natural consequence of short-term unemployment, can not really cause an angel any real anxiety. To begin with angels are immortal and very few are those mortals who can boast anything similar. As for the shortage of messages this must change sooner or later. New transmitters are in the process of being assembled and the potential recipients of messages are by no means scarce. In the past Elzevar had to remain without work for shorter or longer periods with his hands in his pockets. The angel has never gone without scraps of discarded food. It is true that angelic prostitution is not what it used to be but one has, somehow, to remain in contact with human beings while waiting for the next message. In the meantime Elzevar can always find work in a circus in as far as circuses are, just like prostitution, in decline. Unfortunately, many things have changed since television. Nonetheless, other interesting and hardly-beaten paths have opened themselves up recently in case this Great Silence were to last for a long time: for example, underground cinema, the spraying of anti-parasitic chemicals, computer maintenance, cleaning lifts and male fashion parades.

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Roberto Bolaño on Wilcock

Of those who have written about Juan Rodolfo Wilcock surely the great Chilean author of The Savage Detectives & 2666 is one of Wilcock's worthiest promoters.  Here he is speaking of The Temple of the Iconoclasts. Bolaño surely gets it right when he states that the fantasy of Wilcock and the hilarity that his works provoke have something of the Marx Brothers about it. Italian critics have also alluded to Monty Python when trying to describe Wilcock’s wit. Maybe in a decade or so’s time everyone will be talking about how Wilcockian or Wilcockesque situations are. Whether this would signal a progression from a Kafkaesque universe remains to be seen for it seems that Wilcock’s prose is required to cure some pretty absurdly grotesque social ills and, I’m not sure whether Bolaño or Bianciotti got things more correct but Bolaño is surely right in emphasising that Wilcock’s wit – inspired, caustic and irreverent – is pretty unique.

The Temple of the Iconoclasts (La Sinagoga degli Iconoclasti) which was first published in Italy in 1972 is without doubt one of the most inspired, irreverent, witty and caustic books of the twentieth century. Very much influenced by Borges, Alfonso Reyes and Marcel Schwob and these in their turn indebted, in the manner of distorted mirrors, to the prose of the French Encyclopedists, The Temple of the Iconoclasts is a collection of biographies of delirious inventors, adventurers, scientists and artists. According to the Argentine writer Hector Bianciotti the book can be read “as acomedie humaine in which the bitter rage of Celine is hidden beneath Marx Brother type gags”. I don’t believe that any bitter rage (let alone the bitter rage of a Celine) is squatting in the prose of Wilcock. His characters when they are wicked are so out of an excess of goodness, and when they are good are reckless and therefore to be feared but not to be feared more than any other human being. Wilcock’s prose- methodical, always sure of itself, subtle even when it deals with awkward or even immodest subjects gravitates towards sympathy and forgiveness rather than rancour. From Wilcock’s wit (and The Temple of the Iconoclasts is essentially a work of humour) no one is spared.

Some of the characters did in fact exist, like Hanns Hòrbiger, the Austrian scientist who advanced the theory of successive moons and whose disciples included Hitler. With others it is possible that they actually existed like that André Lebran who is “remembered, infrequently remembered, in fact not remembered at all, as the inventor of the pentacycle or the bicycle with five wheels”. Some of the characters are heroic, like the Philippine José Valdés y Prom, telepathist and hynoptist. Others are beings of an absolute innocence, that is to say, saintly, like the Canadian emigrant from Armenia Aram Kugiungian who would became reincarnated or (who would transmigrate) into hundreds or even thousands of people, a phenomenon about which he “always replied that he felt nothing special, rather that he felt nothing at all except a vague sense of not being alone in the world”. One should not neglect the story of Llorenç Riber, a Catalan theatre director who was able to bring Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on to the stage wearing out through nervous breakdowns not just the most savage reviewers but also the occasional theatre goers. Or the inventor of Canarian extraction  Jesús Piea Planas, father of the Ferris-wheel type roasting spit operated by four tortoises or the hermetic elastic panties for bitches in heat or the mouse trap operated by photoelectric cells and guillotine which is to be placed in front of the mousehole. These thirty five biographies summons one to a rapturous and uproarious read of one of the greatest and strangest (with all the revolutionary implications that this word holds) writers of this century and which no good reader should neglect.

The Poor

It’s a simple but a moving ceremony in the village square: Fregep, the richest man there, has decided to give away his goods, his furniture and property, his gardens, grazing land and his woods to the poor. Before distributing everything, it was necessary to make long inventories, study requests, ponder the merits and who were to be the new owners of everything. Now the poor have grown discontented: the only happy person is Fregep, who walks amongst his beneficiaries with the knowledge that he has carried out his duties asking each of them what they were given, how they intend to use it, even giving them advice on the best ways to cultivate their land, since he knows their land better than anyone else. The poor  look askance at him, fixing him with an angry glare. They would spit in his face if it weren’t for the fact that they are waiting for the registration of transfer deeds.

Fregep has no relatives: a few months have gone by and the poor, who inexplicably have remained poor, now send him away. Fregep has begun to sleep in the clefts of old walls or underneath bridges. He carries with him a dented soup-plate and asks for alms. He asks the rich because the poor have remained poor. He has a dog and when it’s cold they sleep huddled up together so as to keep warm.

Little by little, even Fregep is becoming a dog: his down covers his body and a large tail sprouts at the back. He no longer thinks of anything, at times he runs after a mangy bitch or steals the butcher's sausages. However, he has a clear sense of gratitude and loves licking the hand of the poor who kick him. Wagging his tail, he distributes with his tongue every sort of illness amongst the children of the poor. The children die and are carried to the cemetery in their poor man’s chests. Fregep and another dog, a friend of his, follow the cortege, at a distance.

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock: A Celebration

Here is where I intend to upload translations, information, criticisms, reflections and photographs or recordings of and about the Argentinian writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock. In the hope that this blog will gain the attention of people or publishers interested in acquiring publishing rights and pubblishing this great author. To my mind probably one of the greatest undiscovered writers of the twentieth century. The lack of interest in this writer remains to me one of the greatest enigmas of literary ignorance. In any case, expect regular postings of translations in progress and many other posts of this excellent author.