On the recommendation of AE, I read La vida escrito, by Rodolfo Rabanal (Seix Barral, Buenos Aires, 2014), a selection of his diaries and notebooks. It is a rather light book, easy to read, which is read in one sitting. In fact, I did it in one sitting, around 2 in the morning on the top floor of the Burger King in Santa Fe and Ayacucho, almost deserted while it was drizzling outside. Usually in those places they play plastic music, but don’t ask me why, that night they put on a live album by Diana Krall, which is nothing special for any jazz lover either, but which, in that place, sounded almost like an exorcism (I have to say, to be honest, his version of Let’s Fall in Love wasn’t too bad either). In these environments, between decadent and depressing, an immense happiness invades me and I feel like a fish in water, so enthusiastically, I quickly asked myself if I would be able to keep a diary or a notebook. The answer is obviously no: if I reached almost my senior years without doing it, I’m not going to start now.
Instead, Rabanal clearly made an edition of his diaries, published without chronological order, which gives the text a certain jumpy tone, most welcome. But even when ordered in a non-linear way, one never gets the impression that these intimate diaries were written, rewritten, edited and published only to be published, like Piglia’s, in which there are none, just like in the rest of his work, not an iota of truth. Literary truth, I mean, not confessional truth, something otherwise uninteresting. In a specific way, literature also borders on some kind of truth, which we might call “the truth of syntax”, which Piglia takes care, over and over once more, to avoid, replacing it with hits of effects and a thought that advances. , i.e. back off, just for slogans. Rabanal’s book, assumed as a minor text, provides more than one attractive sentence and moments that give rise to investigation. In the entry dated July 12, 1974, he notes: “Pezzoni and Alberto Girri have a radio program where they ‘gut’ Argentine literature.” I never heard of that show, which aired when I was 7 years old. But I am amazed that, despite the fact that they are from my generation, neither AE himself –a great reader of Girri–, nor CR –who is a walking file–, nor, even though he is 10 years older than us, CL, who treated quite a lot Pezzoni, they told me. Maybe they didn’t know either. What would that program be like? How long did it last? To be honest, I don’t listen to almost any radio shows on literature (but the other day a writer told me she had a vague idea of having a radio show, I’ll probably listen to that one) but therein lay the appeal of the signatures, Girri and Pezzoni, the fetishism of proper names in the ether.
Earlier, in the entry for “warm week of March 1975”, Rabanal quotes some beautiful lines from WH Auden: “A stormy wind blows over the stubble/I have cold in my nose, and lice in my tunic”. Rabanal doesn’t mention it, but the poem is a classic called Roman Wall Blues, but I don’t know which translation he took. I remember one by Daniel Samoilovich and Mirta Rosenberg, but that obviously must be another. For months I have been writing these columns without access to my library, which I may never have access to once more. I leave the restlessness.
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