, Trans. by Norman Cheadle, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. [1948.]
A modernist urban novel in the tradition of James Joyce, Adam Buenosayres is a tour-de-force that does for Buenos Aires what Carlos Fuentes did for Mexico City or Jose Lezama Lima did for Havana - chronicles a city teeming with life in all its clever and crass, rude and intelligent forms. Employing a range of literary styles and a variety of voices, Leopoldo Marechal parodies and celebrates Argentina's most brilliant literary and artistic generation, the martinfierristas of the 1920s, among them Jorge Luis Borges. First published in 1948 during the polarizing reign of Juan Peron, the novel was hailed by Julio Cortazar as an extraordinary event in twentieth-century Argentine literature. Set over the course of three break-neck days, Adam Buenosayres follows the protagonist through an apparent metaphysical awakening, a battle for his soul fought by angels and demons, and a descent through a place resembling a comic version of Dante's hell. Presenting both a breathtaking translation and thorough explanatory notes, Norman Cheadle captures the limitless language of Marechal's original and guides the reader along an unmatched journey through the culture of Buenos Aires. This first-ever English translation brings to light Marechal's masterwork with an introduction outlining the novel's importance in various contexts - Argentine, Latin American, and world literature - and with notes illuminating its literary, cultural, and historical references. A salient feature of the Argentine canon, Adam Buenosayres is both a path-breaking novel and a key text for understanding Argentina's cultural and political history.
Today I opened my heavily annotated edition of Leopoldo Marechal’s great modernist epic Adán Buenosayres with a view to finally reading it and possibly writing a review later on just to find out later that this novel had recently been translated into English as Adam Buenosayres. I’ve read quite a few previews of important fiction coming out this year and nowhere was this mentioned. You must be joking! This is the publishing event of the year that can be matched only by the forthcoming translation of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae. All the aficionados of the encyclopedic novel should start celebrating right now! Dubbed “the Argentine Ulysses” in Joshua Cohen’s Bloomsday article, this novel indeed carries the influence of Joyce’s masterpiece. Still, if it was just a piece of crass epigonism, as some of the early negative reviews attempted to present the novel, it would not have become an acclaimed classic of Argentine letters. This erudite exploration of Buenos Aires and its cultural and artistic milieu promises more than mere rehashing of Joyce’s themes and methods. One of the earliest champions of the novel was Julio Cortázar, whose positive review contributed to the subsequent rescue of the work from critical oblivion. Enjoy this unexpected gift from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and I will have to think of some other novel for my next review. - theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/adam-buenosayres-the-translation-which-nobody-noticed/
Leopoldo Marechal is a precursor of both the Spanish American nueva novela and the Argentine novísimos, but traditionally he has been read as a Christian apologist. This study finds instead that Marechal’s novels parody the grand narratives of religion and metaphysics. Close readings of Adán Buenosayres (1948), El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) and Megafón, o la guerra (1970) show that these novels radically subvert the teleological notions underpinning authoritarianism in both religion and politics, supporting instead a profoundly democratic cultural politics. This new critical perspective on Marchal’s novelistics throws light on his relevance to contemporary Argentine culture.
Leopoldo Marechal’s lyric poetry is known for its religious
and metaphysical tenor. Marechal the novelist, however, in emulation of his
master Rabelais, writes in irreverent carnivalesque mode and parodies the
great texts of the Western canon. One of the principal targets of his
parody is the Revelation to John, the final book of the Christian scriptural canon,
as well as the grand apocalyptic narrative in which it is inscribed. It is
the working hypothesis of this study that John’s Revelation is the principal
intertext of an (ironically) apocalyptic cycle of novels. These include Marechal’s
masterpiece Adán Buenosayres (1948), its eccentric sequel El Banquete de
Severo Arcángelo (1965), as well as a significant fragment of his
postumous Megafón, o la guerra (1970). - Norman Cheadle
Marechal’s novel—whose strangely spelled title can be translated only as Adam Buenosayres—follows a fraternity of adventurers based on the author’s friends, among them Jorge Luis Borges. In seven sections centered on the aesthetic formation of Adam, an aspiring poet, Homeric homage gives way to a rewriting of Dante as Argentine Spanish is played with, perverted, and reinvented. - Joshua Cohen
En 1948, con el Adán Buenosayres de Marechal, la ciudad se transforma en espacio mítico. La Buenos Aires de unos imprecisos años veinte es aquí centro del universo, y el recorrido de sus calles marca las etapas del peregrinaje simbólico del hombre hacia su propio yo. [In 1948, with Marechal's Adán Buenosayres, the city was transformed into a mythic space. The Buenos Aires of some time in the 20s is here the centre of the universe and the journey through its streets marks the stages in a symbolic pilgrimage by man towards his own identity.] This statement by the Argentinian critic and novelist, Rosalba Campra, sums up what this book is about. It is a novel where the hero is really the city, in the manner of Ulysses, Palinuro de México, St. Petersburg and others, a novel where a city - in this case, obviously, Buenos Aires - assumes mythic proportions. What is surprising is that the novel was not only little recognised when first published in 1948 in Buenos Aires - probably because its author was too much associated with Peronism - but that it has never been translated into English. (It is, however, available in French and Italian.)
Marechal started writing this book in Paris in 1930 and took eighteen years to complete it. The hero of the book is the eponymous Adán Buenosayres. Note that Adán is the Spanish for Adam. The book is in seven parts, preceded by an "indispensable" prologue, which recounts the burial of the hero and how Marechal has been left the manuscripts which will form the sixth and seven parts. In the first five parts, Adán journeys through the city on the 28, 29 and 30 April of an unspecified year of the 1920s, as recounted by Marechal. The sixth part, called The Notebook of Blue Covers is Adán's autobiography, while the seventh part Journey to the Dark City of Shitodelphia is his symbolic descent to hell. Like Ulysses, there is no major plot to the novel. What is important is that the hero - both the biblical Adam and the representative of the city of Buenos Aires - gives us a mythical portrait of both his place and time, switching between reality and fantasy as Joyce does, using Ulysses as a base but also using the Bible and Dante.Adán, of course, is not alone. Schultze, the astrologist and Samuel Tesler, the philosopher accompany him, while his lover, Solveig Amundsen and the Circe figure, Ruth are just some of the women he encounters. Just as Joyce's characters are Irish through-and-through using Irish humor and Anglo-Irish language, so Adán and his friends are true porteños, inhabitants of Buenos Aires, with their humour, their language and their ways. But, like Ulysses, what makes this book so wonderful is the mix of styles - from classical to scatological, from dreams to jokes, all with a unique Argentinian flavour - so that you are never quite sure where you or the hero are, except it must, must it not? be somewhere in Buenos Aires, which, in this book, is the centre of the universe. - www.themodernnovel.com/argentinian/marechal/adan.htm
As the eponymous hero's name already makes abundantly clear, Adam Buenosayres is meant to be a primal Argentine novel. The similarities with Joyce's Ulysses are not coincidental, Marechal's novel -- very much a city-novel, covering a short time-span (three days, in this case), of relatively minor incident and yet tending to the all-encompassing -- arguably a South American variation on the theme. Set in 1920s Buenos Aires -- the days are specified (28 through 30 April, Thursday through Saturday), the year isn't -- it is very much of its time, a portrait of the author and a (literary) generation trying to define itself in that Buenos Aires. Dedicated to Marechal's 'comrades' at the short-lived (1924-7) but influential periodical, Martín Fierro, several of these figure, thinly disguised, in the novel, including Jorge Luis Borges and Xul Solar.
The novel opens with a short 'Indispensable Prologue', revealing that the protagonist is dead, and that he left behind two manuscripts: The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia. Marechal -- the friend entrusted with the deceased's writings -- felt it necessary to preface publication of these two works with an introduction to the author. So the two works ascribed to Adam make up books six and seven -- the concluding two -- of this volume, while the first five -- which take up just a bit more than half of the novel -- are this portrait that is meant to first give a complete picture of the man behind them.
Marechal begins this five-book introductory portrait with a leisurely account of Adam not-quite waking, setting the pace even more than the tone for what follows. This is a novel that certainly begins in languor -- first Adam's, then that of his philosopher-friend Samuel Tesler (the character based on poet Jacobo Fijman, presented through and through as: "an Eclectic of the finest kind") -- but effectively uses that slow pace to range far and wide in building up a pciture of these characters, circumstances, and Buenos Aires itself.
Eventually Adam and Samuel have roused themselves and wind up at the Amundsens -- home of the lovely daughters they are enamored of: Adam is deeply in love with Solveig, Samuel with Haydée. Adam carries with him his notebook, his 'Blue-Bound Notebook', of which he admits: "To read this notebook is to read my heart". It is a heart he wishes to open to Solveig -- but she has another suitor, Lucio Negri, and he comes to realize: "in her hand the Blue-Bound Notebook was a dead thing.".
Adam saw Solveig as: "the primordial matter of any ideal construct, the clay from which fantasies are fashioned"; unsurprisingly, she -- in reality -- can't live up to that. Samuel, on the other hand, while also vexed by how different Haydée is from him, is far more realistic, and less troubled by how she doesn't live up to any of his intellectual-philosophical ideals.
Adam and his comrades move on, in mild adventures that cover the gamut -- so also a wake (death !) and a brothel (sex !). But, typically, in the case of the brothel, for example:
This lenocinium is abstract. Compared to this joint, Pythagoras's theorem is an orgy.
Indeed, Marechal doesn't go for the entirely obvious, remaining literarily-playful in these passages through Buenos Aires he leads characters and reader alike through. The philosophical bent is also a constant -- led my Samuel, who enjoys toying with others in such debate -- and there is even a long section that closely mirrors a Platonic dialogue. Plato is also the main reference point -- with Marechal even making fun of his and his characters' obsession with the classical philosopher:
- Have any of you read Plato's Critias ?
- Schultz and his whoring books ! groaned Franky. The poor guy's got bats in his belfry.
Unfortunately, Adam Buenosayres, Luis Pereda, and Samuel Tesler had all read the Critias. And so the inevitable argument broke out
It's a nice little bit of comedy in a novel full of the juxtaposition between (over-)learning and the everyday. There is a great deal of bookish seriousness -- and allusions on a Joycean level -- throughout the novel, but Marechal weaves it all effortlessly into his narrative. It is a (very) baggy novel, but Marechal's touch remains light enough not to sink it.
Much of the debate -- actual and suggested, in what the characters encounter -- deals with the state of the nation, of life in Buenos Aires at that time, especially for young intellectuals such as these. Adam is actually employed as a teacher, and this account of his three-day-passage also lingers on that for a while, but Marechal's novel aims for a far greater totality.
Asked about his position as an Argentine, Adam admits he's very confused:
Unable to endorse the reality our country's currently living in, I'm alone and motionless: I'm waiting, I'm an Argentine in hope. That's how I relate to the country.
These first five books of the novel, following Adam and his friends for some 350 pages, do make for a complete journey and rounded picture. The sixth book, The Blue-Bound Notebook, is then something of a very different sort, a deeply personal testament. It fits with what Marechal has presented of Adam, moving now entirely within -- a gazing into his soul, as it were, focused entirely on his young-man romantic ideals. It's short, however, and Marechal roars back in the lengthy final section, Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia, the most vividly imagined of the novel, sending our heroes on a dialogue-heavy trip through a nether-land of Buenos Aires that closely follows the model of Dante's Inferno.
Adam Buenosayres is a remarkably sustained effort: the comparisons to Ulysses are entirely appropriate, and like Joyce's novel it requires a certain kind of patience and even indulgence to appreciate. This is large-scale literature of a kind that it isn't much seen any longer; readers out of practice with this sort of thing may find the novel wearing. But page for page, often line for line, this is grand stuff -- as is the larger whole.
Part of the fun, too, comes from Marechal's modeling so much on figures he knew. Not all of this still resonates particularly strongly outside Argentina (despite translator Cheadle's admirable efforts in his endnotes to point readers in the right directions), but the example of Jorge Luis Borges -- who apparently never forgave Marechal for how he was depicted -- can still be appreciated, as in beautiful little digs such as:
They send him to study Greek at Oxford, literature at the Sorbonne, and philosophy in Zurich. And when he comes home to Buenos Aires, he goes soft in the head over record-industry criollismo, poor sod !
Special mention must also be made of Norman Cheadle's work here. He translated the novel -- "with the help of Sheila Ethier" -- but in fact his immersion in the work seems almost complete. His Introduction, and the copious endnotes, -- as well as the translation itself -- evince an engagement with the text that is staggeringly thorough. Indeed, the engagement clearly is also academic -- analytic, as opposed to just trying to transpose the text from Spanish into English -- making this edition one that begins to feel 'scholarly', as indeed the level of detail in the endnotes can prove distracting to the more casual reader (who may be better served ignoring them on a first read -- though one hesitates to suggest that, as there's so much richness to the text that doesn't reveal itself immediately to the modern-day reader without the help of these endnotes ...). Rarely does one come across a translation in which the translator has come so obviously close to the text; Cheadle clearly lived and studied Adam Buenosayres for many, many years.
One can see why Adam Buenosayres -- not the most approachable of texts -- remained a somewhat hidden classic, and even why it has not been translated into English before, but it is a truly great work, and English-speaking readers are fortunate to now have it presented to them in this masterful edition. - M.A.Orthofer
Marechal’s novel—whose strangely spelled title can be translated only as Adam Buenosayres—follows a fraternity of adventurers based on the author’s friends, among them Jorge Luis Borges. In seven sections centered on the aesthetic formation of Adam, an aspiring poet, Homeric homage gives way to a rewriting of Dante as Argentine Spanish is played with, perverted, and reinvented. - Joshua Cohen
En 1948, con el Adán Buenosayres de Marechal, la ciudad se transforma en espacio mítico. La Buenos Aires de unos imprecisos años veinte es aquí centro del universo, y el recorrido de sus calles marca las etapas del peregrinaje simbólico del hombre hacia su propio yo. [In 1948, with Marechal's Adán Buenosayres, the city was transformed into a mythic space. The Buenos Aires of some time in the 20s is here the centre of the universe and the journey through its streets marks the stages in a symbolic pilgrimage by man towards his own identity.] This statement by the Argentinian critic and novelist, Rosalba Campra, sums up what this book is about. It is a novel where the hero is really the city, in the manner of Ulysses, Palinuro de México, St. Petersburg and others, a novel where a city - in this case, obviously, Buenos Aires - assumes mythic proportions. What is surprising is that the novel was not only little recognised when first published in 1948 in Buenos Aires - probably because its author was too much associated with Peronism - but that it has never been translated into English. (It is, however, available in French and Italian.)
Marechal started writing this book in Paris in 1930 and took eighteen years to complete it. The hero of the book is the eponymous Adán Buenosayres. Note that Adán is the Spanish for Adam. The book is in seven parts, preceded by an "indispensable" prologue, which recounts the burial of the hero and how Marechal has been left the manuscripts which will form the sixth and seven parts. In the first five parts, Adán journeys through the city on the 28, 29 and 30 April of an unspecified year of the 1920s, as recounted by Marechal. The sixth part, called The Notebook of Blue Covers is Adán's autobiography, while the seventh part Journey to the Dark City of Shitodelphia is his symbolic descent to hell. Like Ulysses, there is no major plot to the novel. What is important is that the hero - both the biblical Adam and the representative of the city of Buenos Aires - gives us a mythical portrait of both his place and time, switching between reality and fantasy as Joyce does, using Ulysses as a base but also using the Bible and Dante.Adán, of course, is not alone. Schultze, the astrologist and Samuel Tesler, the philosopher accompany him, while his lover, Solveig Amundsen and the Circe figure, Ruth are just some of the women he encounters. Just as Joyce's characters are Irish through-and-through using Irish humor and Anglo-Irish language, so Adán and his friends are true porteños, inhabitants of Buenos Aires, with their humour, their language and their ways. But, like Ulysses, what makes this book so wonderful is the mix of styles - from classical to scatological, from dreams to jokes, all with a unique Argentinian flavour - so that you are never quite sure where you or the hero are, except it must, must it not? be somewhere in Buenos Aires, which, in this book, is the centre of the universe. - www.themodernnovel.com/argentinian/marechal/adan.htm
As the eponymous hero's name already makes abundantly clear, Adam Buenosayres is meant to be a primal Argentine novel. The similarities with Joyce's Ulysses are not coincidental, Marechal's novel -- very much a city-novel, covering a short time-span (three days, in this case), of relatively minor incident and yet tending to the all-encompassing -- arguably a South American variation on the theme. Set in 1920s Buenos Aires -- the days are specified (28 through 30 April, Thursday through Saturday), the year isn't -- it is very much of its time, a portrait of the author and a (literary) generation trying to define itself in that Buenos Aires. Dedicated to Marechal's 'comrades' at the short-lived (1924-7) but influential periodical, Martín Fierro, several of these figure, thinly disguised, in the novel, including Jorge Luis Borges and Xul Solar.
The novel opens with a short 'Indispensable Prologue', revealing that the protagonist is dead, and that he left behind two manuscripts: The Blue-Bound Notebook and Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia. Marechal -- the friend entrusted with the deceased's writings -- felt it necessary to preface publication of these two works with an introduction to the author. So the two works ascribed to Adam make up books six and seven -- the concluding two -- of this volume, while the first five -- which take up just a bit more than half of the novel -- are this portrait that is meant to first give a complete picture of the man behind them.
Marechal begins this five-book introductory portrait with a leisurely account of Adam not-quite waking, setting the pace even more than the tone for what follows. This is a novel that certainly begins in languor -- first Adam's, then that of his philosopher-friend Samuel Tesler (the character based on poet Jacobo Fijman, presented through and through as: "an Eclectic of the finest kind") -- but effectively uses that slow pace to range far and wide in building up a pciture of these characters, circumstances, and Buenos Aires itself.
Eventually Adam and Samuel have roused themselves and wind up at the Amundsens -- home of the lovely daughters they are enamored of: Adam is deeply in love with Solveig, Samuel with Haydée. Adam carries with him his notebook, his 'Blue-Bound Notebook', of which he admits: "To read this notebook is to read my heart". It is a heart he wishes to open to Solveig -- but she has another suitor, Lucio Negri, and he comes to realize: "in her hand the Blue-Bound Notebook was a dead thing.".
Adam saw Solveig as: "the primordial matter of any ideal construct, the clay from which fantasies are fashioned"; unsurprisingly, she -- in reality -- can't live up to that. Samuel, on the other hand, while also vexed by how different Haydée is from him, is far more realistic, and less troubled by how she doesn't live up to any of his intellectual-philosophical ideals.
Adam and his comrades move on, in mild adventures that cover the gamut -- so also a wake (death !) and a brothel (sex !). But, typically, in the case of the brothel, for example:
This lenocinium is abstract. Compared to this joint, Pythagoras's theorem is an orgy.
Indeed, Marechal doesn't go for the entirely obvious, remaining literarily-playful in these passages through Buenos Aires he leads characters and reader alike through. The philosophical bent is also a constant -- led my Samuel, who enjoys toying with others in such debate -- and there is even a long section that closely mirrors a Platonic dialogue. Plato is also the main reference point -- with Marechal even making fun of his and his characters' obsession with the classical philosopher:
- Have any of you read Plato's Critias ?
- Schultz and his whoring books ! groaned Franky. The poor guy's got bats in his belfry.
Unfortunately, Adam Buenosayres, Luis Pereda, and Samuel Tesler had all read the Critias. And so the inevitable argument broke out
It's a nice little bit of comedy in a novel full of the juxtaposition between (over-)learning and the everyday. There is a great deal of bookish seriousness -- and allusions on a Joycean level -- throughout the novel, but Marechal weaves it all effortlessly into his narrative. It is a (very) baggy novel, but Marechal's touch remains light enough not to sink it.
Much of the debate -- actual and suggested, in what the characters encounter -- deals with the state of the nation, of life in Buenos Aires at that time, especially for young intellectuals such as these. Adam is actually employed as a teacher, and this account of his three-day-passage also lingers on that for a while, but Marechal's novel aims for a far greater totality.
Asked about his position as an Argentine, Adam admits he's very confused:
Unable to endorse the reality our country's currently living in, I'm alone and motionless: I'm waiting, I'm an Argentine in hope. That's how I relate to the country.
These first five books of the novel, following Adam and his friends for some 350 pages, do make for a complete journey and rounded picture. The sixth book, The Blue-Bound Notebook, is then something of a very different sort, a deeply personal testament. It fits with what Marechal has presented of Adam, moving now entirely within -- a gazing into his soul, as it were, focused entirely on his young-man romantic ideals. It's short, however, and Marechal roars back in the lengthy final section, Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia, the most vividly imagined of the novel, sending our heroes on a dialogue-heavy trip through a nether-land of Buenos Aires that closely follows the model of Dante's Inferno.
Adam Buenosayres is a remarkably sustained effort: the comparisons to Ulysses are entirely appropriate, and like Joyce's novel it requires a certain kind of patience and even indulgence to appreciate. This is large-scale literature of a kind that it isn't much seen any longer; readers out of practice with this sort of thing may find the novel wearing. But page for page, often line for line, this is grand stuff -- as is the larger whole.
Part of the fun, too, comes from Marechal's modeling so much on figures he knew. Not all of this still resonates particularly strongly outside Argentina (despite translator Cheadle's admirable efforts in his endnotes to point readers in the right directions), but the example of Jorge Luis Borges -- who apparently never forgave Marechal for how he was depicted -- can still be appreciated, as in beautiful little digs such as:
They send him to study Greek at Oxford, literature at the Sorbonne, and philosophy in Zurich. And when he comes home to Buenos Aires, he goes soft in the head over record-industry criollismo, poor sod !
Special mention must also be made of Norman Cheadle's work here. He translated the novel -- "with the help of Sheila Ethier" -- but in fact his immersion in the work seems almost complete. His Introduction, and the copious endnotes, -- as well as the translation itself -- evince an engagement with the text that is staggeringly thorough. Indeed, the engagement clearly is also academic -- analytic, as opposed to just trying to transpose the text from Spanish into English -- making this edition one that begins to feel 'scholarly', as indeed the level of detail in the endnotes can prove distracting to the more casual reader (who may be better served ignoring them on a first read -- though one hesitates to suggest that, as there's so much richness to the text that doesn't reveal itself immediately to the modern-day reader without the help of these endnotes ...). Rarely does one come across a translation in which the translator has come so obviously close to the text; Cheadle clearly lived and studied Adam Buenosayres for many, many years.
One can see why Adam Buenosayres -- not the most approachable of texts -- remained a somewhat hidden classic, and even why it has not been translated into English before, but it is a truly great work, and English-speaking readers are fortunate to now have it presented to them in this masterful edition. - M.A.Orthofer
Norman Cheadle, The Ironic Apocalypse in the Novels of Leopoldo Marechal, Tamesis Books, 2000.
Leopoldo Marechal has become a chosen precursor of many contemporary Argentine writers, cineastes, and intellectuals, and so his novels - universally recognized but rarely studied - demand treatment from a contemporary critical sensibility. This study departs from the line of criticism that reads Marechal as a Christian apologist, arguing instead that Marechal's `metaphysical' novels are really metafictional, ludic exercises informed by ironic scepticism. Adán Buenosayres (1948) inverts the Christian-Platonist narrative of redemption through the Logos; in El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) Marechal, tongue firmly in cheek, leads his readers on a metaphysical wild-goose chase; and in Megan, o la guerra (1970) he finally lays apocalypticism to rest. The close readings of his novels presented in this book help to lay the theoretical groundwork underpinning Marechal's reinscription in contemporary Argentine culture.
Fundación Leopoldo Marechal
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