For Chinese, Argentina is the country on the other side of the world, the most distant country, but it is by no means a strange country.
Everyone knows Argentina for different reasons. Some because of football, some because of movies ("The King of Sunglasses") is due to literature – when people almost habitually say "heaven is what a library looks like", who can praise the amazing literary genius of the Argentine Borges?
However, under the romantic façade of this distant country, there is a deep scar of history. Military juntas, dictatorships, "dirty wars", forced exiles... We as bystanders can certainly put a pink veil over this scar with a "don't care" attitude, still portraying Argentina as a country of inextricable romance, but for the writers of this country, I am afraid not.
For the Argentine writer Mambo Giardineri, who had been exiled and later returned to his homeland, writing this history became his unshirkable responsibility: "I cannot and do not know how to avoid the sense of social mission imposed on me by my fatherland, I love this country madly, and I am eager to protest and live in it." ”
Dream of the Exile and Other Tales
The Exile's Dream
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[Argentina] mambo Giardineri
Translated by Fan Tongxin
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
The Dream of the Exile is a product of this sense of responsibility—he uses writing to fight time and oblivion.
Today, YiWenjun shares with you an editor's note written by Liu Nian, the responsible editor of "The Dream of exiles", which not only places the writer in the context of Latin American literature, but also writes out the close connection between Mambo's style and the history of his native Argentina.
With dreams and poetry, the belated justice is delivered
Author: Liu Years
(The author is the editor-in-charge of "The Dream of the Exile")
Most of the friends who are involved in Latin American literary works will have the impression that writers in Latin American countries (especially classic writers) often have a strong sense of national consciousness and social responsibility, and for them, literary creation also has a very important "fighting" function: criticizing reality and exposing injustices, and the creative inspiration comes from the Latin American social reality that makes them suffer.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with this feeling, although Latin American literature is composed of literature of different historical periods, different peoples and different countries, but due to the inheritance and mutual influence of history, there are many commonalities between them, and one of its basic characteristics is that literature maintains a very close connection with the real life of society.
From left: Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, José Donoso
Colombian writer García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" tells the story of the Latin American continent represented by the small town of Macondo, which has grown up and searched for its own identity in the face of repeated foreign "invasions"; almost all of the works of Mexican national treasure writer Fuentes are based on Mexico, and the experience of living on both sides of the ocean has enabled him to develop a unique sensitivity and self-awareness of his mother tongue Spanish and his native Mexico in addition to having a broad cultural vision; One of the masterpieces of The Nobel Prize winner Asturias, the famous anti-dictatorship novel "Mr. President", is a literary classic aimed at condemning tyranny, attacking the military dictatorship of the latin American peoples like a tumor; the famous Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's masterpiece "The Century of Light" is full of revolutionary enthusiasm and temperature; the famous Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's masterpiece "Pedro Paramo", writing about the barbaric reality of Mexico and the suffering of the Mexican nation.
Of course, there are many exceptions, such as Borges, Cortázar, Onetti, Areola, etc., whose literary creations may not be too obviously critical. However, the author of the short story collection "The Dream of the Exile" and the famous Argentine writer Mambo Giardineri is by no means an exception.
Mambo Giardineri (1947- ) is a well-known Argentine modern and contemporary writer and journalist, born in The City of Resistensia in the chaco province of northern Argentina, who went into political exile in Mexico between 1976 and 1984 and founded the legendary literary magazine Pure Fiction. Mambo is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, essays and children's literature, which have been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted into films in many countries, with a not-surprising influence on contemporary literature in Spanish-speaking America and throughout the world. He also won various literary awards in the Spanish-speaking world: the most prestigious literary award in Latin America, the Romulo Gallegos Literary Prize, the Mexican National Novel Award, the Spanish "Big Traveler" Book Award, the Spanish Planet Press Book of the Year Award, and so on. Mambo is one of the most representative writers of the "post-explosion" era of Latin American literature, although he himself does not seem to like the label, probably bored by the critics' "must be called explosive", or feels that the concept of "post-explosion" is too vague and general, in short, he prefers to be classified by others into the more explicit category of Argentine "democratic era" literature. In Giardineri's mind, the persecution and exile experiences of many Argentine writers in the 1970s and 1980s were themes that their generation could not escape.
Argentina's "Dirty War"
So, what happened in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s? Yes, dirty war
In 1976, the Argentine military seized power by force from isabel Perón, the widow of populist President Juan Perón, and formed a coalition military junta, which led Argentina to a period of military dictatorship (and the last period of dictatorship in Argentina's recent history). Between 1976 and 1983, the Argentine military junta, which was secretly supported by the U.S. government, carried out various cruel and inhumane repressions and killings of domestic dissidents and social protesters, such as enforced disappearances, secret detention and torture, burial alive, death flight (throwing people from a plane on a sailing plane into the river), tampering with the identity of babies, etc., resulting in the permanent disappearance of more than 20,000 Argentines, which is the so-called "dirty war". It wasn't until the junta relinquished power in 1983 and agreed to democratic elections that the chilling "dirty war" came to an end. However, it is destined to become a silent scab in the hearts of all Argentines but never disappears. Allegedly, the number of deaths in the "war" has not yet been accurately counted, and Buenos Aires has been able to exhum the nameless bodies on a regular basis until now.
Born in 1947, Mambo Jardinelli was one of the victims of the "Dirty War" because of his dissent. Everything starts with a film called "Why Ban Juggling?" " novel talks about. In 1973, Mambo took his debut novel to the Latin American Fiction Competition in Buenos Aires, Argentina. You may not know anything about this literary competition, but its selection committee members are no strangers to Lovers of Latin American literature: Juan Carlos Onnetti (Uruguayan writer, masterpiece Shipyard), Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguayan writer, masterpiece "I, the Supreme"), Julio Cortázar (Argentine writer, masterpiece "Hopscotch") and Rodolfo Walsh (famous Argentine writer and journalist, later killed by the junta). Such a luxurious lineup made Mambo, who was only 26 years old at the time and had not yet officially entered the literary world, excited, and what made him even more unforgettable was that Roa Bastos and Walsh, two literary seniors, praised his entry. Therefore, although he failed to win the championship in the end, Mambo was satisfied and had enough courage to continue to work in literature. Subsequently, this work, which exudes a strong anti-authoritarian temperament, was included in the "New Era Writers" series by the Rosada Publishing House in Argentina in 1975, but before the book was officially published, the military launched the "March 23" military coup in 1976. One night in the autumn of the same year, he hid in the basement of the Rosada Publishing House with "Why is juggling forbidden?" Thousands of manuscripts, including one, were burned. And this incident is why Mambo was forced into exile in Mexico. For eight years, from 1976 to 1984, Mambo had to leave his homeland and live "like a green lotus" in Mexico, Central America.
In order to dispel the bitterness and anger in his heart, Mambo, who was exiled to Mexico, wrote a novel called "Thermido" in just one month. The story told in the book, full of political metaphors and full of magic, takes place during the military dictatorship of Argentina. The young and promising hero has just returned from studying in France and has been warmly welcomed by relatives and friends in his hometown. But just a few hours after the welcome dinner, he became a ruthless abuser, immersed in criminal paranoia... In an interview, Mambo recalled: "In a rented apartment in Magdalena Contreras (one of the districts of the Federal District of Mexico City), I looked at the Ahusco Volcano and spent a month completing the first draft of this work (Thermido). I drank yerba mate, smoked, and the tragedy that was unfolding in my homeland filled me with anger and pain, and I wrote paragraph after paragraph, feeling resentful and desperate inside. In addition to writing, Mambo eagerly read all the Mexican literature he could find, and in Mambo's view, literature was the best way to preserve the memory of the group, while Mexico and Argentina, although different in history, suffered equally deeply by their peoples.
Former President of Argentina Alphonsein
In 1983, when the Argentine military junta fell and democratically elected President Alfonsin came to power, Argentina embarked on the path of democracy. Homesick, Mambo finally returned to the embrace of his homeland. Mambo, like many of his contemporaries, licked this national wound over and over again in his literary creations. Mambo once confessed: "I have been immersed in the contrasting and contradictory reality of Argentina. I can't and don't know how to avoid the sense of social mission imposed on me by my motherland, I love this country madly and are eager to protest and live in it. ”
However, it would be too one-sided to summarize Mambo's writing in general terms such as "anti-dictatorship" and "national pain". When Mambo Giardineri won the Manuel Rojas Latin American Novel Award in 2021, the judges gave the reason for the award: "A long writing career, a rich creative genre, and the universality and marginality of the work have made Mambo Giardineri one of the most outstanding writers in all of Latin America." Indeed, Mambo's work is very comprehensive, including novels, short stories, poems, essays and children's literature, and the subject matter is also extremely rich. If you want to get as full a picture of Mambo's literary world as possible, the short story collection Dream of the Exile is definitely an ideal choice.
In fact, the literary genre of the short story is a rather special presence for Mambo. In 2010, Mambo said, "Short stories will appear at some point in a strange and unusual way." The process of writing short stories is often filled with ephemeral flashes of epiphany, discovery, and concealment. So, at least for me, writing a short story is a contingency. For Mambo, the process of writing short stories is full of spontaneous and unpredictable inspirations, and his wild imagination will stimulate what is hidden deep inside him that he is not even aware of.
The short story collection "The Dream of the Exile" can be said to be a collection of the twenty-five most representative short stories of the famous Argentine contemporary writer Mambo Giardine, presenting the rich and colorful literary world of the writer in an all-round and multi-angle manner. These twenty-five stories of various styles are fluid, humorous, profound, and powerful, without giving the reader any respite. As the Mexican literary master Juan Rulfo put it: "Mambo Giardineri knows how to dissolve suffering, perhaps because his exile has taught him how to endure pain or even more; perhaps thanks to art, to the great artist who lives in his heart, for his success in transforming the sufferings of the world into literary works that are pleasing to life and creative." After years of exile, Jardineri's heart is still soft and strong, transforming the pain of life into soothing words. In these stories, the long-exiled man returns to his homeland in a dream, like an exhausted but glorious warrior, welcomed by his family and friends; as time quietly passes, the memory of childhood becomes clearer and more delicate, like a small crack in the mirror, becoming a mysterious and timeless existence; the brutal military dictator and his accomplices can not escape the punishment of fate, and what awaits them may be a very dramatic divine punishment; in some small stories we will also see, In his own unique way, Giardineri pays tribute to the distant masters of Latin American literature and lets us relive the glorious times of Latin American literature in the past.
The military dictatorship has long since been reduced to the ashes of history, but justice has been affirmed in a "poetic" way. One of the representative articles, "11 Kilometers", is Mambo's retracing of the memory of the Argentine national group and the healing of the psychological trauma of the entire nation. The story takes place one day after the advent of the democratic era, corporal Segovia, an accomplice of the old perpetrators, accompanies a quartet as an organist to accompany a birthday ball, and it is at this ball that he meets a group of people he has hurt. These men were all detained during the U-7 operation during the Argentine military dictatorship, and when they were tortured in prison, the officers would always have Segovia play the piano to cover the cries of the prisoners, and he would always play the song called "11 Kilometers". As the music sounds again, a scene of the past comes to everyone's mind. So, full of resentment, the silent Corporal Segovia, wearing sunglasses, surrounded him, and the role of the hunter and the prey was reversed, and the former prey surrounded the former hunter. Their demand was simple: Let the former abuser play "11 Kilometers" for everyone present.
As a well-respected word magician in Argentina and the whole world, Borges's influence on Mambo is undoubtedly extremely far-reaching. "Borges's Lost Manuscript" is such a wonderful short story that pays tribute to the literary master. In this short story, Mambo traces the footsteps of literary idols, deliberately blurring the boundary between reality and fiction, so that the whole story is also real and illusory, and the plot is connected from beginning to end, showing the usual circular structure in Borges's works. The story unfolds in the first person. "I" flew from Mexico to New York in late 1980 and accidentally met his literary icon Borges in first class. "I" plucked up the courage to talk to him, and finally we had a very happy conversation. "I" confessed to him that his practice of repeatedly listing some works that did not exist in the works was really impressive to "me". Then Borges burst out laughing and mysteriously told "me": "Of all these books, only one is true. I've written it out. "I" was so shocked and excited that I became completely speechless. After noticing the silence of "I", Borges gently told "me": he took the first draft with him, and if he wanted, he could borrow "me" to see. "I" took the manuscript back to his seat in economy class and studied it, but when I returned it, Borges was asleep, and "I" put the manuscript on his lap. Next, what people did not expect was that the manuscript was actually stolen by a tall blonde man, and this man looked like the protagonist in the manuscript. Five years later, "I" accepted the publisher's invitation to attend a speech by Borges and made up my mind to find an opportunity to find out the whereabouts of the manuscript. But just before he began the question-and-answer session, he suddenly talked about his previous experience of a plane trip: he dreamed of a guy coming up from economy class, and he managed to trick the other person into taking a manuscript that was actually a fake, and the person never came back. The story ends abruptly. Borges in "I"'s memories, after reading the manuscript, fictionalizes a blonde man who looks exactly like the protagonist of the manuscript, and at the end of the story, Borges in "I"'s memories stand up and tell the reader that "I" is just a character he created in his dream. The whole story forms a distant and wonderful echo with Borges's classic "Circular Ruins".
The text of this work is not difficult to enter, just like the particularly smiling Mambo himself, this short story collection gives people the same feeling of "kindness" and "warmth", no matter whether the subject matter is relaxed or heavy, he will not deliberately increase the difficulty of reading, challenge the patience of readers, the reading process is relaxed and pleasant, and this precisely reflects the "post-explosion" characteristics of Mambo's literary creation: a sense of social responsibility and a return to realism. However, the narrative structure of the work does not lose its density, and Mambo is like an acrobat walking a tightrope, finding a balance between the difficulty of reading and the pleasure of reading, bringing a relatively relaxed and quite rich reading experience to the majority of readers.
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