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Prólogo de A tribute to Marcha
En Fiction, vol. 5, nº 1, New York, 1976
30 p. , il.
"Prologue
For thirty-six years Marcha was the leading Uruguayan weekly
and one of the most important political publications in Latin America.
It was closed down by the government last year, after a long political
struggle which included repeated suspensions, fines, and, in 1974,
the jailing of its editor-in-chief, assistant editor, two members
of a literary jury which had awarded a prize to a short story about
political tortures in Uruguay, and the author of the story. By the
time, months later, that the journal was allowed to resume publication,
all but the author having been set free, its back had been broken.
Founded in 1939, one of the eve of World War II, Marcha
was not only of decisive importance to the left -Che Guevara's letter
about the new revolutionary man, addressed to its editor, Carlos
Quijano, was originally published there- but also instrumental in
promoting the new literature. Marcha's first literary editor
was Juan Carlos Onetti, who brought to its pages some of his favorite
authors -Céline, Faulkner- and opened the magazine to a new
generation of Uruguayan writers. In the fifties and sixties, Marcha
became a truly Latin-American publication: the Guatemalan Miguel
Angel Asturias and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Cuban Guillermo
Cabrera Infante and the Argentine Julio Cortázar became contributors.
But it was mainly the River Plate writers who gave Marcha
its unique flavor. To recapture now some of its tone and style,
I have selected five short stories published during its most pioneering
times. These make up only a sample of what was printed year after
year in a weekly that represented Latin-American culture at its
best.
The spirit that made Marcha possible is gone. Of the four
Uruguayan writers in this selection, only Carlos Martínez
Moreno still lives and works in Uruguay; Felisberto Hernández
died in 1962, and the other two live in exile: Onetti in Madrid
and Benedetti in Cuba. On the other bank of the River Plate, a new
Perón government has come and gone, leaving both Jorge Luis
Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares as incredible survivors of a canceled
time. What remains of the days when the stories were first printed
are the texts now especially translated for Fiction. They
are witness to what was once an original culture.
"Monsterfest" (La fiesta del monstruo) is the
product of the joint effort of Jorge Luis Borges (born in 1899)
and his friend and disciple Adolfo Bioy Casares (born in 1914).
It is a cruel parody of Argentina at the time of Perón's
first government, when anti-Semitism was rampant (the Nazis were
still fighting in Europe and the Argentine government hadn't made
up its mind about who was going to win). For quite a long time,
the story circulated underground in Buenos Aires, slimly protected
by the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq, which both authors used for their
detective stories. It was first published in Marcha in 1955,
in the aftermath of Perón's downfall. Using a baroque language
that stretches savagely the rather mild River Plate slang, Borges
and Bioy (or Biorges, as I call them) criticized the corruption
and brutality which was then commonplace in Argentina. The story
and its very language do not attempt to represent realistically
and specific historical moment in Argentina but to symbolize the
underlying grotesque reality.
"The Crocodile" (El cocodrilo) is typical of Felisberto
Hernández's fumbling, absentminded by highly comical style.
Born in Uruguay in 1902, Felisberto (as he was always called) combined
a truly surrealist imagination with a perhaps too colloquial speech
to produce small masterpieces about the horrors and hazards of everyday
life.
"María Bonita" was originally published in Marcha
as a short story about the dramatic arrival of a small band of prostitutes
to a sleepy and imaginary village on the bank of the River Plate,
but it was actually an excerpt of the first version of Juan Carlos
Onetti's most important novel, Junta, the Bodysnatcher (published
in book form in 1964). The novel told its tale of Gothic horror
and laughter in a very elaborate way, alternating the narrative
points of view of the main character, Junta, the owner of the local
brothel, and the townspeople, its shocked and voyeuristic costumers.
For this selection, the final version of the novel has been preferred
to the original text printed in Marcha. Onetti (born in 1909)
was then living in Buenos Aires and created the sleepy town of Santa
María, where the story and the novel are located, out of
fragments of Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
"The Wreath on the Door" (El lazo en la aldaba)
is a brilliant exercise in satire. Layer upon layer of Uruguayan
gentility are revealed in a story which appears to be concerned
only with the sad and comic fate of a not too respected nor respectable
mother. A lawyer by profession, Carlos Martínez Moreno (born
in 1917) brings to literature a lucid, implacable eye.
"The Iriartes" (Familia Iriarte) attacks frontally
some of the myths of bureaucracy (machismo is here shown as a deplorable
form of the rat race) but the text never forgets to laugh at its
own indignation. The author, as much as the characters and the readers,
is involved in the same reality. The most successful of all Uruguayan
writers, Mario Benedetti (born in 1920) has had some of his stories
and novels filmed or adapted for television in Argentina."
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