criollo — in colonial times, Spanish colonials born in the Americas; after Independence, their modern-day descendants; native-born Argentines.
dientudo (“big-toothed,” “toothy”) — a voracious fish of the Oligarsarcus species, native to the River Plate region.
dorado — a long spindle-shaped fish with a large mouth, indigenous to the Paraná River.
facón — a large knife with a straight blade ending in a point, used by gauchos for butchering cattle, but also as a weapon, especially in duels.
franelero (argot) — someone who goes to the brothel to hang out, drink, and converse, without paying for sexual services. In early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, large numbers of lonely men had no other social life than the café or the brothel.
gallego — a native of Galicia, the northwestern province of Spain. Gallegos were the most numerous contingent of Spanish immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Argentina, the gallego was stereotyped as hardworking and honest, but gullible and unsophisticated.
gringo — foreigner, usually referring to the very numerous Italian immigrants.
linyera — in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Argentina, a poor itinerant farm labourer (usually Italian); by extension, tramp or hobo.
malambo — a folk dance in northern Argentina, executed by single men who compete in footwork.
malevo (< abrev. of malevolente, “malevolent”) — bad guy, bully, thug.
malón (< Mapuche) — an attack by group of aboriginals on white settlers.
mate (< Quechua mati, “little gourd”) — (1) the gourd in which the tea-like infusion yerba mate is prepared and then drunk; (2) the drink itself.
mazamorra — a traditional Argentine dish made of corn mashed and boiled in water.
milonga — a popular dancehall or party where people dance tango.
nene — literally, a small boy; in Buenos Aires argot, by antiphrasis, a fearsome tough-guy.
padrinos (plural of padrino, “godfather”) — in rural Argentina, horsemen who assist the horsebreaker.
pampero — a wind that blows across the pampa or plain in Argentina that brings fine weather.
paraíso (“paradise”) — bead-tree.
parrillada (< parrilla, “grill”) — barbecue; an assortment of cuts of beef, including internal organs, from the grill.
payar (verb) — to improvise verses in counterpoint with another in a kind of poetic duel.
payador — gaucho troubadour; popular country-style singer.
pesado (“heavy”) — a man who acts tough and walks with a swagger.
pompier (French, “fireman”) — a codeword coined by the French avant-garde to denote vulgar, emphatic, or pompous conventionality in art; the 1920s Buenos Aires avant-garde used it pejoratively against the preceding generation of poets and artists.
porteño (adj. or noun) — refers to a person or thing from the port city; that is, Buenos Aires.
pulpería — an all-purpose general store / liquor store / pub, prevalent in rural Argentina and elsewhere in Spanish America until the early twentieth century.
puna (< Quechua) — a high Andean plateau.
ranchera (< rancho, a rural hut of mud and straw with a peaked roof) — in Argentina, the ranchera is a dance and song form, in 3/4 time, dating from the late nineteenth century in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
sainete — a theatrical genre, usually a one-act comic or melodramatic sketch, very popular in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires.
taita (< tata “Dad”) — a gaucho term, then suburban argot: a man respected for his courage and audacity, especially in knife fights.
tertulia — a group gathered in a café or private salon for informal discussion.
tano — slightly pejorative term for Italian immigrant.
truco — a traditional Argentine card game played with a Spanish deck in which three cards are dealt to each player; the points won by betting are added together with the points won in each hand.
tuna — a group of strolling student musicians, in a Spanish university tradition dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
vizcacha — a large rodent with a tough hide which lives in underground colonies on the pampa; considered a pest by country folk.
yerba (mate) — see mate
zaguán — in Hispanic architecture, a kind of vestibule serving as an intermediary space between the street door and the interior of a building or house.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 Marechal, poet and playwright, wrote only three novels. Adán, his chef d’oeuvre, was his first; it was followed by El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) [Severo Arcángelo’s Banquet] and the posthumously published Megafón, o la guerra (1970) [Megafón, or War]. A comprehensive biography of Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970) has yet to be written. The most complete chronology of his life, compiled by María de los Ángeles Marechal, is available at the website of the Fundación Leopoldo Marechal http://www.marechal.org.ar/Vida/Vida/cronologia.html (English version accessible).
2 Unless otherwise indicated, I quote from the English translation of Cortázar’s review.
3 Respectively, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s reading of Midnight (1932) by Mao Dun (in Moretti 687–92); and Ernest Emenyonu’s reading of People of the City (1954) by Cyprian Ekwensi (in Moretti 700–5].
4 James Scobie’s Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 is a classic English-language social history of Buenos Aires. A good sequel is Richard Walter’s Politics and Urban Growth in Buenos Aires: 1910–1942.
5 European visitors, especially French and Spanish, praised Buenos Aires as the most important Latin city after Paris. In Adrián Gorelik’s view, this enthusiasm was due in part to their anxiety to find an equivalent to anglophone New York, and in part to a view to assuring a place of continuing importance for their own old-world “Latin” cultures in a world whose future looked to be increasingly American (Gorelik 86–8).
6 Berg disagrees with the classification of Adán as a Großstadtroman. Although he agrees that it offers a “ ‘total’ panorama” of Buenos Aires in terms of scriptural and discursive space (99), he feels it is a mistake to compare Marechal’s novel with those of Joyce, Dos Passos, or Döblin, opining instead that Adán affords a “non-modern” vision of the well-ordered, familiar barrio, or at most — Berg concedes to the peril of his argument — of the arrabal [suburb] (101–2). But barrio and arrabal, it must be noted, are two very different spaces, whose agglomeration adds up to the modern big city. Navascués’s view of the matter, though expressed in an article concerned with Marechal’s “mythical cartography” rather than his treatment of urban space, tends toward the same position as Berg (Cartografías 111–12).