The art of caricature, in both Xul and Marechal, is an aesthetic choice that offers the immense plasticity and freedom enjoyed by cartoon strips and film animation. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, Buenos Aires in the 1910s and ’20s was home to the great animationist Quirino Cristiani (1896–1984), who made the world’s first feature-length animated film, El apóstol (1917) [The Apostle], an amusing spoof of President Hipólito Yrigoyen. His Peludópolis (1931) was another premiere — the first “talky” in animated film. Its symbolic character Juan Pueblo [John of the People] may be the source of Marechal’s Juan Demos, a similarly symbolic figure who, seated on a pedestal inside the Cacodelphian parliament, offers pithy comments on the parliamentarians’ deliberations. Between those two landmark films, Cristiani prolifically created animated films for popular consumption (Bendazzi 49–52). Marechal’s novel, it would seem, not only enters into dialogue with the high avant-garde art of a Xul Solar, but also exploits the aesthetic possibilities, along with those of tango and popular theatre, of the popular visual arts.
The picture theory explicit and implicit in Adán Buenosayres, grounded in Dante and Thomas Aquinas and yet keenly cognizant of the new visual media emerging in his time — in particular, cartoons and animated film — has yet to be comprehensively addressed in Marechalian criticism. For our present purposes, we need only observe that, if Xul Solar is the semiotically obsessed creator of pictures, Adam Buenosayres presents the converse case: the image-obsessed wordsmith whose obsession causes him guilt. Just as Dante’s image theory, as Hans Belting has put it, got “entangled in an unresolvable conflict” with the theological doctrine of the soul (An Anthropology of Images 133), so the piously logocentric Adam stumbles over contradictions in the aesthetic theory he expounds at Ciro Rossini’s restaurant (Book Four, chapter 1). Whereas the astrologer Schultz and his real-life model Xul Solar are fearless (or quite mad) in their semiotic-imagistic experimentation, Adam has profound doubts about the ontological status of the image and its verbal analogue, the poetic image. Though Adam’s theological language may strike late-modern readers as anachronistic, his angst over the nature of images, and their power, makes him our contemporary. We still await the picture theorist of the calibre of a W.J.T. Mitchell or a Hans Belting, who will translate Marechal’s theological metaphors into a twenty-first-century theoretical discourse.
It is again no accident that filmmakers such as Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Eliseo Subiela are inspired by Marechal’s novel(s).27 The greatest cineaste to champion Adán Buenosayres has been the venerable Manuel Antín, whose project to take the novel to the big screen was repeatedly frustrated by Argentina’s turbulent history (Sández 36, 100). Spurred on by his friend Julio Cortázar (some of whose texts he filmed), Antín with the help of Juan Carlos Gené wrote a screenplay, which as recently as 2009 he still possessed.28 And yet, one cannot help wondering how Antín could have realized so quixotic a project as filming the diversa desmesura of Adán Buenosayres in the medium of live-action film. The medium of film animation could provide one solution to the technical difficulties involved. Twenty-first-century advances in computer animation offer another solution — the sort of filmic language developed, for example, by Esteban Sapir in La antena (2007) [The Aerial]. Steeped in the avant-garde film tradition of both Europe and Argentina, Sapir’s crossing of grapheme, word, and image, as well as his morphology of human-machine hybrids, seems a direct homage to Xul Solar and Marechal’s Schultz. The continuously falling snow-like substance in La antena — is it finely shredded paper? semiotic dust? — recalls the rain of grimy newsprint in the first circle of Schultz’s Cacodelphia; and Sapir’s hombres-globo (human balloons) are surely the formal descendants of the homoglobos designed by Schultz/Marechal or Xul Solar’s human airplanes. Perhaps Antín’s dream of filming Adán Buenosayres was an idea before its time.
THIS ANNOTATED TRANSLATION
This translation of Adán Buenosayres is based on the fourteenth (and final) edition of the original publisher, Editorial Sudamericana, and Pedro Luis Barcia’s annotated edition (Clásicos Castalia, 1994). Although I have consulted other editions, the minor textual variations (mostly orthographic) are too slight to be of significance for the English-language translator. Patrice Toulat’s French translation (Grasett/UNESCO, 1995) has been amply consulted as well, especially by Sheila Ethier, who read the first draft of my English translation against Toulat’s version and gave valuable feedback. Nicola Jacchia’s 2010 Italian translation arrived too late to provide a substantive point of comparison, but I have been grateful for our stimulating and helpful e-mail exchanges about translation problems.29
In principle, this translation adheres as closely as possible to the elusive ideal of textual fidelity. Recourse to annotation allows for the possibility of rendering the novel’s rich colloquiality more directly. Though often rendered in approximate equivalents toward the beginning of the translated novel, many of the original lunfardo or Argentine-slang terms, are progressively incorporated in the translated text, with explanations provided in the notes and the glossary; the intent is that readers should gain more direct access to the palpable flavour of a unique urban culture, which in turn facilitates a more precise reading of it. It is worth noting that two of the many dictionaries I consulted — the Academia Argentina de Letras edition of the Diccionario del habla de los argentinos and José Gobello’s Nuevo diccionario lunfardo — both frequently cite Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres to illustrate particular Argentine usages; this is yet another indication of the novel’s cultural importance.
The long sentences and elaborate language of Marechal’s neo-Baroque prose present a problem for English syntax. I have broken up run-on sentences when doing so seemed to profit readability, but never at the expense of any layer or nuance of meaning. Marechal’s prose is often self-parodic: he piles up clause after clause in pretentiously elaborate constructions with comic intent, the opulence of the expressive means humorously contrasting with the relative banality of the content. In such cases, I have adjusted the syntax as little as possible, in order to conserve the humour. In cases where language is ludically celebrated in nonsense prose or utterly gratuitous puns, I have at times needed to sacrifice textual fidelity; such instances are signalled in endnotes.