MAY 19, 18—
I could say that, physically, I was a happy man, as the night passed swiftly, profoundly, in my quiet bedroom, the clock on the nearby asylum marking the hours. I knew its chimes well, but had never felt the need to actually look out at the clock, which I imagined to be blind, without numerals.
At midnight yesterday, however, I passed in front of it. The clock let loose its chimes over sleepy Bougival and I lifted my eyes for the first time to the bell tower.
The clock wasn’t a blind thing, an indifferent machine. No — connected to all the pain and misery here, the face of it was the yellowish face of a sickly moon, not an opaque pane covered with cabbalistic symbols.
How could it be that this same clock had marked my existence until last night and made me hear what I believed were notes of jubilation? Had its face really been so dismal since the first night it was illuminated by an oil lamp, giving it the aspect of a dying star?
Can it be that I’ve only ever felt truly understood when the dismal notes of this sick clock consoled my heart? Has everything in me always breathed in reverse? Am I really so different from my fellow men?
NOTES
Montaigne: though it differs in places from Lascano Tegui’s Spanish, we have used the Charles Cotton translation of the appropriate passage.
Greemvaneco: probable Teguian distortion of “Van Eyck.”
lowest third of Dante’s hell: in the Spanish, the narrator appears to be consigning these sadistic Jesuits to the third circle of hell. As Dante reserved this real estate for gluttons, we have taken a more liberal interpretation.
September: this entry appears to be out of order, but we have elected to respect the sequence found in the original edition.
Septeuil: the apocryphal French Revolution story about a noblewoman forced by the mob to drink a glass of blood to save her father from execution in fact concerns the Marquis and Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, not Septeuil. The daughter died childless, years after the supposed incident.
bescreen’d in night: Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2. Translated literally, Tegui has his “nobleman” here “wrapped in a cloud.”
1 Revista de Avance, 2:3, Feb. 15, 1928.
2 Not that the difficulty of obtaining them could ever overcome the desire to do so. Thus, when I presented a paper on Lascano Tegui at a conference called “The Atypicals,” put together by the Institute for Hispanic American Literature, it was revealed that there were a number of secret admirers of Tegui who, until then, had been scattered and isolated among the ranks of professors, researchers, and students at the College of Philosophy and Arts at the University of Buenos Aires. I’m indebted to them for providing me with certain details of which I was previously unaware, and loaning me invaluable materials!
3 Lange, Norah. Discursos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones C.A.Y.D.E., 1942. pp. 43–45.
4 The dedications of those books reveal a circle of friendships and affinities that in 1926 was headed by Ricardo Güiraldes, alongside Girondo and Evar Méndez, and later, in 1936, would include Rogelio Yrurtia, Alfredo Palacios, Nerio Rojas, and Nicolás Coronado — under the spiritual patronage of Domingo French and Antonio Beruti — in a movement that seemed to shy away from the literary realm into a zone characterized by the confluence of art and politics.
* The Editors would like to state their objection to the exploitative tabloid style here employed by Monsieur le Vicomte de Lascano Tegui. (Note in the first edition.)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
EMILIO LASCANO TEGUI (1887–1966), a self-styled Viscount, is one of the most provocative and singular figures in Argentinian literature, making his way through life as a writer, journalist, curator, painter, decorator, diplomat, mechanic, gentleman, orator (known to make incendiary speeches in perfect rhymed verse), and even a dentist. His position as a translator for the International Post Office brought him to Europe, where he began his literary career.
IDRA NOVEY is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, Slate, and the Believer and her debut collection The Next Country was released in 2008. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. She currently directs the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and NYU.