After the style of Sir Thomas Browne
Instill
There were some snatches of English poetry translated by commission of Benigno Uzal for the Ur anthology, Nurlihrt’s first publisher. Poems by Dylan Thomas and George Baker, Philip Larkin and Anselm Hollo. And a poet with the pseudonym: Gabriél Donovan. Donovan was his mother’s maiden name.
His name was Gabriel Sebastián Lubriano [Cecchi] [?]. Donovan was his mother’s name. Sebastian Birt [via Concluding] …
[But some began suggesting it was jinxed: Trib]
On a trip, Bambi falls for him [???]
I remember they divided the translations between Belisario Tregua and me [“him”]. “I got to know Belisario the same day I got to know Nicasio …”
The narrator has a book belonging to the old bachelor. Read the highlighted parts, the annotations.
Inventing the book
He’d thought about leaving with his books. Or rather, he’d never have thought to leave without them. The forgotten, the unread, everything was a pretense of death as the two of them read in the same room together without acknowledging each other. And they did so with neither a show of reverence or nonchalance, as they would have done in the presence of their enemies [solicitous, smug, thought themselves ahead of everyone]. Sometimes a general overview is all it takes. After which, one discovers — he discovered — how many victims could be disinterred.
At some point, after all the trials, the stumbling blocks, [and mostly] all the anger and frustration, he finally attempted to make a record of his experiences as a bibliophile. But there is little left of his notebook; in fact, all that remains is a single inscription, brief but desperate, which perhaps cannot be properly conveyed in the indirect style we’ve adopted here (and which he’d also adopted). On one occasion, the loss of a very precious collection — the five volume study by P. Uslar on the libraries of Jesuit missionaries: source, P. Pastell, who succeeded in reducing the number of volumes to four — obliged [forced] him to commit a “surreptitious crime.” For him, it was a point of honor that he never stole a book without first consulting the price tag, and fortunately, when he got to the bookstore, everyone was too distracted by the man who came to sign Uslar’s collection to notice the indiscretion. Everyone, that is, except Birt, who was standing three paces behind him, with a look of irritation that quickly developed [distorted] into an expression of outright disgust, as he watched the incident unfold. The judge of appearances residing in him [Birt] disapproved of the ostensible buyer [shady fellow], who was neither a collector nor a noted bookseller but one of those fatuous men [and adventitious] who was, perhaps [at best], only a very distant descendent — the genealogical branching, formalist in design, blessed Uncle Toby — of P. Uslar or Pastell.
Where was he wounded?
Shandy, not pointing to the anatomical ubicity of the wound [the groin], instead disclosed the geographical ubicity (or name) of the battle …
It wasn’t so much the loss of his precious books that distressed him, but being deprived of his closest companions; he felt as if he lost an entire kingdom. The irrevocable absence in his library spread like a contagion in his person. He spent days in mourning. He neither bought books nor consulted his own. He was content to read only those he carried in his briefcase (never fewer than four). But neither penitence nor abstinence could repair the gaping wound [left by the loss of those precious books] of his ravished library.
Anecdote in “Early” and “Replicas”
Many years later, he was horrified when one of the boys who wrote for the school paper — being alerted by an older boy — referred to him as one who had been “investigating with gloves on.” And he answered: “I’ve never done [carried out] any investigating whatsoever. And that’s not to say I don’t fear infection, [au contraire, I know all about the terrible diseases one can contract …] and for that reason, I never felt the urge to investigate. I fear the gloves are only used by arrivistes. The seeker doesn’t need to rummage or even touch anything: he need only look in order to see. The spines of books are like tombstones. Even the least discernible ones, those with faded inscriptions, will not escape his notice. And as regards the ones stacked on desks or piled on floors, they are detected, as tiny pebbles in a dense forest, through the gaps between leaves. Even what is imagined, what has never been seen, is anticipated by those spaces that are yet to be filled …”
It was the longest answer he gave, and the most emphatic, for the written questionnaire. He’d even tried to find the first fake editions he’d done [for Frederick Prokosch (NYRB)] to make the answer more exhaustive.
He came across some publications of Edith Wharton — the ones with those illustrations by Maxfield Parrish she’d rejected …
He looked with familiar disdain on the books from his last trip, still wrapped in a Galigani bag.
He had on his wall a photo of Arthur Waley playing the flute, or something that could be translated “flute” as a penultimate punishment [reed]
[And although he was a big fan of Hollywood movies, and especially Westerns, he was cautious about making sweeping generalizations. It’s true he liked Hitchcock, but he felt that when his movies were bad, they were horrid. But the director whose films he really couldn’t stand was Brian de Palma. He far preferred a conventional movie with a strong cast, directed by someone like Adrian Lyne, to some florid art-house adaptation of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe. He advocated films like Karel Reisz’s Sweet Dreams, because, for one, he loved K. Reisz generally (the first time I saw that particular flick, at an open-air cinema in the provinces, he spent the whole time raving about A Suitable Case for Treatment), and, for another, because there’s no film that succeeds so well at divesting myths of their splendor, he said: not by censoring them, but through a stripping away of the rich patina of common belief to reveal the underlying pith]
NO
He was raised by two spinster aunts in a large [and cavernous] house in Lobos. The Donados [the Vieytes] [Chola Quaglia: Barriola, Fanfarlo, Arribalo], his FATHER’S sisters, were known for their euphemisms, which although frequently incongruous, seemed to leap from their mouths with such éclat … “part the shutters so Phoebus’s rays can unsettle the Lord’s diadem,” said Soccoro to her younger sister, Milagros, when she wanted her room to feel less like a monastic cell … // “Milagros, narrow the shutter, so Phoebus’s rays can wound …” [Chloe Quaglia, las Barriola] As for the eggs in their henhouse — and eggs in general, for that matter — they were called “homemade abortions.” And Gabriel was content to recall their turns of phrase, the majority of which were taken [extracted] from Don Quixote or the Vulgate … “Either Sancho is dreaming, or Sancho is lying,” is an example, and also “Tomorrow, God will bring back the sun and we will prosper,” and “see you remove the mud from your feathers after swooping on serpents, and if you can, be sure to trim your talons].”