“It seems to me that if there is an efficacy to which one can aspire in literature, it lies in the expansion of consciousness, and this is related to overcoming mediations, multiplying the ways of thinking and approaching the real,” he told her. Marcelo Cohen told Graciela Speranza in 1993. Cohen died last Saturday the 17th in the city of Buenos Aires. He was born in the Argentine capital on September 29, 1951 and at that time was still living in Barcelona, where he had arrived shortly before the March 1976 coup. “The Barcelona of that time was a considerable mental journey,” he wrote years later. afternoon; “all the heterodoxies that had been incubated during the Franco regime were deployed in a multi-machine of projects, not all of them impossible. […] One day I found that no one was observing me or asking me for explanations: that independence, which I had never felt and which exalted me, helped me with time to read better, see more, discover what was important to me about writing and deciding on a profession. ”.
“The profession of translator can be sublime or grotesque, but it is rarely boring,” he pointed out. Over the years, Cohen translated Kathy Acker, Jane Austen, JG Ballard, Ray Bradbury, William Burroughs, Al Alvarez, Raymond Roussel, Edmund De Waal, Gene Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector, and Philip Larkins, among others. Already become one of the most important Spanish translators of the time, he published his first novel in 1984: The country of the electric lady it was a book about the loss of innocence and revealed the enormous interest that its author had in music, of which he was an uncomplicated enthusiast and scholar.
It was followed by novels like Kelany’s site (1987), absolute pitch (1989), O’Jaral’s Will (nineteen ninety five), where i was not (2006) and Other’s House (2009), ten storybooks —among them the end of the same (1992), kind men (1998), the aquatics (2001) and green cry (2022)—and seven books of essays, including a year without springa beautiful book from 2017 in which the loss of that season of the year as a result of a stay in the northern hemisphere and the contemplation of an infrequent nature led the author to reflect on the “many fictions that begin by mentioning meteorology” and a handful of tours, ranging from a David Hockney installation to a Naomi Klein article, from the voices of Anne Carson, John Berrymann and John Ashbery to those of Arturo Carrera, Tom Maver and Chris Andrews, from the weather journals of the singular Henry Darger to a canonical work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, from the extraordinary book by JA Baker the pilgrim —which Cohen translated in 2016— to the realization that the destruction of the environment and climate change are literally leaving us without time.
An age like ours —accustomed to editorial overproduction and the spontaneous expiration of authors and titles— may find it difficult to understand the way in which Cohen’s books were, and are, read and treasured by his readers, who expected —we expected— anxiously for the next novel, the next text, the new piece that the author added to the puzzle of his Panoramic Delta, a deliberately opaque territory situated between reality and fiction, between a certain representation of Argentine orality and linguistic innovation, and between narrative realism and speculative fiction, in which many of his books take place.
“Read better” and “see more” were part of Cohen’s narrative and vital project, which expanded the possibilities of contemporary literature in Spanish and is one of the most visibly hidden influences of many of its authors. “For me the risk and the possibility of failure, as a reader and as a writer, redound to an increase in wholeness,” he told Speranza in 1993. “Entry into an opaque world includes the possibility of a more radical escape. The writers who give me the most interesting experiences, the ones that really matter to me, produce in me that general joint agitation of thought, memory, feeling and senses. [que significa] the expansion of consciousness”.
Marcelo Cohen produced that agitation with extraordinary efficiency, and he did not do it only in his books. One midday in May of this year, sitting in front of him in a bar in Buenos Aires, for example: sitting in front of him, I felt the pressing desire to take notes, verify readings, jot down names and titles, try to be up to the task. his intelligence and that of Graciela Speranza, his wife since that 1993 interview in which they met. Cohen and Speranza directed together, later, Other part, the Argentine magazine of thought and arts. There he published one of his last texts, an essay entitled Around Vaca Muerta. Notes on fracking and the name of a deposit, which reflects the way in which he conceived human existence: as a natural manifestation, potentially harmful, but not without a beauty that must be preserved.
Cohen once wrote that his parents—he, Bulgarian; She, the daughter of Ukrainians and Poles, both Jews, had passed on to her “a fair amount of fear, hesitation, and a disbelief riddled with superstitions, but also strength of will, a lot of affection, and a propensity to enjoy small pleasures: a walk with ice cream , a movie”. A few years later, under a blazing sun, in Buenos Aires, she gave me the cap she was wearing. Out of modesty, I didn’t want to accept it, but Marcelo reminded me that it’s good to get rid of things, to give: perhaps he felt in doing so one of those “little pleasures” that he enjoyed so much. For my part, I felt that I had been very lucky in choosing my teachers: it stays with me and I use it sometimes, for example when I remember the many other things that Cohen gave us and that are going to stay with us.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
subscribe
babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by our best critics in our weekly bulletin
RECEIVE IT
#Marcelo #Cohen #expansion #consciousness