search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

The protagonists in María Rosa Lojo's novel The Passion of Nomads (La pasión de los nómades, 1994, Buenos Aires: Editorial Atlántida) are of unique, even ambiguous material: the one, Rosaura dos Carballos, is a Galician water fairy, daughter of Morgan le Fay and "a plebeian Galician goblin of no standing whatsoever", political niece of Merlin the Magician; the other, Lucio Victorio Mansilla, deceased Argentine gentleman and author, recent escapee from Paradise, is newly materialized (by virtue of the supernatural qualities of some seeds borrowed from ferns by the fountain of Broceliande) through the timely mediation of Rosaura and Merlin, whom he encounters vacationing in 1990s-era Buenos Aires. The novel itself, like much of Lojo's work, is similarly ambiguous. Call it supremely credible fantasy, or realistic contemporary fiction with a sprinkling of otherworldly and historical influences; whatever one calls it, this exquisitely poetic prose is magical and topical at once, drawing seamlessly from a body of myth, history, and literature that spans centuries, continents, and schools.

Lojo, born in Buenos Aires in 1954, is the daughter of Spaniards. Her father, also a Galician, had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and then exiled himself to Argentina. Her experience of living in two worlds, the one seen and the other recreated almost as a mythical land, inhabited by dreams and invisible longings, has informed her career as a writer. Another thread that runs through her writing is an acute sensibility to the experience of marginalization, of nomadism and diaspora; which, like the movement between earthly and ethereal realms, are equally present in this novel, in her other short stories and historical narratives, and in the prose poems that I have recently translated - and which have appeared in a variety of English-language journals - from her collection Awaiting the Green Morning (Esperan la mañana verde, 1998, Francotirador).

Lojo's literary reputation has transcended the borders of Argentina and even Latin America, extending to parts of Europe before these recent publications in English. Her honors and prizes include the First Prize in Municipal Contest "Eduardo Mallea" of Buenos Aires for La pasión de los nómades and the Prize of the Hispanic Cultural and Literary Institute of California for "her valuable contribution to Hispano-American literature". Her recent novel Las libres del Sur (2004, Editorial Sudamericana) bridges worlds as diverse as those of Argentine writers Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the North American idealist Waldo Frank.

The Passion of Nomads (from which the present excerpt is taken) is narrated, in turns, by the lush, lyrical voice of Rosaura and the digressive, epistolary voice of Mansilla, who unlike Rosaura does have a historical record to be measured against. One of Lojo's greatest achievements in this novel is the brilliance of her re-creation of that pre-existant literary voice, achieved with an almost photographic precision that makes of the character's words themselves a stunningly corporeal presence. The pre-phantasmal Mansilla, in 1870, had penned a series of "letters", ostensibly to his friend Santiago Arcos, who was then living abroad, which were first published serially in Buenos Aires in La Tribuna and subsequently between two covers as Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (available in English in separate translations by Eva Gillies, University of Nebraska Press, and Mark McCaffrey, University of Texas Press, both published in 1997).

In this re-incarnation, Mansilla again writes to Santiago. He has unfinished business in Indian country, it seems, where as a colonel in the Argentine army he had once attempted (in a dramatic and unauthorized gesture) to solidify a peace that was in process between the Ranquel people and his own Congress. His book, a remarkably humane meditation on humanity in both macro- and micro-cosm, was ahead of its time and did nothing to forestall the effective annihilation of the pampean Indian culture that would follow within roughly the next decade. He travels now, ego in hand, with the beautiful Rosaura at his side, toward an uneasy reconciliation between seen world and unseen, corporeal and incorporeal, into a land rife with ghosts and hauntings.

The novel presents a number of felicitous challenges to the translator. For one, the range of voices and moods is almost staggering, its linguistic influences ranging from the Spanish of Spain to that of Argentina, from the idioms of Galicia to the original voices of indigenous America. Literary allusions range from Merlin's Scottish sagas to the tales of Alvaro Cunqueiros (the Galician "Tolkien") to the texts of Argentina's own Enrique Anderson Imbert, literary critic and fashioner of mythological and folkloric short stories and novels. Lojo's prose is at all times richly allusive. It ranges from passages as elegant as the best of her prose poems to stretches of dialogue of the most natural flow and relaxed wit.

In the passage here excerpted, that dialogue between the elegant and the prosaic, between spirit and flesh, corporeality and incorporeality, is captured with a lightness of touch and an earnestness so delicate, so indistinguishable and precise, that the translator feels himself walking a tightrope in order to not err on either side. But the experience was undoubtedly much the same for Lojo herself, who speaks of having drafted and re-drafted this chapter various times in order to capture with appropriate subtlety Mansilla's own bewildered tiptoe (with the tender humor that it merits and which she so skillfully achieves) across the knife's edge that is that boundary between life's most unbridgeable paradoxes.