Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Sublunary Editions, 2021
The subject of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s impact on Argentine Literature summons a polarity of responses. The late Leopoldo Marechal, commenting on Lamborghini’s seminal El Fiord, said: “It’s perfect. A sphere. Shame it’s a sphere of shit.” On the contrary, César Aira, Lamborghini’s mentor/curator of sorts, extrapolates his singularity—claiming his work to be unparalleled. Academics of the greatest rigor and other heavyweights of the contemporary Latin American literati—such as Tamara Kamenszain and Roberto Bolaño—have unfettered their comments on the writing of Lamborghini as well: the former finding the need to unabatedly analyze, theorize, and deconstruct the dialectic around Lamborghini’s work, and the latter encouraging the reader to enter with caution. With so much contention surrounding his oeuvre, taking on the task of translating any of Lamborghini’s work is a mighty—even ominous—task. It therefore comes to no surprise that a print translation into the English has taken a relatively long time to reach our hands, but it has arrived: Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, by the intrepid hand of translator Jessica Sequeira.
The written word, for Lamborghini, permeates the conscious with a concise and potent mechanism, boggling the minds of readers with an intelligently savage use of syntax, punctuation, and orthography. I first encountered his antics in El Fiord, his first publication. After quickly scrapping my thesaurus and dictionary, I stumbled between aversion and infatuation, rummaging through a labyrinth of blogs and academic databases for explanations and makeshift guides to the text. After a few years of indulging in the somewhat toxic relationship of attempting to translate El Fiord into English, my notes revealed that a great many elements of his writing transcend conventional translation approaches and decisions, culminating in ever more possibilities for the text. Thus, translation is an important tool for engaging the multifarious nature of Lamborghini’s work, and Two Stories demonstrates that the act of translation proves to be a helpful light while shadowboxing what some call the “untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini.
It is not only Lamborghini’s quirky punctuation and witty syntax that deems his work untranslatable; the challenge lies within his deep plunge into Argentine history, politics, literature, popular culture, and identity at large. Two Stories is no exception. Each story is meticulously laced with gaucho and contemporary slang—not to mention the author’s own neologisms. Jessica Sequiera is to be commended, then, for a translation that does not break or loosen the tensions Lamborghini creates with the aforementioned layers embedded in his work, setting the state for the Anglophone community to consider how Lamborghini has set himself apart, breaking from the established literary scene.
As I read Two Stories, I felt the valve on a pressure cooker releasing, the shrill steam that signifies the relief of completion. The two tales are comprehensive in showcasing the quandary of Lamborghini’s work in a brief fifty pages, nodding to the author’s weariness towards thick, text-blocked classics. The mastery in his craft was to have brazenly completed the poem, story, or collage with ingenuity, not exhaustive length: deploying an immediate and exact text that exhausts in unexpected ways, with literary devices and themes to the point of generating new ones. Cataracts of oddly punctuated sentences interpolated with puns, neologisms with indeterminable spliced words, syntax, and punctuation—many readers, let alone translators, may relent and pass on Lamborghini, but Sequiera has dutifully heeded to the deftness of these mechanisms, presenting a readable and necessary entry into “Lambo the poet” for English readers.
I was wary of the extensive endnotes, their number exceeding the total page count of the book, but they serve an obvious purpose—even making a peculiar contribution. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, Sequiera applies them in accounting for some of her choices, even offering alternatives (like for the phrase: “es una fija / con esa pija,” for which her endnote offers seven alternate versions, yet maintains the authority of her chosen translation “it sure gets along / with that dong”). They also provide geographical and political context, providing references and literary juxtapositions that one, like myself, may not consider. Thorough and honest, the endnotes shed light on literary translation, showing how pithy decisions and vulnerable choices often go hand in hand. Lamborghini is all wild and free in his work, and Sequiera corrals it, grounds it. In short, the endnotes, the unequivocal introduction from César Aira, and Sequiera’s translator note coordinate to prime the reader adequately for rumination on this enigmatic author.
The first of the titular two stories is The Morning, a story that Aira claims to be one of Lamborghini’s “best texts.” Its poeticism adorns a tale about a Saturday morning lashing of Flores, a gaucho of Guaraní descent. Right out of the gate, the story incites a violent and uncomfortable overtone: a “savage was thrashed”—summoning a reference to the archetypical “savage” in the grip of “civility.” This rapid entry flows and spills forth, gushing into a narration that quickly suspends the reader in a seemingly never-ending morning that questions any possible afternoon: “It fell tense, the afternoon, hanged, under white clothes.” Lambo scores a dark musica universalis, a cacophony of observations, the narrator musing on the circumstance of Gaucho Flores and their own position on this morning.
At times it seems that the narrator may just be the savage or gaucho, or at least identifies with them. “A savage was thrashed.” begins the story, but which savage? This vernacular returns in the final line: “he was thrashed until he was killed. Or almost.” The thrashing begins and ends the ludicrous opera in between—the bulk of the story. The middle is an Argentine theatre of madness: “a deluxe theater curtain for the Saturday performance,” a “theater of crushed stone” where “the opera is a tonic crunch.” A theatrical elegy for a country, or maybe for Gaucho Flores, or the narrator’s lament for himself as he seeks reason and meaning, or for the loss of ones idea of a nation or place—“And you, meadow, don’t forget me, that I had my animals and gouache, and a silver heaven—Argentina, Argentina!” And in Lamborghinian fashion, the story is anomalous—a sadistic uroboros of sorts. The story demonstrates how Lamborghini’s prose can thrash a reader with its content.
The second story, ”Just Write Anything!”, expands on the possibilities of the written word by rupturing and moving away from convention by subverting punctuation and format from their utilitarian purposes. It is also the more explicitly political out of the two. It is the tale about a trade union, a marching protest. Beginning with chant, energy-driven inspection, and intense interjections from the beginning (“It seems to me the bourgeoisie should be blown up!”), the story urges movement and immerses the reader in the manic fervor of protest. Although less poetic than the first story, “Just Write Anything!” reads like a marching poem.
The first eleven pages contain what could be called “headnotes” (smaller texts at the top of each page), introducing characters like cops, inspectors, sergeants, militants, Achilles, the State, and soldiers. As the tale guides the reader through the protest, this superscriptus interjects clear descriptions; the interplay between the body text and the headnotes creates a frisky and unique narrative—mimicking the feel of screenplay. It seemed to me an interpretation of the tension between somatic and ontological human experiences, contained within the freneticism of people gathered en masse. The story aids the reader in intimately delving into the militancy, trade unions, and the political spectacle of Argentina as it unveils the chaos of the conscious—how it manifests into reckless acts of violence in a context of supposed order and progress. The story explicitly jeers at unions, the state, psychoanalysis (the second greatest religion next to Catholicism in Argentina), and the military.
One of the most dynamic interplays between a headnote and the main text is towards the end of the story. The superscriptus suggests the rape of a young soldier by a sergeant, and Lamborghini inserts an opening parentheses in the main text. Instead of marking off a parenthetical phrase or word, he leverages the line “—And gluteus parenthesis:” to place the following paragraph between two parentheses—not enclosing the text, but rather turning their curves to the beginning and end curves of the lines, creating an ass, inserting the “filthy writing” in the crack of the “gluteus parenthesis” text between each cheek.
—And gluteus parenthesis:
)we unite filthy writing, with silver bridge, to gossipy mental incoherence: and keep going, and keep going, and just a little more, and keep going!—cos it’s going to berth in the rose: it sure gets along / with that dong . . . (
Another example that shows the author’s knack for quirky punctuation and its vitality to the story is how he polemicizes revolution by pitting the word against itself visually: “revo(lution)” and “revo/ /lution,” leading to a fluorescent flash of possible interpretations.
Through a plethora of possible interpretations, Osvaldo Lamborghini lives on through analysis and critique, assuring the gelatinous nature of any grounded consensus on what a how-to guide to his writing would look like. But I believe, however, that this translation of Two Stories is an empowerment of Lamborghini, somehow in his own words. And without any real sense of linear time, it also evokes an acute present that endures in the English; “Now, not before or after—after—now.” As this last line from The Morning shows, the somewhat desperate present Lamborghini creates is incendiary, vulgar, and extremely evocative of the human experience. The reader will be entrapped within the literary cosmos he imagines and exacts to paper with precision; his prose suspends everything onto a timeless stage to pummel, distort, and engender new possibilities and failures for the cultural sphere kindred of Argentina.
Two Stories demonstrates that the endnote-laden translation is better for it, but also that the stories can—and should—be read without flipping repeatedly to the back. Because the act of reading in the original must include a liminal space for doubt and uncertainty, it will surely summon a re-read, or at least the first read will delude the reader into a very uncomfortable, and in my opinion, necessary place. But I admire the editor and translator in both limiting the endnotes and including those that are in the book, allowing the reader to confirm that all is both well and unwell with the text while juggling the impulsive writing. Even if you can engage Lamborghini in the original, it could be wiser to invest in this first ever publication of Osvaldo Lamborghini in English—it is an indispensable compendium for contemporary Latin American Literature and literature in translation. Grab a copy and make sure to apply—in Jessica Sequiera’s words—a “healthy dosage of recklessness.”
paul holzman is a multidisciplinary artist and translator from North America, currently living in Buenos Aires.
*****
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