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Aira, César

Entry updated 2 September 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1949-    ) Argentine academic, translator and author, extremely prolific from the early 1980s, who began to publish work of genre interest with his first story, "Drácula en su dracumóvil, Frankenstein a pie" ["Dracula in his Dracumobile, Frankenstein on Foot"] in El Cielo for September-October 1968, a journal edited by Aira and Arturo H Carrera (1948-    ). Beginning with a nonfantastic novel, Moreira ["The White Mulberry Tree"] (1975), he has published prolifically in various genres, his first fully mature tale seeming to be Ema, la cautiva (1979; trans Chris Andrews as Ema, the Captive 2016), which is built around its female protagonist's long Fantastic Voyage through the wilds of nineteenth-century Argentina, during the course of which a wide range of previously unknown (and perhaps impossible) species are encountered (see Evolution); the long central section comprises a tour of an Archipelago-like concatenation of indigenous cultures, each as radiantly dreamlike as those encountered in Herman Melville's Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849 3vols); eventually the cast returns to the remote ramshackle settlement of Coronel Pringles (the author's birthplace). In contrast to the monomythic penetrations of the unknown often found in Genre SF, there is no frontier in this tale, and no hero (see Imperialism).

Ema is unusual in Aira's work for its considerable length; most of the twenty+ tales so far translated read as essentialized novellas, a body of work that transacts (and duly mutates) many of the suggestive generic models of modern nonmimetic, literature: from the finished hermetic intensities of Jorge Luis Borges to the more openly haunted tales of Silvina Ocampo to the rhapsodically unpredictable short fiction of the Chilean Juan Emar (1893-1964) to the inherently interminable but world-facing excavations of Robert Bolaño. In a roster of classic European literature, his work may seem sui generis, though the oneiric abruptions of story typical of his work clearly reflect his familiarity with Jan Potocki, whom he has translated, with Raymond Roussel, and to a perhaps lesser extent with Franz Kafka. Some of his author-focused metafictions may show a familiarity with the tone and matter of some of some of Edgar Allan Poe's hoax tales. A list of contemporary non-Latin-American writers who seem to convey a recognition of similarly defamiliarized but revelatory universes might plausibly include Paul Auster, Witold Gombrowicz, W G Sebald (1944-2001) and Zoran Živković; there are others.

Aira is at the same time distinguished from these models by the labile mutability of his tales. Thematic and narrative counterpoints overlap throughout individual works – as far as a necessarily limited comprehension of the mosaic of the whole is able to determine – in what might seem an unstoppable "fuga hacia adelante", variously translated as "escape forward" in El congreso de literature (2000; trans Katherine Silver as The Literary Conference 2010), or as "flight-forward" in the nonfiction Cumpleaños (2001 chap: trans Chris Andrews as Birthday 2019 chap), to describe the unmappable unfolding flood of his own work, though some later titles seem calmer. It is term which may also be used to convey the increasingly unplumbable incessancy of recent Fantastika as a whole; the deft copiousness encouraged in Aira's work by this "looseness" shows clearly in the thematic interplays between two intriguingly linked tales, El juego de los mundos: novela de ciencia ficción (2000 chap; exp 2019) and Festival (2011), together trans Katherine Silver as Festival/Game of the Worlds omni 2024). Festival describes surreal distortions inflicted upon a film festival dedicated to Alex Steryx, notorious auteur of trashy sf movies (see Cinema; one of Aira's few titles specifically labelled as sf, Game of the Worlds, which could be set in one of Steryx's distant-future epics, revolves around Total Reality, a Videogame played by children in which real Alien civilizations are destroyed.

The twenty or so tales translated into English [the Checklist below is almost certainly incomplete] provide a series of peepholes into an oeuvre probably exceeding 140 individual titles, some published obscurely even in Argentina. La liebre (1991; trans Nick Caistor as The Hare 1997), the first Aira title to be translated, subjects a nineteenth-century British naturalist to a Fantastic Voyage into a Borgesian pampas in search of the eponymous specimen; a closely cognate tale, Un episidio en la vida del pinta Viajero (2000 chap; trans Chris Andrews as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter 2006), conveys the historical painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858) eastward from Chile toward the epiphany-saturated pampas, which he can only appreciate after being struck by lightning.

There is a sense that Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) may be reflected in Cómo me hice monja (1993; trans Chris Andrews as How I Became a Nun 2007) through the commandeering heuristic regime imposed on the world by the tale's apophenia-cursed child protagonist. In Los Fantasmas (1990; trans Chris Andrews as Ghosts 2008), a family of workers inhabiting an unfinished high-rise co-op find it, up to a tragically-conveyed point, easy to co-inhabit with the ghosts who irradiate this surreal Zone. Obsessed parents create a convoy chasing down their abducted child in La costurera y el viento (1994; trans Rosalie Knecht as The Seamstress and the Wind 2011) until they all find at the End of the World a Monster child, perhaps a slapstick Doppelganger.

The conference at the heart of The Literary Conference [for full cite see above] is interrupted by a "Mad Scientist"'s (ie César Aira's) attempt to create an army of Clones of Carlos Fuentes in order to rule the world, which backfires when Fuentes's silk tie is cloned by accident, creating a devouring army of thousand-foot-long silkworms; the underlying depressiveness of this tale is dourly redoubled in El ilustre mago (2013; trans Chris Andrews as The Famous Magician 2022), also set in part at a literary conference, where Transcendence is resisted. In a tale that might be read as a paradigm iteration of Magic Realism, the eponymous narrator of Varamo (2002; trans Chris Andrews 2012) transfigures, over the course of a single night, the experience of receiving his salary in counterfeit notes into an inexplicably masterful narrative poem composed out of and mysteriously comprising the mosaical orts of his and his City's existence: the poem being a reliquary out of which the future flows. In El Pequeño Monje Budista (2005; trans Nick Caistor as The Little Buddhist Monk 2017), two French tourists in South Korea, anxious to capture the land through photography or the kind of cartoon used in designing tapestries, are taken by the surreally minuscule eponym on a Fantastic Voyage by foot and train, a hegira whose oneiric shifts of venue and scale evoke similar deadpan transfigurations in the work of Hayao Miyazaki. Again aleph-like – in this case Borges's "The Aleph" (September 1945 Sur) is specifically instanced – El Divorcio (2010; trans Chris Andrews as The Divorce 2021) focuses its mercurial traversal of various genres upon a single instant of recognition, to which time returns. The contrasts between Great and Small, and compressions of elaborate actions into the course of a single day (or stasis), frequently mark routes through and Zones within the overall geographical interweb of Aira's universe; perhaps most vivid geography of travel itself is unpacked in La invención del tren fantasma ["The Invention of the Ghost Train"] (2015 chap), not yet translated.

A recently translated title with specific sf interest, "Game of the Worlds" in Festival & Game of the Worlds (coll trans Katherine Silver 2024), is set in a distant Near-Future world where a war game played by the protagonist's children and their peers has begun to decimate the populated worlds of the Space Opera universe; raddled by interfering AIs, the protagonist suspects that playing a Godgame of such infinite power will lead to a dreadful reintroduction of the long-erased concept of a living deity.

Much work, including a not easy to determine amount of sf, remains untranslated into English. [JC]

César Aira

born Coronel Pringles, Argentina: 23 February 1949

works (selected)

Aira's Spanish-language bibliography is complex, and his practice of explicitly dating the completion of his manuscripts – as with other prolific writers like Georges Simenon – has sometimes led to these dates being taken in English checklists as dates of publication. In other cases, the release of many of his titles with small and obscure firms, and their subsequent re-release with larger publishers, seems contrastingly to have led to some dating of titles according to those later releases. As far as we have been able to establish, dates given below are dates of original publication. The checklist below currently includes translated titles only.

  • Ema, la cautiva (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial de Belgrano, 1979) [binding unknown/]
    • Ema the Captive (New York: New Directions, 2016) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/Rodrigo Corral]
  • Los Fantasmas (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1990) [binding unknown/]
    • Ghosts (New York: New Directions, 2008) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/]
  • La liebre (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Emecé, 1991) [binding unknown/]
    • The Hare (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997) [trans by Nick Caistor of the above: pb/Oscar Zarate]
  • La Prueba (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1992) [binding unknown/]
    • The Proof (Sheffield, South Yorkshire: And Other Stories, 2017) [trans by Nick Caistor of the above: pb/Edward Bettison]
  • Cómo me hice monja (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, 1993) [binding unknown/]
    • How I Became a Nun (New York: New Directions, 2007) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/Rodrigo Corral and Gus Powell]
  • La costurera y el viento (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1994) [binding unknown/]
  • La Curas Milagrosas Del (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Simurg, 1998) [chap: binding unknown/]
  • Un episidio en la vida del pinta Viajero (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000) [chap: binding unknown/]
  • El congreso de literature (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones ERA, 2000) [binding unknown/]
    • The Literary Conference (New York: New Directions, 2010) [trans by Katherine Silver of the above: pb/]
      • Three Novels (London: Penguin Books, 2015) [omni of the English versions of the above two and of Los Fantasmas further above: the first UK releases in 2013 of the three translations above are separate volumes boxed under the surtitle Three Novels: introduction by Roberto Bolaño: pb/]
  • El juego de los mundos: novela de ciencia ficción (La Plata, Argentina: Ediciones El Broche, 2000) [chap: binding unknown/]
  • La Villa (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Emecé, 2001) [binding unknown/]
    • Shantytown (New York: New Directions, 2013) [chap: trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/Rodrigo Corral]
  • Varamo (Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Anagrama 2002) [binding unknown/]
    • Varamo (New York: New Directions, 2012) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/Rodrigo Corral and Devin Washburn]
  • El Tilo (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003) [binding unknown]
    • The Linden Tree (New York: New Directions, 2013) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/]
      • The Lime Tree (Sheffield, South Yorkshire: And Other Stories, 2017) [vt of the above trans by Chris Andrews: pb/Edward Bettison]
  • El Pequeño Monje Budista (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Mansalva, 2005) [binding unknown/]
    • The Little Buddhist Monk (Sheffield, South Yorkshire: And Other Stories, 2017) [trans Nick Caistor of the above: pb/Edward Bettison]
  • El Congreso de literatura (Mérida, Venezuela: Fundación Casa de las Letras Mariano Picón Salas Universidad de los Andes, 1997) [chap: in the publisher's Coleción Ferdydurke series: binding unknown/]
  • Las conversaciones (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007) [binding unknown/]
    • Conversations (New York: New Directions, 2014) [chap: trans by Katherine Silver of the above: pb/]
  • La Cena (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007) [chap: binding unknown/]
    • Dinner (New York: New Directions, 2015) [chap: trans by Katherine Silver of the above: pb/]
  • El Divorcio (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Mansalva, 2010) [binding unknown/]
    • The Divorce (Sheffield, South Yorkshire: And Other Stories, 2021) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: introduction by Patti Smith: pb/Edward Bettison]
  • Festival (Buenos Aires, Argentina: BAFICI, 2011) [binding unknown/]
    • Festival & Game of the Worlds (New York: New Directions, 2024) [omni: trans by Katherine Silver of the above and of El juego de los mundos further above: pb/Tyler Comrie]
  • El ilustre mago (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional, 2013) [binding unknown/]
    • The Famous Magician (New York: New Directions/Storybook ND, 2022) [chap: trans by Chris Andrews of the above: in the publisher's Storybook ND Series: hb/from David Salle]
  • Artforum (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Blatt and Rios, 2014) [binding unknown/]
    • Artforum (New York: W W Norton, 2020) [chap: pb/]
  • Fulgentius (Barcelona, Spain: Literatura Random House, 2020) [binding unknown/]
    • Fulgentius (New York: New Directions, 2023) [trans by Chris Andrews of the above: pb/Rodrigo Corral and Adriana Tonello]

collections and stories

nonfiction

  • Cumpleaños (Barcelona, Spain: Mondadori, 2001) [nonfiction: binding unknown/]
    • Birthday (Sheffield, South Yorkshire: And Other Stories, 2019) [nonfiction: trans Chris Andrews of the above: pb/Edward Bettison]
  • Edward Lear (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2004) [nonfiction: Spanish only: binding unknown/]
  • On Contemporary Art (David Zwirner Books, 2018) [nonfiction: chap: trans by Katherine Silver of a 2010 address: pb/nonpictorial]

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