Here we speak with Argentine writer, poet, educator, and cultural organizer Daniel Mecca about the work of César Aira, and his facet as a translator in particular. Mecca is the author of the poetry collections Ahorcados en la felicidad (2009), Lírico (2014), Haikus periodísticos (2016), Música de incendios (2021, chosen as best poetry book of 2021 by María Negroni), Troya, aparta de mí este cáliz (2022, highlighted by writers such as María Teresa Andruetto, Ana María Shua, and Luis Chitarroni), and Las armas y las letras (2023), as well as the novel Aira o muerte (2023) and the biography Los Canto (2024) on the life of siblings Estela y Patricio Canto.
In 2018, he received first prize from the Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas Argentinas in the “Culture and History” category. He currently gives seminars on Borges. He created the #BorgesPalooza festival, headed marketing strategy campaigns such as #PagaAira and #BorgesChallenge and the Borge’s Jazz project (an improvised class on Borges that premiered at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in August 2019), and promoted the #BorgesChallenge on social media in honor of the writer’s one hundred twenty-first birthday.
Juan Camilo Rincón: Why is it important to read César Aira today?
Daniel Mecca: Because he’s a disproportionate figure in Argentine literature. I don’t mean that pejoratively, but in the sense that he’s published over a hundred novels and translated dozens of books (although this latter fact is relatively unknown). We talk a lot about Aira as a novelist and very little about Aira as a translator, but one way or another, his translation work gives us a lens through which to observe what lies behind this disproportion. Aira provokes something very elemental in me with his literature: happiness. And it’s not arbitrary happiness, it’s a happiness that goes hand-in-hand with his construction of very fairy-tale-style plotlines. He even calls them his novelitas and classifies them as Dadaist fairy tales, which brings us to the link between Aira and Marel Duchamp. Within these plotlines—which are very simple, very outrageous, very “Once upon a time…”—lies this effect of happiness he provokes in readers, which comes from setting your imagination free. Aira imagines, he puts forth a scenario—he doesn’t write the literature of the self, which really dominates the literary scene on a global scale. Aira can be read in many ways, but I never want to stop stressing the happiness that comes from reading him.
J.C.R.: You make me think of Borges, who has a very broad body of work, so you don’t always know where to start… Something similar happens with Aira. What books would you recommend to get started reading him?
D.M.: Well, you mentioned Borges, so before turning to an Aira reading guide, I’d like to emphasize that they have something very important in common. On the one hand you have Aira, who has written over a hundred novels, and on the other you have Borges, who didn’t write even one. This allows us to go deeper and reflect, in the first place, on the fact that Borges was just as disproportionate a writer as César Aira. He wrote hundreds of articles, essays, translations, texts that are always floating around somewhere. He was a writer who, while disproportionately productive, had to make a living. For example, in the years when he was writing what I see as his most important works—Ficciones and El Aleph—Borges was working at a municipal library in the Boedo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It was a very unpleasant time of life for him, from 1937 to 1946, when he produced most of his best works. We’re talking about his story-writing phase, especially in the forties. Then we find the link between Aira and Borges, which is this focus on brevity. Aira’s novels are very brief; some have only twenty pages, and we see the same brevity in Borges. On the other hand, they both have a conceptual bent to them; there is an idea that goes beyond the texts, a singular autonomy, a general idea, an identity, a philosophy behind their literature, and in both cases, this philosophy has to do with conceptualism, with the Duchampian. It’s worth noting that Aira outwardly identifies with this; Borges did not. He was quite wary of linking himself to the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, and did not place himself among them. But that conceptual leaning, the idea and aesthetic of provocation are in both of them; they are both provocateurs, and we find that trait in their respective oeuvres. Lastly, I would also say that in both of them we see the creation of probable worlds and improbable worlds; they are constantly playing with the line between fiction and reality, and this categorical struggle between one setting and the other gives rise to texts that are still being written today. Aira could stop publishing his novelitas and it would still feel as if he were writing; something similar happens with Borges. The Airean and the Borgesian are much closer together than we think, and that’s crucially important.
J.C.R.: And now, with which books should we start reading Aira?
D.M.: It’s a complex question because, speaking of disproportion, there are many possible entryways: La guerra de los gimnasios, El congreso de literatura, Parménides, Fulgentius, I’d probably add El embalse, and if we wanted to add a couple more, La liebre and Los misterios de Rosario.
J.C.R.: We know the tradition of Argentine translators like Borges himself, Julio Cortázar, and Victoria Ocampo, as well as Aira, of course. Which works has he translated? What’s his work like? What kind of literature does he like to translate?
D.M.: His translation might seem to be at the periphery of his work, but that’s not really the case. I feel it’s a role that has fallen into ostracism, and today there’s a powerful struggle from translators to appear on the covers of their books, not inside on the first page. That’s very important because every translation creates a new text. It’s worth rereading Borges’s Las versiones homéricas, the essay where he presents this idea that there’s no such thing as the definitive text. He explores this expression and says the idea of the definitive text belongs only to religion or exhaustion. To corroborate his point, he cites the same excerpt from the Odyssey, if I remember correctly, translated by different authors, and they seem like completely different texts. And therein lies the importance—which is essential to underscore—of translators. I just published a biography of the siblings Estela and Patricio Canto, and one of the questions that runs through the book is why the figures who have translated classic works of literature, such as the Cantos (Estela translated six of the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and hers is considered its finest translation into Spanish, even better than the one by Pedro Salinas), have been forgotten. I asked the critic and writer Luis Chitarroni that question, and he answered, “What translator hasn’t been ostracized?” Who among us knows Aira has translated just as many books as he has written? To make a sort of synthetic visual reel, I noted down some of the books or authors I’ve found that he has translated; for example, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, Pet Sematary and Misery by Stephen King, works by Oscar Wilde like “The Canterville Ghost,” Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle… Once you start getting into it, you realize something even more important, as a consequence of Aira the translator: Aira the reader. To write what Aira writes, he had to have read and translated all of this, so I suggest that you also enter into his world as a translator. If I may go even further, there’s a beautiful novelita by Aira, La princesa primavera, in which a princess who lives in the land of spring is attacked by her kinsman, General Winter—classic Aira. It’s all very childish, but it also incorporates the issue of translation because the princess is a translator; she makes a living translating bad novels and puts this craft into operation. For example, in Parménides we meet the first ghostwriter of Greek literature when Parmenides hires Perinola, one of the main characters, to ghostwrite the great book he wants to compose, but Parmenides never clarifies exactly what he should say in the book, and years keep passing and passing… It’s a beautiful delusion.
J.C.R.: You published a book about Aira. Tell us about that.
D.M.: Yes, it’s called Aira o muerte. The title is meant to be provocative; it comes from the language of the seventies, specifically from Che Guevara’s “Patria o Muerte,” and it plays with those kinds of slogans. What’s going on in Aira o muerte, based on intertextually recouping some of his texts—for example, La liebre—is a journalist discovers that Aira has formed a clandestine organization of his own doppelgangers in an attempt to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Aira himself, as a character, tries to correct an injustice: he’s a candidate every year, but they never give it to him. So he starts putting together an underground army of doubles, whom he trains with warlike devotion, leading to hilarious scenes; for example, they blockade a major bridge in Buenos Aires, the Pueyrredón Bridge, which is usually blocked by protesters for social or political causes, but in this case they block the bridge to read Aira. The novel is in dialogue with Ray Bradbury’s 1984, with various totalitarian moves within the literary scene in order to seize power not just in Argentina, but over the Swedish Academy itself, such that they must give him the Nobel by force. I won’t tell you the ending, but the idea is to found the Legibrerian Republic, which appears in Aira’s novels.
J.C.R.: What was the most recent conversation you had with him?
D.M.: It was a café conversation, I gave him the book. When we got in touch before, he was very excited to receive it because the prologue is by Luis Chitarroni, whom I mentioned earlier, and they were friends. That was a doorway to legitimacy that made him think it might be worth taking a look. Aira is a very difficult person to access, not in the elitist sense of the phrase—someone who doesn’t want to stoop down to other mortals because he’s locked away in his house writing his next novel, etc.—but rather because he’s just not interested. He lives a humdrum life in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires, he takes the subway, he barely uses a cell phone. He likes to follow certain protocols in his life; he goes to a café to write, he comes home, nothing out of the ordinary. I once asked one of his friends, probably the one who knows his work best, if he would ever write a biography of César Aira, and he said, “No! It would be the most boring book in the world.” That makes a lot of sense because the extraordinary thing about Aira is not his life but his work, and that, sometimes—going against the current of our times—is the most valuable thing about him: the recovery of that lost capital once held by the imagination, in contrast with the importance of the author. He doesn’t want to be important as an author; he wants to recover that lost capital that is the craft of the imagination, the craft of making up stories, the counterpoint of the self in literature. The great poet Wallace Stevens once said, “Poetry is not personal,” and I think that is reflected in Aira’s literature. Returning to our last encounter, it was a very pleasant chat. We talked about literature, about music, he told me he was reading Joyce’s Ulysses for the third time—so there we see the disproportion a little, we start to understand. You also wonder when he finds the time to do everything he does; he is clearly very methodical and organized. I always say there’s no need to be anyone’s exegete or groupie. Aira o muerte doesn’t have that intention. Rather, it tries to follow the same impulse Aira uses in his texts; this idea of the proliferation of delusions, of expropriating solemnity, which is one of the things that most interests me about Aira’s literature: along with bringing happiness, it makes you laugh. You’re reading it and you start smiling: What the hell was he thinking?! And I say this in the best possible light: How did he come up with this?! I never would’ve thought of it in a thousand lifetimes. I think having him with us—having his literature—is something for which all of us readers should be grateful.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
