Editor’s Note: 2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto. To celebrate the work of this renowned author, we are glad to share this never-before-published essay by his countrywoman, poet and essayist Vanesa Almada Noguerón, a frequent contributor to LALT.
If there’s one thing that nobody can deny, it’s that the world of letters—objections aside—is one of the most gripping and captivating worlds.
Here are the facts: on March 24, 1976, a few hours after the military coup that overthrew Argentina’s constitutional government, a man is arrested at his office, located at Avenida San Martín 1049, in the midst of his workday as assistant director of a well-known Mendoza newspaper. The reader doesn’t know it yet, but he is one of the first writers detained by the latest military dictatorship.
The country falls into one of the darkest chapters of its history and the man—who claims he doesn’t have the slightest idea why they’re taking him—goes on to suffer physical torture, moral debasement, and extreme psychological violence, ranging from maddening confinement to four sadistic mock executions.
At first, he is locked up at the Liceo Militar General Espejo, in his home province, where he shares a cell with several fellow journalists. However, the dictators don’t take long to move him to Unidad Penal No. 9 in La Plata, more than a thousand kilometers from his home city, where he stays behind bars for almost a year and a half, until September of 1977.
For their part, the newspaper’s directors are floundering. They prefer not to intervene. They choose not to intervene. Their interests and intentions largely align with those of the new regime.
Besides his work as a journalist, the man writes. Fiction is his thing. He tries in vain to endure his captivity by making use of this gift: everything he writes is confiscated, torn to pieces, and thrown away. Then he comes up with a scheme: he requests permission to send letters (many political prisoners did so) and begins a very particular exchange of correspondence with a lady friend of his. The letters are perfect simulations of letters, with all the typical epistolary markings and the proper, carefully inserted expressive trivialities (harmless, of course, to the authorities’ eyes). But something sets their content apart: in each of them, the writer describes a dream. And each dream is an illogical, surreal sequence of events, ludicrous to the core or plainly incomprehensible. They are stories, of course. Exquisite works of fiction that, as such, will be collected and published two years later as a book.
To put faces and names to the characters, we’ll have to go back in time, returning to those dire, dismal years. To place ourselves, in short, within an Argentina racked by censorship, fear, and the most brutal of persecution. Let’s get moving.
The newspaper in question is Los Andes, one of the oldest and best known in the country, and the main print publication in the Cuyo region. The lady friend in question is Adelma Petroni (1907-1987), an esteemed visual artist from Buenos Aires who, in the fifties and sixties, earned great international prestige. The book in question is Absurdos (1978), a decisive work within the canon of dictatorship-era fiction. And the man in question is Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986), an Argentine writer, journalist, and screenwriter born in Mendoza, considered one of the most significant literary voices of the twentieth century.
Naturally, the context in which the book was produced is inseparable from its reading. “Last night I had a lovely dream: I’ll tell you about it,” Antonio would say to Adelma in his letters. Immediately after, he would transcribe the contents of his stories in microscopic handwriting, the kind you have to read with a magnifying glass. Petroni thus became a key proxy and handler of these clandestine stories. They were published in Spain. Barcelona-based press Pomaire saw to their distribution. Di Benedetto himself later recognized in interviews that the title was directly linked to the situation he was forced to live through: the arbitrary imprisonment, the unstated charges (he was never concretely accused of anything), the viciousness, the hostility, the senselessness. The absurd was not just a conceptual category: it was, above all, an accurate descriptor of the life to which he was subjected.
Made up of fifteen stories of widely varying length and register—eleven of them previously unpublished (written in captivity) and four others previously included in papers and magazines—Absurdos acts as a space of projections and correspondences in which multiple genres coexist: the gaucho tale, the fantastic fable, the horror story, the dream journey, and the existential parable, all saturated with the same charged sensibility and permanent tension.
One of the book’s most distinctive and recurring traits—as in all of Di Benedetto’s work—is the habitual presence of wild or domestic animals, along with the almost invariable reappearance of the arid, radically hostile spaces that characterize the rural world of the Pampas. This resource takes on a disturbing symbolic weight that goes much further than regionalism or local flavor. Dolly Sales de Nasser writes in her critical study, “El absurdo existencial en la obra de Antonio di Benedetto”:
While each story is a finished narrative, their grouping into a single book is the result of their marked unity, established by several of their shared aspects. One is the depiction of a recurring space: the Cuyo countryside, within which Di Benedetto puts into writing the drama of existence confined to a space that seems not to belong to this world and that often turns against those who inhabit it.
Likewise, the construction and exposition of characters dominated by helplessness—or clinging to the expectation of an extraordinary or “miraculous” interruption that might modify their existence or change their fate—make up the foundational plot that girds this stifling absurdity that permeates landscapes, routines, and behaviors.
But the man in question, this constrained Antonio, defeated and kept apart from his profession and his family, has achieved something more: his thematic terms and narrative threads (of sense and senselessness) are by no means obedient to whims or chance; rather, they cater to a two-sided purpose that perhaps the writer himself does not entirely anticipate.
On the one hand, the heralded coming of the absurd takes a step closer in every setting and plot line the author chooses. The harshness of the surroundings, the solitude, the defenselessness, the fateless erring, along with his efforts to depict his characters in permanent conditions of confinement, invasion, or constant danger, refer back specifically to the experience of captivity—and, perhaps, to a broader conception of human existence as a common, shared state of estrangement, bewilderment, and vulnerability.
Argentine researcher Jimena Néspolo—the author of one of the most thorough studies of Di Benedetto’s work—points out that almost all the stories that make up Absurdos were written from a confinement that, unlike the voluntary confinement surrounding the composition of Zama (his most critically acclaimed novel, published in 1956), was imposed by state violence. This apparently external distinction lends the stories a particular drive: they contain a certain urgency, a pressure that filters through and is compacted and sealed in through their expressive sobriety and verbal economy.
Simultaneously, the book’s rural focus offers a possible closure or endpoint to the purifying sublimation and mythologizing to which literary fiction has subjected the imagined Pampas for decades. Consider, for example, “Aballay,” the volume’s best-known story, which also made its way to the screen as a film co-written and directed by Fernando Spiner (Aballay: el hombre sin miedo, 2010).
This text masterfully narrates the waning years of a gaucho who, after hearing a sermon on the stylites—anchorite monks who lived atop columns to isolate themselves from the world—decides to never again dismount from his horse as a way to expiate his guilt for having killed a man in his youth.
Argentine critic and researcher Julio Premat suggests in his essays that, with this story, Di Benedetto sets out a counterpoint to the long literary lineage that runs from José Hernández to Jorge Luis Borges, closing the cycle of reverential rewritings of the gaucho and the Pampas. Aballay is not a typical heroic gaucho, but rather the inversion of one: a repentant gaucho, tortured by his guilt, whose paradoxical penitence—remaining on his horse in perpetual motion—is lofty and absurd all at once. According to Premat, this character can be equated to a guilty Martín Fierro, wholly aware of his failings and viewed through a perspective of redemption that the text, nonetheless, chooses not to resolve either simply or comfortingly.
Referring specifically to Di Benedetto’s work as a writer, his path through said work, and his eventual literary consolidation as an author, it becomes clear, as mentioned above, that Absurdos serves as an inflection point both in his own oeuvre and in the shaping of an identity that would mark the Argentine fiction of the twentieth century.
In this regard, the academic Teresita Mauro Castellarin points out that Di Benedetto’s trajectory as an author of short stories ranges from the fantastic, allegorical stories of Mundo animal (1953) to the objectivist forms of the so-called “Generation of 55,” only to then arrive, in his last two books—Absurdos (1978) and Cuentos del exilio (1983)—at a synthesis that integrates the fantastic, the oneiric, the historical, the existential, and the absurd into writing of greater density. The fantastic tale, Castellarin also tells us, at this stage becomes independent of any mechanical allegorical function and operates as a discursive strategy of profound aesthetic autonomy.
We might say, then, that Di Benedetto’s writing approaches—in its expressive and conceptual aspects—the Hispano-American narrative tradition that includes, for example, Felisberto Hernández, Silvina Ocampo, and Virgilio Piñera: authors for whom the fantastic serves as a horizon more than a plot resource. Within this tradition, time appears blurred, indefinite, intentionally ambiguous and disposed to contribute to a sought-after sensation of uncertainty and estrangement. This is, of course, no recognizable historical time, but rather a temporality in suspension, almost dreamlike, in which circumstances seem to be governed by a logic entirely distinct from everyday causality.
But, returning to this literature’s origins, it is worth pointing out that the circumstances of its production have become a structural factor, not just an anecdotic fact: this writing itself is born as a clandestine, undercover act, from the depths of the forbidden, and is projected via the fragmentary, often enigmatic form of each letter (of each story). In said stories, Di Benedetto explores
the experiences of men and women in extreme situations, in which the characters come up against their own limitations, which are imposed upon them and determine their fate. […] These characters’ anguish is an anguish marked by the everyday, which emerges from something very concrete and is defined by waiting, or by the awareness that it is impossible to achieve a specific goal that, oftentimes, may be or indeed is at their fingertips. (6)
The absurd thus functions as a device with which to reveal the fissures in one’s own experience, linked to a political violence that, as it shifts traditional frameworks of meaning, presupposes and demands new forms of representation.
And while it is true, as implied above, that the stories of Absurdos are, in a sense, articles of outcry (this outcry is present, inevitably, in the process by which they were created), it should also be remarked that these stories are, first and foremost, literature: a literature rigorously assembled and inhabited by characters placed in the most pitiless landscapes of the rural world, who seek redemption or a more or less logical sense of existence which, in this fictional environment, is denied them.
The question that this book ends up asking us, beyond its undeniable literary triumphs, is: What is literature’s place within the story that contains and permeates us, what role can it or must it play, what are its range, its limits, and its strengths?
Di Benedetto’s late reception in Argentina—his work went partially unknown while he was in exile and in the years after his return in 1984—stands in stark contrast to its academic and editorial recovery, which accelerated starting in the late nineties, especially with the reprinting of his complete works at the hands of Adriana Hidalgo. Absurdos was no exception: it was reprinted by the same press in an edition that mentions, as we might reasonably expect, the context and conditions of the book’s creation, thus allowing new readers to approach the collection with full awareness of the circumstances of its genesis.
Regarding these circumstances—chilling, to say the least—Rafael Morán, a fellow journalist and coworker of Di Benedetto’s at Los Andes, said in an interview: “Also on March 24, at four in the morning, they [the soldiers] came looking for me at my house, meaning to break in. Neither my family nor I was there at the time; we knew the coup was coming and we had taken precautions. But my neighbors told me, some time later, how that night they threw a grenade through the glass of my library window and started letting out tear gas. They did it so clumsily that they couldn’t go inside, since they would choke on the gas themselves, and my own neighbors had to come out and help them. ‘Be careful, these ones are dangerous,’ they told them, ‘these ones are readers.’”
“Readers,” people who have a library, people who read, people who think, people who, therefore, are “dangerous.” The man in question here, of course, also fell within this category. He was doubly dangerous because, what’s more, this man wrote. And from this vocation and this narrative genius was born, among other great things, Absurdos. The man set its existence in motion through a trick, and the book came into the world through another trick—one much more intimate, introspective, confessional, and exquisite: the trick of the letters, which are still—you can’t deny it—one of the most gripping and captivating worlds.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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