Ernesto Sabato
ForumSouth American Fiction-Argentine Writers
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an, um Nachrichten zu schreiben.
Dieses Thema ruht momentan. Die letzte Nachricht liegt mehr als 90 Tage zurück. Du kannst es wieder aufgreifen, indem du eine neue Antwort schreibst.
1msjohns615
Ernesto Sabato turns 100 in June! I'm pretty sure El Túnel (The Tunnel) is pretty easily obtainable in translation. It's a shame that Sobre héroes y tumbas hasn't been printed in English in a while, because I would like to give that book to some friends of mine. It looks like it was translated as On Heroes and Tombs in the 80s, but it hasn't been published in English since then.
It's a great book, probably my favorite book that takes place in Buenos Aires. You've got the tragic love story of Martín and Alejandra, interspersed with hallucinatory passages of 19th century Juan Lavalle's attempted escape across the deserts of northwest Argentina. Then, halfway through the book, Martín's story cedes to Fernando Vidal's Report on the Blind. Maaan, it's been too long since I read this book.
Here's a short essay by Sabato about books:
I was a solitary child, distanced from the games and mischief that bring happiness to children's lives. Alone in my room, as if behind a window, I watched life pass by each afternoon. Already in those days, art was my salvation. I spent hours spread out on the floor, lying on my stomach, drawing with the crayons that my brother Pancho bought me. I will never forget my earliest readings. It was Pepe, "the crazy Sabato," the one who would later run away with the circus, who initiated me into the infinite magic of books. He loved the theater, and was always looking for roles to play, modest though they might be. He dedicated all of his savings to the Bambalinas collection, which published classic works of theater in small, popular editions. In one of those books I met Tolstoi, and the book's cover, illustrated with a troika, is permanently united in my soul with my gratitude toward that author who so greatly enriched my childhood. By the time I was twelve I had already read every book in the collection, which included both lowbrow comic sketches and serious authors such as Ibsen.
Another locale in which my anguished soul found refuge was the Library of the Colegio Secundario de La Plata. I capitalize Library because for me it was a Temple, to which I arrived as a true pilgrim. The librarian was like the keeper of the heavenly gates, responsible for opening the doors to a prodigious world composed of spent and often crumbling volumes that I later devowered in the solitude of the room where I lived, distanced from my family, during those dark winter afternoons that cause sad thoughts to grow vertiginously. Thus began my passion for literature, first by way of the books of Salgari and Jules Verne and later, because one book inexorably leads to another, to the greatest books of all time, those books that explore the depths of the human heart and rescue it, molding it like a forge.
What would have become of me without books! Due to the nobility of its sentiments, and due to its disinterested and utopian attitude toward life, I identified with German Romanticism (although it would be more fitting to say that I fell in love with it), that movement that produced one of the greatest moments in the history of art. And it did so paradoxically at a time when technology and capitalism were waging their great battle. In everything that I have done since then, in my struggles and in the novels that I wrote, in my paintings and in the values that I upheld in my life, those creators who forged my soul are present. The Robbers of Schiller, Hölderlin, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Kafka, London, Goethe and Rousseau. Later on I discovered the Nordic authors, Ibsen and Stringberg, and the tragic Russians who greatly influenced me: Dostoievski, Tolstoi, Gogol; and also the Mio Cid and the great Quixote. Works to which I come back to time and again, like a man returning from exile to the homeland where fundamental events in his life occurred.
As the different eras of the past can be seen in the sides of mountans by observing their layers of stone, the books that I have frequented during different periods of my life speak profoundly of the crucial moments through which I passed.
In the same way, how greatly have authors such as Dickens, Gorki, Camus, Miguel Hernández, Pavese and Dostoievski, the great prophet, named by none less than Kierkegaard and Freud as their predecessor, influenced the lives and sentiments of men! To say nothing of the sacred books such as the Koran or the Bible, which have merited even the very sacrifice of life!
Because reading is not a pastime; to truly read is to re-create. Books possess one life granted them by their author and another life born through their encounter with the soul of each reader.
It's a great book, probably my favorite book that takes place in Buenos Aires. You've got the tragic love story of Martín and Alejandra, interspersed with hallucinatory passages of 19th century Juan Lavalle's attempted escape across the deserts of northwest Argentina. Then, halfway through the book, Martín's story cedes to Fernando Vidal's Report on the Blind. Maaan, it's been too long since I read this book.
Here's a short essay by Sabato about books:
I was a solitary child, distanced from the games and mischief that bring happiness to children's lives. Alone in my room, as if behind a window, I watched life pass by each afternoon. Already in those days, art was my salvation. I spent hours spread out on the floor, lying on my stomach, drawing with the crayons that my brother Pancho bought me. I will never forget my earliest readings. It was Pepe, "the crazy Sabato," the one who would later run away with the circus, who initiated me into the infinite magic of books. He loved the theater, and was always looking for roles to play, modest though they might be. He dedicated all of his savings to the Bambalinas collection, which published classic works of theater in small, popular editions. In one of those books I met Tolstoi, and the book's cover, illustrated with a troika, is permanently united in my soul with my gratitude toward that author who so greatly enriched my childhood. By the time I was twelve I had already read every book in the collection, which included both lowbrow comic sketches and serious authors such as Ibsen.
Another locale in which my anguished soul found refuge was the Library of the Colegio Secundario de La Plata. I capitalize Library because for me it was a Temple, to which I arrived as a true pilgrim. The librarian was like the keeper of the heavenly gates, responsible for opening the doors to a prodigious world composed of spent and often crumbling volumes that I later devowered in the solitude of the room where I lived, distanced from my family, during those dark winter afternoons that cause sad thoughts to grow vertiginously. Thus began my passion for literature, first by way of the books of Salgari and Jules Verne and later, because one book inexorably leads to another, to the greatest books of all time, those books that explore the depths of the human heart and rescue it, molding it like a forge.
What would have become of me without books! Due to the nobility of its sentiments, and due to its disinterested and utopian attitude toward life, I identified with German Romanticism (although it would be more fitting to say that I fell in love with it), that movement that produced one of the greatest moments in the history of art. And it did so paradoxically at a time when technology and capitalism were waging their great battle. In everything that I have done since then, in my struggles and in the novels that I wrote, in my paintings and in the values that I upheld in my life, those creators who forged my soul are present. The Robbers of Schiller, Hölderlin, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Kafka, London, Goethe and Rousseau. Later on I discovered the Nordic authors, Ibsen and Stringberg, and the tragic Russians who greatly influenced me: Dostoievski, Tolstoi, Gogol; and also the Mio Cid and the great Quixote. Works to which I come back to time and again, like a man returning from exile to the homeland where fundamental events in his life occurred.
As the different eras of the past can be seen in the sides of mountans by observing their layers of stone, the books that I have frequented during different periods of my life speak profoundly of the crucial moments through which I passed.
In the same way, how greatly have authors such as Dickens, Gorki, Camus, Miguel Hernández, Pavese and Dostoievski, the great prophet, named by none less than Kierkegaard and Freud as their predecessor, influenced the lives and sentiments of men! To say nothing of the sacred books such as the Koran or the Bible, which have merited even the very sacrifice of life!
Because reading is not a pastime; to truly read is to re-create. Books possess one life granted them by their author and another life born through their encounter with the soul of each reader.
2RickHarsch
was Angel of Darkness the third novel? I remember resumed interest in him in the early 90s and getting hold of On Heroes and Tombs and I think Angel of Darkness.
3msjohns615
Yep, it looks like Abbadón el exterminador was translated as Angel of Darkness. It's a book I've sought for quite some time, and just the other day, as I was thinking about Sabato, I found a copy online for a couple of bucks. I hope to read it this year!
5lriley
We've had this discussion before on other writers. I'm an admirer of Sabato's On heroes and Tombs and the Angel of darkness. And Sabato headed the commision to look into the atrocites of the Argentine Military dictatorship circa 1976-1983--a dictatorship that waged war including economic war against its own people. Estimates of 30,000 + dead attributed to it until it finally came to an inglorious end and like in Chile had the support of major political figures in the United States particularly on the right. Like Borges though he was hardly a critic of that same regime when it was in power. A very intelligent man--a great writer but he had flaws too.
6msjohns615
5: Indeed we have...I'd thought that the whole lunch with Videla was an isolated incident, but it appears that it was more than that. Here's a rather caustic article about Sabato's less-than-admirable political history:
Ernesto Sabato: mejor no hablar de ciertas cosas
It's admittedly quite one-sided, but it's interesting to compare it with the general portrait of Author/Champion of Human Rights that has accompanied his death. I'll still reserve a special place in my heart for Sobre héroes y tumbas, though. I've been thinking about re-readin El túnel this year because I read it many years ago and would like to revisit it. I remember being happy when he referenced the crime of Juan Pablo Castel in Sobre héroes y tumbas. Intertextuality is always fun...
Ernesto Sabato: mejor no hablar de ciertas cosas
It's admittedly quite one-sided, but it's interesting to compare it with the general portrait of Author/Champion of Human Rights that has accompanied his death. I'll still reserve a special place in my heart for Sobre héroes y tumbas, though. I've been thinking about re-readin El túnel this year because I read it many years ago and would like to revisit it. I remember being happy when he referenced the crime of Juan Pablo Castel in Sobre héroes y tumbas. Intertextuality is always fun...
