Baroni: Un Viaje" and Other Recent Work by Sergio Chejfec
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2013 Writing the Visual in "Baroni: un viaje" and Other Recent Work by Sergio Chejfec Margaret Carson The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1941 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] WRITING THE VISUAL IN BARONI: UN VIAJE AND OTHER RECENT WORK BY SERGIO CHEJFEC by MARGARET CARSON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2013 ii © 2013 MARGARET CARSON All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Magdalena Perkowska_______________________ ______________ __________________________________________ Date Chair of the Examining Committee José del Valle_______________________________ _______________ __________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Paul Julian Smith_______________________________ Elena Martínez_________________________________ Esther Allen___________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract WRITING THE VISUAL IN BARONI: UN VIAJE AND OTHER RECENT WORKS BY SERGIO CHEJFEC by Margaret Carson Advisor: Professor Magdalena Perkowska This dissertation has three parts. First, I explore the ways in which the word intersects with the image in several recent texts by the contemporary Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, whose oeuvre is replete with verbal descriptions of visual artifacts. Second, as a complement to the critical essay, I present my English translation of Chejfec’s Baroni: un viaje (2007), a novel featuring the Venezuelan artist Rafaela Baroni, whose extraordinary wood carvings of Virgins, saints and other figures are described in key passages. Third, as a bridge between these two parts, I reflect on the related critical discourses of ekphrasis and translation and on the task of translating Baroni: un viaje. Chejfec’s engagement with the visual as both an essayist and novelist has received little critical attention to date. In the first part of my study, I consider recent essays and blog postings in which he discusses the problematics of the word-image encounter, both in his own work and in that of others. I contend that Chejfec’s privileging of the word and of the artifice of writing affirms W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of “ekphrastic hope.” By examining ekphrastic passages in Baroni: un viaje, I study the effects of the ekphrastic encounter in the novel and move beyond the notion that ekphrasis represents a “spatial fix” or halt in the narrative. In the second part, I offer my English translation of Baroni: un viaje. In the third part, I v discuss the affinities between the critical discourses surrounding ekphrasis and translation. I conclude with a Translator’s Note that posits that the cleft that splits one of Baroni’s wooden carvings, described at the novel’s outset, can be understood as a powerful trope for the gap separating word from image, and the original Spanish of the novel from my English translation. I argue that although translation implies rupture, one hopes for engagement with the other in the space such a translation opens. vi Acknowledgments My profound gratitude to Sergio Chejfec for his generous help in answering my questions and in discussing his work with me. For their guidance and encouragement I thank Esther Allen, Jean Graham-Jones, Elena Martínez, Paul Julian Smith, and my insightful and meticulous reader and adviser, Magdalena Perkowska. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 1 2. “Una verdadera aventura visual”: Essays, Blog Posts, Interviews 18 3. “Ella y su obra prueban que la representación es posible”: Visualities in Baroni: un viaje 37 4. Baroni: A Journey 61 5. From Literary Criticism to Translation a. Ekphrasis and Translation: Provisional Discourse Analysis 205 b. Translator’s Note 216 Bibliography 243 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Tengo frente a mí el cuerpo de madera del santo; la madera se ha rajado por la mitad de este médico que mira hacia adelante sin ver nada en particular. Sergio Chejfec, Baroni: un viaje In the opening sentence of Sergio Chejfec’s 2007 novel, Baroni: un viaje, the first-person narrator gazes at a hand-carved wooden saint that has a distinctive and memorable crack down the center of its torso. In the paragraphs that follow, the reader, guided by the narrator’s appreciative eye, will visualize the carved image of José Gregorio Hernández, a popular folk saint known as el santo médico, made by the title character, the Venezuelan artist Rafaela Baroni. In rendering the saintly doctor’s most salient characteristics through words, the author fixes an image in the reader’s eye by means of an artistic medium, writing, that stands in marked contrast to another artistic medium, wood carving, that is the focus of the narrator’s attention. In these initial passages and in many others throughout the novel, the reader is repeatedly engaged by what the critic Murray Krieger, in his 1992 study Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, 2 calls the “picture-making capacity of words” (1). Though this critical essay is limited to Baroni and other recent writings by Sergio Chejfec, the author’s oeuvre is replete with picture-making passages such as the one cited above. In fact one could say his work is saturated with verbal descriptions of all kinds of visual artifacts: photographs, wood carvings, bas-reliefs, paintings, graffiti, maps, films and videos and, most recently, web cartography.1 Chejfec’s engagement with the visual, a facet of his work that has only recently begun to attract critical attention,2 is the starting point for a dissertation that will comprise three parts. First, I will explore the ways in which the image intersects with the word in several instances of Chejfec’s post-2000 work (Chapters 2 and 3);3 second, and as a complement to the critical essay, I will present my English translation of Baroni: A Journey (Chapter 4); and third, as a bridge between these two parts, I will reflect on the striking similarities between the critical discourse on ekphrasis (and some of its contemporary critical iterations, as I will outline in this Introduction) and the discourse that surrounds literary translation. I will conclude with reflections on the dual task of the translating the novel as I write critically about it. Because this dissertation has its roots in my critical and creative work in translating several works of fiction and essays by Sergio Chejfec, I approach this study with the advantage 1 Two instances: In the opening scene of La experiencia dramática (2012), a priest delivers a sermon in which he warns the congregation that “Dios es como los mapas en línea (dijo textualmente ‘Google Maps’). Puede observer desde arriba y desde los costados, es capaz de abarcar con la Mirada un continente o enfocarse en una casa, hasta hacer zoom sobre el patio de una casa” (9). In Sobre Giannuzzi (210), a book-length essay on the Argentine poet Joaquín Giannuzzi, Chejfec compares his poetry to the act of taking a photograph: “Hay una medida entre temporal y emotiva que Giannuzzi tiende a obedecer; no encuentro mejor forma para describirla que llamarla exposición, una suerte de exposición fotográfica, como si el poema dependiera de una forma y un lapso de encuadramiento necesariamente calibrados” (30). 2 See studies by Horne (2005, 2011, 2012) and Epplin (2012). 3 Specifically, the essays or blog postings “Breves opiniones sobre relatos con imágenes”; “Cuadros de una instalación”; “Sobre Baroni: un viaje”; “El escritor plástico”; “El caso de un título y un nombre,” and the novel, Baroni: un viaje. 3 of having essentially inventoried the author’s tools—his words—one by one in each of the texts I have translated.4 In doing so, I have subjected these words to various levels of scrutiny—their picture-making capacity being only one of them. It is perhaps in the very rigorous process of translating this author’s prose into English, which entails reimagining it in another linguistic medium, that I have been able to fully measure and appreciate the pictorial turn of Chejfec’s writing. In this introduction I will establish a conceptual framework within which to situate a reading of Baroni and other recent essays and blog postings, one focused on issues that arise when words become instruments to paint pictures, sculpt figures, flesh out photographs. As I do so I am mindful of the dangers of oversimplifying and compressing a tradition in Western literary history that for many begins with Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad.5 The sheer volume of texts that have lent themselves (or could potentially lend themselves) to a study of this nature stands as a formidable barrier to an investigator who wishes to take note of what has preceded her before attempting to open a new critical space for studies of visualities in Sergio Chejfec’s work. Even Krieger, in his fundamental text on ekphrasis, declares at the outset that he can only consider “a small number of representative landmark texts across the centuries” (6). An additional intellectual cloud is that the field gives signs of being in a state of flux and realignment. As an initiate in this field of scholarship, I have attempted to work my way through a maze of critical formulations and nomenclature, old and new, in order to situate my exploration of the visual in Sergio Chejfec’s work.