An English version of The Flamethrowers is available in manuscript.
Talk Roberto Arlt and River Boat Books
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1RickHarsch
I am seeking readers of Roberto Arlt to discuss a translation of The Flamethrowers made by a man who subsequently become a friend of mine. Anyone interested in a group read of the full book The Seven Madmen/The Flamethrowers in English translation please post here.
2RickHarsch
How did Arlt become labeled a bad writer?
3davidgn
>1 RickHarsch: Read your blog post. I'm sold. Viva Boedo! (Hell, Florida isn't even in Buenos Aires. In terms of Chicago -- which has got to be the best comparison -- we're talking about a place that would be serviced by the likes of Car 553... maybe Wilmette, if we analogize San Isidro to Winnetka.) (Whoops... looks like Borges' group was named after the street, not the neighborhood. In terms of the latter, at Florida 774 468, we're basically talking San Nicolás (Centro) verging on Retiro -- cf. the Near North Side... maybe River North. Which would make Boedo analogous to... I don't know, McKinley Park? Or better, maybe Pilsen...) Nothing to see here; just some guy who knows his Buenos Aires geography solely from entering all of its bookstores into Librarything. Carry on!)
Bravo, @lriley . :-)
Bravo, @lriley . :-)
4lriley
#2--I don't think of Arlt as a bad writer at all. I think he writes beautifully. I've had a lot of time to look at these very often massive passages and think---wow, did I translate that--because I don't think I could write anything like them in a million years of trying. He's like a brilliant guitar player that never ever took a lesson and not giving a crap about all the unwritten rules and grammatical niceties made him in the eyes of the majority of his writing contemporaries back in the 20's and 30's something of a barbarian. It's a good thing that he didn't seem to care all that much about others opinions. It's also why he's so unique in the Latin American writer's landscape of the time. He didn't write or try to write like anyone else. He has a style that is unique to him. He is IMO the first true Latin American literary modernist. There is the comparison made that he's South America's Dostoyevsky and there are some similarities to Fyodor (and Arlt is know to have read him) but I've never gotten a modern feel out of the Russian and I much prefer Arlt--who's pacing is much quicker, the black humor--there's this noirish, hardboiled feel. Céline writes his first novel Journey to the end of the night a couple years after the Flamethrowers--there's more comparison there. To me Arlt is a precursor of things to come.
The thing that I wonder about is--those who read the Flamethrowers--how they're going to react at the end because the last few chapters are unflinchingly grim.
The thing that I wonder about is--those who read the Flamethrowers--how they're going to react at the end because the last few chapters are unflinchingly grim.
5RickHarsch
>4 lriley: You said the same to me and I expected worse than I got, and I think the reason is that the grim is there throughout, and particularly the Enigmatic Visitor prepares you for the end.
>3 davidgn: Rogers Park?
>3 davidgn: Rogers Park?
6davidgn
>5 RickHarsch: Perhaps. I'm putting some weight on the geography as well here (keeping in mind the oddity that BA turns away from the coast, whereas Chicago clings dearly to it which rotates things a bit), and Mataderos has got to be Back of the Yards. :-p
7davidgn
Some interesting reading:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/yet_another_tale_of_two_cities_bu...
I'm sure there are any number of other pieces on a similar theme, and one day I might try looking for them.
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/yet_another_tale_of_two_cities_bu...
I'm sure there are any number of other pieces on a similar theme, and one day I might try looking for them.
8ArseneIncubus
I would really like to be part of this. I hope it is not too late.
9RickHarsch
No, not really. If you get the book we'd be very happy to read what you think of it. The discussion of the book is virtually over, having taken place within the Tropic of Cancer. It's private, but if you write enrique freeque he would no doubt open the door. If you are interested in Arlt you'll probably be interested to see what sort of took over the thread, a book of 1200 or so pages that's coming out in August from River Boat Press by a guy named Zabala, who wrote a brilliant diary entry about a short binge in Caracas with Bolano.
10jkolchak
I would love to see a translation of The Flamethrowers as I enamored of Seven Madmen. You can email me at jk@johnkolchak.com
11RickHarsch
>10 jkolchak: you can pm iriley for the ms
12Svets
Hello, I've been looking for The Flamethrowers . It seems that the English translation is not available here in India. It would great if someone can share if it's available online or for sale in USA/UK so that I can get a friend to send it to me. Thank you so much!
13RickHarsch
>12 Svets: Write a private message to Iriley. He is the translator and is looking for a publisher. He might be kind enough, he would be, to send you a pdf.
ETA his translation is excellent, has been through severaly tests, and you can ask for the version with introductions by both me and him
ETA his translation is excellent, has been through severaly tests, and you can ask for the version with introductions by both me and him
14Svets
I'll do that! Thank you so much! I just finished reading Seven Madmen and have been trying to figure out a copy of this one for a while.
15nyc.luck
Greetings! I have been looking for an English translation of this book for years. I would be very grateful to obtain a copy if possible. I can't see how to write a private message as indicated in other comments unfortunately.
16lriley
Right now The Flamethrowers is scheduled for publication at the end of May by River Boat books. At the same time River Boat is republishing Naomi Lindstrom's translation of The Seven Madmen---so that both books will be available from one publisher at the same time/place. River Boat may make the books available some time before then. You can check the website.
Also to be found in River Boats catalog there is Pedro Javier Zabala's The Mad Patagonian. That is available now and is a great book. Zabala and Roberto Bolano were friends and the Mad Patagonian IMO is as good as anything Bolano every wrote. I wouldn't just say that and I know Roberto Bolano very well. He's one of my favorite writers ever. It is a very long book--over 1400 pages but well worth the price. Also available at River Book is Rick Harsch's Skulls of Istria--that's much shorter than the Mad Patagonian but it's a great book as well. Without Rick's help by the way there wouldn't be an Arlt Flamethrowers translation.
Also to be found in River Boats catalog there is Pedro Javier Zabala's The Mad Patagonian. That is available now and is a great book. Zabala and Roberto Bolano were friends and the Mad Patagonian IMO is as good as anything Bolano every wrote. I wouldn't just say that and I know Roberto Bolano very well. He's one of my favorite writers ever. It is a very long book--over 1400 pages but well worth the price. Also available at River Book is Rick Harsch's Skulls of Istria--that's much shorter than the Mad Patagonian but it's a great book as well. Without Rick's help by the way there wouldn't be an Arlt Flamethrowers translation.
17RickHarsch
Here is most of the intro to THe Flamethrowers
(from "An Introduction to Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers" by Rick Harsch)
1. The Flamethrowers, by Roberto Art, originally published in Buenos Aires in 1931, is without question the most important Spanish language novel unavailable in English translation until this curretn edition.
2. The Seven Madmen, considered by English language literary critics the most important novel written by Roberto Arlt (published originally in 1929 in Buenos Aires), has been translated twice.
3. Neither book is a novel.
4. The Seven Madmen is the first half of a novel and The Flamethrowers is its second half.
5. Roberto Arlt knew this. And I have no doubt that Julio Cortazar and every other Spanish language reader inspired by Arlt knew this as well. And since Arlt is considered a precursor to the ‘Magic Realist’ boom in Latin American literature, some would say its godfather, this strange fact of its botched delivery into English is an obscenity not without charm.
6. In fact, Arlt likely published the book in two acts as he did for financial reasons. And of course it is for financial reasons that no one has bothered to publish The Flamethrowers. (Our translator, Larry Riley, knows more about this, for in addition to the difficulty of selling obscure translations, it seems there was a difficult heir in the Arlt family.)
7. Certainly the two translators of The Seven Madmen—Naomi Lindstrom and Nick Caistor— knew that they were not really translating a whole novel. Arlt said so at the end of The Seven Madmen. Lindstrom and Caistor had to translate this: ‘*Commentator’s note: The story of the characters in this novel will continue in a second volume, The Flamethrowers.’ If that seems ambiguous it is because the commentator is unfamiliar to you as a voice who is telling this singular and, if multi-splenetic, single novel. And then there is that most benignly adamantine voice among Arlt’s nephews, Cortazar’s, in his introduction to the latest publication of The Seven Madmen (in English), referring with casual authority to ‘...what is in truth one novel with two titles.’
8. Arlt’s novel is unusual in that it is imbedded in time from which he deracinates his characters.
9. The Great War provided urgent impetus to Arlt’s characters; they viewed the horrific episodes of World War Two with wry, sating curiosity despite Arlt’s grave.
10. Born in 1900, Arlt died in 1942.
11. The Enigmatic Visitor of The Flamethrowers was not surprised that atomic bombs did the work that a few dedicated madmen with phosgene could easily have accomplished.
12. Early in The Mad Toy, Arlt’s first novel, a group of visionary urchins forms a club, at which the following, among other, proposals is made: “The club should have a library of scientific works in order for its associates to be certain that they are robbing and killing according to the most modern industrial procedures.” This proposal is made directly after a discussion regarding replacing a chicken egg’s natural contents with nitroglycerin.
13. Circuitous routes are pioneered by admirers of Arlt to reach the point where they feel it is safe, finally, to say that his writing was, after all, human. Yet what separates Arlt from all writers of his time is his anguish that the human is finished, finishing, knocked off, an anguish that is expressed like no other anguish has ever been expressed in literature, in the character of Remo Erdosain, whose essential phenomenological disturbance is an obsessive leitmotif of The Seven Madmen, quicksand for the tender readers like myself who recognize the tin skies, cubical rooms, geometric incursions of light and thought, and, anguished, Arlt compelled again and again to describe Erdosain’s anguish, perhaps already knowing that one impending horror was the inevitable scrutiny of the actions of Erdosain by Giacommetti figures picking Beckettian through ruined literary landscapes.
14. It is difficult to argue seminality, particularly in fiction, which lacks the immediacy of painting, and more—it assumes a lack of transfer between the arts. So when Roberto Arlt is credited with being the originator of magical realism, not only is the issue absurd, it serves to deflect the meaning of Arlt’s great work, The Seven Madmen and The Flamethowers. He may have preceded Guernica, but not Tzara, and not the city scapes and madmonsters of Grosz. What makes Arlt’s work great is to some degree indeed its originality, his private cubysmal canvass that combined the abysmal industrial architecture and working conditions of the most modern of human creatures with the existential madness this engendered, and awareness of historical defeat, and the other side of that, what lurked temporally beyond, the advanced cannibalism of technological weaponry and worse, the acceptance of it. The chapter The Enigmatic Visitor in The Flamethrowers in which a jaundiced, fully uniformed (gasmasked!) soldier appears to Erdosain at night, their subsequent, almost blase conversation about gasses, including the support for Erdosain’s belief in the efficacy of phosgene as a mass murdering agent, and worse, the final declaration of the visitor, places Arlt beyond the future in which he is accursed with being labeled progenitor. For Arlt, civilization is over. As he writes, it is dying a slow death, and still is. Witness the writer who perhaps best reflects the influence of Arlt, intentionally or not, Rodolfo Walsh, who in his astonishing work of investigative writing, Operation Massacre, refers to ‘...this cannibalistic time that we are living in...’, in a book that in retrospect seems to have ushered in a regime much like that of the United States, in which the faces change, but the cannibalism gathers strength, so much so for Argentina that some 20 years after the publication of that book Walsh published an open letter to the regime and left his home with a pistol knowing he was going to need it that very day—and indeed was murdered at five in the afternoon. This is Arlt’s greatness, a diagnosis not a prophecy, and an accurate diagnosis at that. In Arlt there is absurdity, surreality, some Kafka, some Beckett, some Joyce, but mostly there is what may be called hyper-reality, an umbrella term, which to Arlt was merely the horror of reality.
(from "An Introduction to Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers" by Rick Harsch)
1. The Flamethrowers, by Roberto Art, originally published in Buenos Aires in 1931, is without question the most important Spanish language novel unavailable in English translation until this curretn edition.
2. The Seven Madmen, considered by English language literary critics the most important novel written by Roberto Arlt (published originally in 1929 in Buenos Aires), has been translated twice.
3. Neither book is a novel.
4. The Seven Madmen is the first half of a novel and The Flamethrowers is its second half.
5. Roberto Arlt knew this. And I have no doubt that Julio Cortazar and every other Spanish language reader inspired by Arlt knew this as well. And since Arlt is considered a precursor to the ‘Magic Realist’ boom in Latin American literature, some would say its godfather, this strange fact of its botched delivery into English is an obscenity not without charm.
6. In fact, Arlt likely published the book in two acts as he did for financial reasons. And of course it is for financial reasons that no one has bothered to publish The Flamethrowers. (Our translator, Larry Riley, knows more about this, for in addition to the difficulty of selling obscure translations, it seems there was a difficult heir in the Arlt family.)
7. Certainly the two translators of The Seven Madmen—Naomi Lindstrom and Nick Caistor— knew that they were not really translating a whole novel. Arlt said so at the end of The Seven Madmen. Lindstrom and Caistor had to translate this: ‘*Commentator’s note: The story of the characters in this novel will continue in a second volume, The Flamethrowers.’ If that seems ambiguous it is because the commentator is unfamiliar to you as a voice who is telling this singular and, if multi-splenetic, single novel. And then there is that most benignly adamantine voice among Arlt’s nephews, Cortazar’s, in his introduction to the latest publication of The Seven Madmen (in English), referring with casual authority to ‘...what is in truth one novel with two titles.’
8. Arlt’s novel is unusual in that it is imbedded in time from which he deracinates his characters.
9. The Great War provided urgent impetus to Arlt’s characters; they viewed the horrific episodes of World War Two with wry, sating curiosity despite Arlt’s grave.
10. Born in 1900, Arlt died in 1942.
11. The Enigmatic Visitor of The Flamethrowers was not surprised that atomic bombs did the work that a few dedicated madmen with phosgene could easily have accomplished.
12. Early in The Mad Toy, Arlt’s first novel, a group of visionary urchins forms a club, at which the following, among other, proposals is made: “The club should have a library of scientific works in order for its associates to be certain that they are robbing and killing according to the most modern industrial procedures.” This proposal is made directly after a discussion regarding replacing a chicken egg’s natural contents with nitroglycerin.
13. Circuitous routes are pioneered by admirers of Arlt to reach the point where they feel it is safe, finally, to say that his writing was, after all, human. Yet what separates Arlt from all writers of his time is his anguish that the human is finished, finishing, knocked off, an anguish that is expressed like no other anguish has ever been expressed in literature, in the character of Remo Erdosain, whose essential phenomenological disturbance is an obsessive leitmotif of The Seven Madmen, quicksand for the tender readers like myself who recognize the tin skies, cubical rooms, geometric incursions of light and thought, and, anguished, Arlt compelled again and again to describe Erdosain’s anguish, perhaps already knowing that one impending horror was the inevitable scrutiny of the actions of Erdosain by Giacommetti figures picking Beckettian through ruined literary landscapes.
14. It is difficult to argue seminality, particularly in fiction, which lacks the immediacy of painting, and more—it assumes a lack of transfer between the arts. So when Roberto Arlt is credited with being the originator of magical realism, not only is the issue absurd, it serves to deflect the meaning of Arlt’s great work, The Seven Madmen and The Flamethowers. He may have preceded Guernica, but not Tzara, and not the city scapes and madmonsters of Grosz. What makes Arlt’s work great is to some degree indeed its originality, his private cubysmal canvass that combined the abysmal industrial architecture and working conditions of the most modern of human creatures with the existential madness this engendered, and awareness of historical defeat, and the other side of that, what lurked temporally beyond, the advanced cannibalism of technological weaponry and worse, the acceptance of it. The chapter The Enigmatic Visitor in The Flamethrowers in which a jaundiced, fully uniformed (gasmasked!) soldier appears to Erdosain at night, their subsequent, almost blase conversation about gasses, including the support for Erdosain’s belief in the efficacy of phosgene as a mass murdering agent, and worse, the final declaration of the visitor, places Arlt beyond the future in which he is accursed with being labeled progenitor. For Arlt, civilization is over. As he writes, it is dying a slow death, and still is. Witness the writer who perhaps best reflects the influence of Arlt, intentionally or not, Rodolfo Walsh, who in his astonishing work of investigative writing, Operation Massacre, refers to ‘...this cannibalistic time that we are living in...’, in a book that in retrospect seems to have ushered in a regime much like that of the United States, in which the faces change, but the cannibalism gathers strength, so much so for Argentina that some 20 years after the publication of that book Walsh published an open letter to the regime and left his home with a pistol knowing he was going to need it that very day—and indeed was murdered at five in the afternoon. This is Arlt’s greatness, a diagnosis not a prophecy, and an accurate diagnosis at that. In Arlt there is absurdity, surreality, some Kafka, some Beckett, some Joyce, but mostly there is what may be called hyper-reality, an umbrella term, which to Arlt was merely the horror of reality.
18RickHarsch
This press is about to make publishing history, at the very least with The Flamethrowers, but probably with Zabala as well (1200 pages, not 1400)
http://riverboatbooks.com/our-books
http://riverboatbooks.com/our-books
19nyc.luck
Thanks! I've ordered the Zabala book, will look at the Skulls of Istria, and look forward to the release of the Flamethrowers. I can't express how glad I am that you've put this out - Thank You!
20RickHarsch
Peter Damian Bellis is the publisher of RRB--and I need to mention his own novel, which has received excellent reviews (I think one from me) THe Conjure Man.
21PeterDamianBellis
>20 RickHarsch: It is enough to focus on Roberto Arlt, Mad Pat and Skulls for the time being. Let's make history...
22RickHarsch
Here are a couple youtube spots for Zabala:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOszJGZU8Ss&t=10s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1UlmWryDI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOszJGZU8Ss&t=10s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1UlmWryDI
