Antonio di Benedetto

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Antonio di Benedetto

Antonio di Benedetto (born November 2, 1922 in Mendoza , † October 10, 1986 in Buenos Aires ) was an Argentine writer .

Life

Di Benedetto worked in Argentina as a journalist, foreign correspondent and screenwriter. Just hours after the 1976 military coup, he was arrested by the military for no apparent reason . Due to foreign petitions, etc. a. by Ernesto Sábato and Heinrich Böll , he was released from prison after 18 months and immediately emigrated to Madrid . In 1984 he returned to Argentina and died, lonely and impoverished, two years later in Buenos Aires . He has received numerous awards and prizes for his work, including the Gran Premio de Honor de la Sociedad Argentina de Escritores , which is considered the highest literary honor in Argentina.

The works of Antonio di Benedetto are not as well known as those of his compatriots Jorge Luis Borges , Manuel Puig or Julio Cortázar , especially because they disappeared from bookshops for a long time. His rediscovery began in Argentina at the end of the 1990s with new editions of his works at Adriana Hidalgo Editora .

Works in German

The novel And Zama is waiting

And Zama waits is di Benedetto's most famous novel. It first appeared in 1956 in the Dople P editorial in Buenos Aires under the title “Zama” . In 1967 there was a new edition of a version revised by the author in Argentina. The novel saw further editions, including in Spain (1972, 1979, 1985) and Cuba (1990). The German translation comes from Maria Bamberg and was published by Erdmann Verlag in 1967 , taking into account the changes made by the author. A new edition of this translation was published by Manesse Verlag in 2009 under the shortened title “Zama Warte” .

The narrative silence

The story of Silence is originally called El silenciero and is also referred to there as a novela (i.e. a novel). El silenciero was first published in 1964 by Ediciones Troquel in Buenos Aires and in 1968 it was translated into German by Curt Meyer-Clason by Suhrkamp .

The original title of the story, El silenciero , is a neologism that describes the unnamed first-person narrator . This is a man who once Jura has studied, but now nothing brings about more, as he always and everywhere disruptive to noise ( el ruido looks suspended) and can not think clearly. His insistence on the right to privacy, his petitions to the authorities remain unsuccessful. He sees himself as a budding writer who wants to promote a work called Das Dach ( El techo ). But the omnipresent noise makes him miss his life. In the end he ends up in prison for arson.

The book was reprinted in Argentina in 1999, with a foreword by Juan José Saer , who counts El silenciero to be one of the main works of Argentine literature.

The story Visor Obstinatus

Visor Obstinatus first appeared under the Spanish original title Obstinado visor in the collection of short stories Absurdos (1978). The German translation by René Strien appeared together with the stories of other authors in the anthology The Red Moon. Fantastic stories from the Río de la Plata in 1988 by Suhrkamp .

The short narrative (only eight pages in the cited volume) shows four episodes from the life of Rubén, who has been driven since childhood to observe certain things closely in anticipation of a catastrophe.

In the first episode, Rubén is seven years old. He is repeatedly drawn to a certain house with a light blue facade and keeps “watch” there for no apparent reason. One day he notices a crack in the wall of the house and watches how first the roof and then the sky-blue wall collapse.

The second episode tells of the nine-year-old Rubén, who spends his history class in the vague expectation of a coming misfortune. This time it is the teacher whose sheer presence causes Rubén to “dominate the emotions”. Rubén's discomfort is confirmed when the teacher's smock hits the stove and catches fire. The teacher wants to escape outside, the air supply spreads the fire to her clothes and her long hair.

The now seventeen-year-old Rubén spends the third episode in anticipation of a misfortune. This time his vague feeling concerns a pregnant girl in the neighborhood. One day his premonition drives him onto the bus she gets on. During the journey, she goes into labor and gives birth to the child on the bus. There is also no misfortune, everything is going well, and although Rubén does not directly help, he thinks he recognizes: "For that [...] he had to be there."

In the fourth episode, this time "Mr. Rubén" is used without an indication of the age. He is widowed, has a daughter and a son-in-law. A renewed sense of anticipation drives him home earlier than usual. On the way he meets a chained, barking dog who looks at him, "with a direct look that is only for him, and it is perhaps a sad look". The encounter with the dog never goes out of his head, at night he cannot sleep and suddenly realizes “that he has to wait until five without impatience and without anger. Wait ... what? "His own death has announced itself here, and when it strikes five o'clock," from the armchair in which he has sat down, he watches him die in his bed ". The story ends with this indefinite separation of body and soul when dying.

Works not translated into German

  • Mundo animal (1953)
  • El pentágono (1954; reissued in 1974 under the title Anabella )
  • Grot (1957; reissued in 1969 under the title Cuentos claros )
  • Declinación y ángel (1958)
  • El cariño de los tontos (1961)
  • Los suicidas (1969) - filmed by Juan Villegas (2005)
  • Absurdities (1978)
  • Sombras nada más (1984)
  • Cuentos completos (2006)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Casa de Mendoza present in Buenos Aires and a biography sobre Antonio Di Benedetto. In: Prensa Gobierno di Mendoza. November 16, 2016, accessed March 23, 2020 (Spanish).
  2. ^ Benjamin Kunkel: A Neglected South American Masterpiece. In: The New Yorker. Condé Nast, January 16, 2017, accessed March 23, 2020 .
  3. See the reviews in the FAZ and Deutschlandradio Kultur .