In 2018 I reviewed an English translation of the first volume of Ricardo Piglia’s Diaries of Emilio Renzi. Five years later, in 2023, I thought I’d go back and write about the second volume. If I did all three, I told myself, and spaced them out, I’d end up with an essay.
Making notes for my new review, I noticed that Piglia mentions Cesare Pavese, the Italian novelist and poet, more often than any other writer—any other person, in fact—and only Manuel Puig, author of Kiss of the Spider Woman, who Piglia knew personally, came close. Emilio Renzi, the mask that grew more firmly onto Piglia’s face the longer he wore it, was working on a short story collection during the years covered by the Diaries’ second volume. I watched a peculiar drama play itself out, in Piglia’s composition of a story about Renzi and Pavese, as it took shape over an extended period.
That story, “Un pez en el hielo” (“A Fish in Ice”), reminded me of “Corps de bois” (“Body of Wood”), a story by Pierre Michon (about Gustave Flaubert) that I translated in 2014. So I translated “Un pez en el hielo,” and showed it to a few friends, who encouraged me to translate the rest of La invasión, Piglia’s first collection, dated 1967, the book he printed the story in, when he published a revised second edition many years later. I translated The Invasion and as of today, June 26, 2024, I’m still seeking a publisher for it.
I gave a couple of talks on Piglia (at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference and the Sant Jordi USA literature festival), and obtained permission to publish a few of the pieces. “A Fish in Ice” just came out in Translation Review (which also ran “Life Sentence,” Sarah Booker’s translation of Piglia’s story “Prisión perpetua”), and “The Wall”—reprinted below—is printed in the new issue of Your Impossible Voice.
Always love a hall of mirrors.