Daniela Demarziani is a writer and translator born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1984. She has worked as an editor for different labels in Spain and Argentina. She worked alongside Ricardo Takes during the process of correcting their journals. We present a sample of I’m Harold, her first book, published by Overol Ediciones in 2023, a diary in which the protagonist, in order not to flee a love breakup, obsessively dedicates herself to translating a poem by Harold Norse and uses this translation as an excuse to address issues related to her day to day and their identity. This work before us is included in a family of works that in recent years have occupied a prominent place in literature written in Spanish and that focus on the fragmentary, on intertextuality and on the sensations and images that They accompany us every day as fleetingly as the subway cars that go through the tunnels at night. Logs, hybrid works, in which the limits of fiction are always blurred and the story transcends the purely anecdotal, the diary genre itself, to transform into something much more powerful: another way of understanding life and writing far from the most traditional canons when telling a story. Daniela Demarziani’s work raises the question of what a diary really is and what is the limit between reality and fictiona book in which debates about the boundaries between genres are meaningless compared to what matters: writing how you live.
*****
What I like most about the house in Entre Ríos is the noise of the kitchen screen door. It’s the only sound in my life that remained constant.
I like the permanence of things in a town.
***
Another hateful day at school. I quickly translate a Norse poem between classes. Issues remain to be resolved to which I will never return.
***
I DO NOT RECOMMEND LOVE TO YOU
I felt my head pierced
for a crown of thorns but I joked and rode the subway
and I sneaked into school bathrooms to masturbate
and I wrote secretly
about teenage hell
because I was “different”
the first and last of my kind
acute suffocating sensations
in swimming pools and changing rooms
addicted to lips and genitals
crazy about asses
that Whitman and Lorca
and Catullus and Marlowe
and Michelangelo
and Socrates admired
and I wrote: Friends,
if you want to stay alive
I do not recommend
love
***
We met on a stormy day. We said goodbye just a second before lightning struck very close to us, making us all press against the low blinds of the closing bar.
Some of the electricity that day must have hit our magnetic field, because the first time I kissed you I gave you electricity. And the second too.
***
This afternoon, walk around the neighborhood, have tea with my grandmother at Caballito and walk through the market. I bought chickpeas and fruit salad. I owed twelve pesos.
When I left I walked thinking that maybe one day I would want to remember this afternoon as one of the best of my entire life and I concentrated hard on recording it on some tile in my mind for when I needed it.
***
Who writes this diary? Are these memories mine? And even more so, are they true?
***
The psychiatrist reminds me of “those years.”
After stopping by the pharmacy to buy a mild antidepressant with a funny and overly literal name, I’m going to drink mate at my grandmother’s, who turns ninety today.
I paint her nails at the dining room table while the cold war between my mother and my aunt unfolds without subtlety of any kind.
***
Piglia says in the prologue to The Last Reader: “Sometimes readers live in a parallel world and sometimes they imagine that this world enters reality.”
For Piglia, the narrator/reader turned translator (see this transition of the narrator) of Borges’ Tlön is “the perfect reader, a copyist who writes what he reads in another language, who faithfully copies a text, and in the meticulousness of “that reading forgets what is real.” One writes his life when he believes he is writing his readings.
***
My translator friend told me that the numbers that become recurring are because they are or have been important at some point in our lives. I go up to the terrace and I understand that my obsession with the number 22 comes from the model of the family Remington that no longer works and I left upstairs in the little room on the terrace, like someone setting up an altar with its fundamental objects.
***
bodies try to contact each other
with gestures of helplessness
lovers go crazy in cannibal beds
they bite the meat
It becomes clear to me that poets need constant physical contact: giving each other short hugs with greetings, stroking hands and hair during poetry readings, kissing if the night allows it.
It is a way of masking the gross individuality of egos, but also a universal gesture of desperation.
***
I spent my insomnia hugging a newspaper that you forgot at home. It’s almost as soft as the skin on your cheeks. It also has a very long ribbon that, if I’m not careful, can wrap around my neck at night and kill me.
You once confessed to me that the blush on your cheeks was not charm but a condition. At night your face overflows with violet haloes and lascivious glances, and yet the pale beauty and that unfathomable space between your teeth that over the years eroded a mountain range on the inside of your upper lip prevail.
***
Who writes this diary? Are these memories mine?
Harold Norse says in his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: Memory is a rescue mission to recover, as best we can, the irrecoverable.
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Author: Daniela Demarziani. Title: I’m Harold. Editorial: Monol Editions. Sale: Todostuslibros.com
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2024-02-11 01:52:26
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