A selection from "Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels", translated by Henry Martin. Manganelli (1922-1990) was part of “Gruppo ‘63”. There are 5 pieces of Borgesian essay/Flash.
- Five - a man is wrongly sentenced to death for murdering his business partner - "to end up in court, accused of homicide, struck him as so wondrous and improbable as to lead him to conclude that he had realized one of his life’s great themes: the achievement of an objective insanity, not only his own, but a structural insanity"
- Sixteen - A man gets ready at 8am for a special hour - "he must traverse it as pure and simple time, nothing else, absolutely. ... but the twenty-eighth minute deals him a blow on the temple, and he falls from the chair; upon striking the floor, absolutely without a sound, he disintegrates."
- Thirty-five - An intellectual couple who often meet don't think they love each other. Finally "With a bizarre, mental desperation, they think about a life that does not include the other’s voice. And then, briefly, they fall into silence, since they direly mistrust, and will always mistrust, the vocality of the voice, that vain custodian of the purity of concepts."
- Fifty-three - In a city where humans are mythical, there are finely crafted masks and puppets in the likeness of humans in wildly varying myths - "some [citizens] suppose human beings to be immortal; they venerate those masks and puppets, and if they judge them imperfect or disrespectful, they reverently burn them".
- Seventy-seven - "In this city, everyone possesses something which is indispensable to someone else, without the possessor knowing what to do with it, or even knowing they possess it." The piece describes how citizens might organise themselves to get what they think they want.
No comments:
Post a Comment