César Aira doesn’t like to be called “prolific.” He has, however, published more than eighty works of fiction and nonfiction. Last month, “ Ema, the Captive ,” which was first published in Spanish, in 1978, became the thirteenth of his novels available in English. (He’s been translated into seven other languages as well.) Aira, who was born in Argentina, in 1949, has spent most of his life in Buenos Aires. In “Ema,” which is set in the nineteenth century, soldiers take a young woman prisoner and, after a journey marked by baroque violence, bring her to “the edge of the world,” Argentina’s southern frontier. “Ema” is as inventive and aphoristic as Aira’s best works. It also includes depictions of “Indians” that can come across as exoticizing, which may have been intentional; some of Aira’s other fiction deploys the trope of Western colonizers smothering reality with prefabricated forms. In “Ema,” he mentions “Darwin’s sketches of the Indians, crude vignettes that always show them about to mount a skinny horse with a human face.”
When I met with Aira, a little more than a year ago, in Buenos Aires, we talked less about his writing than his habits of reading. Aira’s day is as punctuated by reading as it is by meals: periodicals in the morning, prose in the afternoon, and, in the evening, poetry. Every night at 9:30 P. M. , he takes a whiskey. (After that, he said, laughing, it’s harder to follow prose.) We spoke twice, in cafés in an area of the Palermo neighborhood known as Villa Freud, for its density of psychologists. Per Argentinian custom, we were served delicate cookies with our coffees. Gracious and mannerly, Aira picked me up before our first meeting and later walked me home, stopping, at one point, to give a stranger directions. His hair is graying and he wore dark-rimmed glasses, with a light jacket for the early spring cold.
Aira laughs often and speaks deliberately, in a smoky baritone. He’s a translator, including from English; we talked in my language, rather than his. Decades ago, when translation was his livelihood, he specialized in “bad literature,” he said: it took less time to translate but paid just as well. The story of “Ema, the Captive” was modelled on the plot of one such book, he told me.
