I have always identified myself as a Jewish Boy from Melbourne, even though I have lived in other places and other countries. Learning to speak Spanish, I am fairly proficient in it now, was not on the horizon, let alone reading the best known poets or writers in their native tongue.
Spanish has been a great gift
It opened up Latin America for me
It gave me a home
it gave me many friends
I was studying in Sweden and was on my way home to Australia when I picked up the New York Times Review of Books and there for the first time, I learned about Pablo Neruda, with a poem If you Forget Me translated by Alistair Reid. After reading it in translation and then trying to pronounce the words in its original spanish, I made up my mind to learn Spanish, it would take me years, so that I can read Neruda as he wrote them. I as fortunate to have read his poetry in his native tongue in each of his three houses. Santiago de Chile (La Chasscona), Valparaiso( La sebastiana) and Isla Negra..
I introduced many of my English speaking friends to GABO, Gabriel Garcia Marquez when his book One Hundred Years of Solitude came out.. Somewhere in his many interviews he mentioned that his good friend Alvaro Mutis was a better writer than him. It so happened that on another transit through New York city one of the magazines had a poem called Caravansary translated.. I just loved it.
Maqroll El Gaviero became my alter ego and I became Maqroll El Gaviero Judio with a good friend Abdur Bashur, the lover of palms and many others from the latin american literary dream world...
Here is an excerpt from the CV of Maqroll El Gaviero Judio.
...On receiving a note from the Malabar coast that home of an aging Jew was about to be passed on to him, he imagined himself ensconced there, waited on by thin Malabari Moslems who questioned their faith, with his traveling companion, the Prince of Palms and the little girl who loved him so much that she continually adoringly attached herself to other lovers in faraway lands she dreamt of visiting with him. Making vagrancy a profession young people all over the world could aspire to, he plans to convert the 700 year old synagogue, when it is not in use, of course, into a Museum of Vagrant Peoples where others may find refuge from the restriction imposed upon them by their fear of being alive
Alvaro Mutis, Gabo, Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Lezama Lima these classic writers are always in my world view and my head. Leonardo Padura is trying to enter that space.
Imagine my great pleasure when a close friend from that huge land to the south that speak the lusitanian tongue, said she had managed to procure a copy of the poems by Alvaro Mutis!
I have been dreaming of this poem for months if not years and it is to arrive from that land in the south..
Some unexpected pleasures are too sweet to describe.
I repaired my self to Ricky's cafe and gave special instructions to the venezuelan waitress to make Cafe Cortadito like we drink in Havana and began writing what came to my mind
so this is my CV (dont ask me where I went to medical school or studied my postgraduate course in Anthropology)
In Akko, he as ejected from the Hummus Store of Sayed the Palestinian, only to find himself staring at the lodgings of the medieval poet from Isfahan.
A proto-dravidian immigration offer at the middle of the night refused him entry to the land of Dosai and Idly, forcing him to spend the night on the cold floor of a rundown airport, with a group of Nigerians waiting to be deported.
In Cochin, overcome by hunger, he dressed himself as a priest and helped himself to the sacred wine and wafers, he was condemned but forgiven by the venerable patriarch of the Syrian Catholic Church, on the promise to become a christian, a promise he never kept.
In Baracoa, in the eastern part of the island of Cuba, his name is written on plaques honouring him as an authority on local indigenous archeology and a photo of him dressed in Lakota Indian regalia is kept besides the Cross that Cristobal Colon left there on his visit to Cuba in 1493. Syncretic followers of the afro-cuban religion worship him as YEHOO the spirit of Friendship and Fertility.
This my dear friends is my life
I am feeling extraordinarily happy, but slightly worried how I will survive the CDG-JED-COK flight on the dry airline of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia..
