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Page 154
least to remain perplexed. The book even bears an introduction by one of its characters, Gervasio Montenegro. Now, a character should not write the introduction to the book that will give him or her life. But what is worse, every time that Montenegro appears in one of the book's stories, he looks like a fool. How can the reader take him seriously when he fervently praises his authors with flashy, pompous, academic rhetoric? We are confronted with the paradox of Epimenides of Crete: all the Cretans are liars, says Epimenides, but how can we believe him, given that he too is from Crete and therefore a liar? (By the way, Saint Paul, not a character invented by Borges, in his letter to Titus cites Epimenides's dictum as a reliable source concerning the deceitful nature of the Cretans, because [he notes] if the man who says it is from Creteand therefore knows the Cretanswe have to trust him. . . . )
2.
But the reasons why Six Problems must have baffled the Argentines do not end here. In these stories, we find ourselves face to face with another game, one destined to lose force in translation, no matter how good the translator. The speeches of the characters who come to visit Don Isidro in his cell are a fireworks display of commonplace expressions, cultural tics, and Kitsch weaknesses and fads of the Argentine intelligentsia of the time. And even if translators do their best (but they would fail even in translating this Spanish into a Spanish dialect different from the one spoken among Lavalle, Corrientes, and la Boca), the various ironic references are bound to be lost because the readers, in any case, are different: they speak another language and they are not the Argentine readers of 1942. The readers, therefore, must make an effort to imagine this earlier Buenos Aires, as well as the parodic virulence that a book such as this could embody; a book in which (says Rodriguez Monegal) "the solemnity of spoken Argentine, with all its variations (working-class slang, the Frenchified speech of pseudo-intellectuals, the thick and obsolete Spanish of Spaniards, Italianate jargon) was exploded through characters who were less narrative figures than figures of speech. For the first time in Argentina a deliberate attempt to create narrative through the parody of narrative form and speech was successful" (368).
There comes to mind an etymological game, which I will mention with no guaranties to fans of Isidore (Isidro?) of Seville, Heidegger, or Derridean exercises on drift: the fact that Don Isidro's name is Parodi should not be surprising, since Parodi is a very common Italian name (from Liguria), and nothing is more common in Argentina than an Ital-

 
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