Cortázar's Letters

Archipelago Books in Brooklyn has released the first installment of what will presumably be a two-volume edition of Julio Cortázar's selected correspondence, ably translated by Anne McLean and Sarah Moses. At more than 600 pages, Dear Julio makes for a substantial (and handsome) volume, condensed from the first half of the substantial five-volume Spanish-language edition of the author's complete Cartas published by Alfaguara. Much, inevitably, has been left out, but there's no shortage of entertaining and illuminating material here, including Cortázar's often hilarious letters to Sara and Paul Blackburn and to Gregory Rabassa, the translator of Rayuela (Hopscotch).

Dear Julio isn't aimed at literary scholars, who will no doubt continue to refer to the Alfaguara volumes. There's no Preface, no Introduction, no Note from the Translators, no Index, and only a handful of explanatory footnotes. This has advantages and disavantages. On the one hand, Cortázar himself was averse to pedantry and academic apparatus — though he could be a stickler when it came to the editing and publishing of his own work — and by eliminating all but a few notes the reader is free to relax and concentrate on enjoying brilliant letter-writing of a kind that, in an age of instant electronic communication, is unlikely to be revived soon.

The downside, unfortunately, is that many readers, especially in the English-speaking world, will be unfamiliar with the names of many of the recipients of the letters, as well as the names of people mentioned in passing (sometimes by only a first name). A case in point is that of the writer and translator Edith Aron (1923-2020), who, we read, was at the center of an awkward kerfuffle involving the German translations of several of Cortázar's works. Cortázar had given Aron his novel Los Premios (The Winners) to translate, but Aron apparently wasn't up to it. When her work was shown to several expert readers (at her own suggestion) it was unanimously deemed unacceptable, and the subsequent decision by Cortázar and his Argentine publisher to take her off the project led to considerable bitterness on her part. But there's more to the story, and without an explanatory note it's easy to miss. Cortázar writes to his publisher, Paco Porrúa:

I told Edith a long time ago in Paris that she wasn't qualified intellectually to translate Rayuela, and there ensued one of those scenes that's better left unsaid. I don't need to tell you who Edith is, do I? You'll have long figured it out. So can you imagine her translating Rayuela? She would make great intuitive decisions, but all that entails information (in the modern sense of the word) would be botched. In Rayuela, you'll recall, La Maga confused Thomas Aquinas with the other Thomas [the Apostle]. This would happen on every line...

What Porrúa would have "long figured out" is that Edith Aron was the primary "inspiration" (to the extent that a character in a work of fiction can be said to be drawn from a model) for the character of La Maga, and Cortázar's somewhat condescending characterization of Aron as intuitive (i.e. feminine) but ill-informed and unintellectual fits La Maga to a T. Why Cortázar would have suggested that Aron translate Los premios in the first place if he didn't think she could handle Rayuela is another matter. A brief note identifying her would have been advisable.

The appealing vignette on the cover is doubly appropriate, because it's the work of the painter Zao Wu-Ki (1920-2013), whom Cortázar mentions admiringly several times, and because Cortázar highly approved of cats.

On Board the Kangaroo

I've found some surprising things on the bookshelves in the free stuff shed at our local dump, but The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin has to be one of the most unlikely. Published in Ireland in 2021 by Four Courts Press, it presents the repertoire of a renowned Irish singer and song collector who died in 1956, leaving behind an archive of recorded and written material encompassing some 200 songs, many of them in her native Irish. The book, compiled by her grandson Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, was issued along with two CDS, which, unfortunately, my copy lacks.

Cronin sang or collected versions of familiar English-language songs like "High Germany," "The Derby Ram," and "Green Grow the Rushes O," as well as pieces that are otherwise unknown; in some cases her song-lists preserve a title only. The song that leapt out for me was one she called "On Board the Kangaroo." When I saw this I recognized it and remembered that I had heard her name before, because when Christy Moore recorded the song with Planxty, under the title "The Good Ship Kangaroo," he mentioned that he had learned it "from the singing of the late Mrs. Elizabeth Cronin of Macroom, Co. Cork." He elaborates in his own song collection, One Voice:

Somewhere along the line I came to possess a recording of Mrs Cronin's beautiful singing. She had a unique sound, a beautiful voice combined with perfect diction and her singing in English was wonderfully coloured by the inflections of her native tongue. I simply love the way this woman sings.

The song in question is narrated by a man who signs up for a tour as cook and steward on the Kangaroo, and finds, when he returns months later, that his true love has run off with another man. The lyrics are quite colorful and funny:

Our ship it was homeward bound from many's the foreign shore
Many's the foreign present unto my love I bore
I brought tortoises from Tenerife and ties [sic] from Timbuktu
A China rat, a Bengal cat and a Bombay cockatoo

Paid off I sought her dwelling on a street above the town
Where an ancient dame upon the line was hanging out her gown
Where is my love she's vanished sir about six months ago
With a smart young man who drives the van for Chaplin Son & Co

Refrain:

I never thought she would prove false or either prove untrue
As we sailed away from Milford Bay on board the Kangaroo

The version of the lyrics above is from One Voice; I suspect that "ties" is a mistranscription of "toys." Below are recordings of the song by Planxty, from After the Break, and by Elizabeth Cronin:

There's no indication that Cronin ever claimed to have composed the song, although for years I assumed it was hers. Clearly it's too clever and polished to be a textbook example of collective invention and transmission; someone had to have written the song. But who? The extensive notes in The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin don't attempt to identify the original source.

As it turns out, for once we have a fairly definite answer. It was composed by an English music hall performer named Harry Clifton, and published as sheet music in 1865. The National Library of Australia has a copy, and portions of the lyrics are right there on the cover:

How Cronin learned the song may never be known, nor is it clear why Clifton's authorship of it was forgotten for so long, but no doubt the composer would have been tickled to learn that it is still being sung 150 years later.

What Am I Meant to Do?

Jeanne, a single woman who has been going through the end of a relationship with her longtime girlfriend, receives an unexpected visit from her widowed sister Suzanne, who brings in tow her two children, a boy of nine and a girl of six. Though a bit taken back at first (the sisters evidently have had an uncomfortable relationship), she ushers them inside, makes them a meal, and settles them down for the night. The next morning Suzanne has gone, leaving a note, the keys to her flat, and the two children, who barely know their aunt. The police are unable to help, since the disappearance is clearly voluntary; Suzanne's trail quickly grows cold. Moreover, the children are now in legal limbo, since Jeanne, who has never wanted children of her own, hasn't been declared their legal guardian and can't, initially, even register them for the start of the school year. They're also emotionally vulnerable — as is everyone in this movie — and difficult to handle.

From that brief description Nathan Ambrosioni's 2025 film Les enfants vont bien would seem to be in danger of falling into one or both of two fairly worked-out veins: the melodramatic thriller about a family member who mysteriously disappears, and the sentimental narrative about a bachelor or single woman who is suddenly left to care for someone else's orphaned or abandoned child or children. In fact, it hews to neither formula, and is a better film for it. Without giving too much away, Suzanne's disappearance, though it sets the story in motion, recedes into the background, and Jeanne's relationship with her newfound wards never produces the facile heartwarmer it could easily have become in lesser hands. The children are in fact reasonably adorable, but they aren't simpering cherubs; they're just ordinary kids who have had a tough time of it and show the scars.

Jeanne takes over the care of the children not because she has to, or wants to, or even out of some abstract sense of doing the right thing; she does it because abandoning them to whatever uncertain fate would otherwise overtake them is unthinkable. In Ambrosioni's world there are no simple happy endings but people get on with doing what they have to do. That's mostly how life goes.

Les enfants vont bien has been released in English under the title Out of Love, perhaps because the distributors thought that anything like The Kids Are All Right would remind too many people of the Who. It's available from several streaming services. A trailer with English subtitles is here.

My theme is memory

I was checking a fact in a Joni Mitchell discography yesterday and spotted a listing of "The Priest," from her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon. I quickly realized two things: that I probably hadn't heard or thought about the song for at least twenty-five years, and that I still remembered all of the lyrics, almost verbatim, and in the right order.

And then of course I realized a third thing: that I have no idea whatsoever how the brain or mind is able to do that.

(Title credit: Evelyn Waugh.)

Dónal Lunny (1947-2026)

It's been a rough year for Irish music already, and now sadly the great Dónal Lunny has died. Among the many obits and notices coming in are those from the Guardian and RTE, and I won't try to duplicate them. I've been a fan since his days in Planxty and was lucky enough to see him live in the 1990s, when he organized a band called Coolfin that toured the US. Lunny was better known as an instrumentalist, band leader (and band mate), and producer than as a lead singer, though here and there he sung a few songs in Irish in the sean-nós style. His work on the bouzouki, especially in Planxty and the Bothy Band, has had a profound influence on generations of younger musicians.

As fate would have it, I had tickets for an evening of music by a group called the Strayaways on the day he died. That fine trio consists of fiddlers Kevin Burke and Dylan Foley as well as the bouzouki player Eamon O'Leary. Burke, the senior member, is another of the giants of Irish music, with a career spanning more than a half-century, and he played with Dónal Lunny frequently, notably in the Bothy Band and as supporting musicians on the landmark Andy Irvine / Paul Brady album released in 1976. Towards the end of the evening the Strayaways dedicated several sets of Bothy Band tunes to Lunny, and it was good to see that the tradition he did so much to carry forward is in no danger of disappearing.

Domestic tranquility

This morning Marian woke me up just before dawn to tell me that one of the apes had gotten outside again. I lifted up the window shade a bit and, sure enough, there it was resting on its haunches on the lawn, looking over a wilted dandelion it had found amid the grass.

It didn't take long to persuade it to come back inside — it never does. By the time we got through the doorway its fellow had roused itself and stared at us mutely as we came into the kitchen. The apes ambled down the hall to their room and I started making tea. "Marian," I said, "you know we can't keep them here anymore. They'll have to go back." She nodded. Neither of us said exactly what "go back" might mean, and perhaps we didn't know.

Written before sunrise

I wake up early by habit and by nature, using no alarm. In part this is because I turn in early as well, but in truth I've just never had much aptitude for sleep, tossing and turning and waking up multiple times, and the quiet early morning hours are my most productive time of day. I also have a prejudice against using artificial light in the morning, which means, by this time of year, that I'm generally waking up during the period of what is called astronomical twilight and that I get out of bed during the phase known as nautical twilight, with an hour or so still to go before the sun actually rises. If I put up the window shades a bit there's enough moonlight and ambient light to find my clothes in, and I press the on button on my phone to give me enough light to make my way downstairs without falling over the dog, who is mostly black, or the cat (in the night all cats are black). The refrigerator light, when I reach in for cream, is a bit blinding at this hour, and when I open the laptop I realize that I have no idea how the keyboard lights up, but it does. By 6:30 AM I can see the changing colors of the trees outside, and grazing deer if there are any (there aren't).

The temperature has dipped into the thirties overnight, although a frost isn't expected for at least a couple of weeks, even here in southern Maine. I also have a prejudice against turning the heat on in the morning, for as long as I can stand it, so in the coming months the temptation to stay in bed in the dark will be greater. But now the sun is about to rise and it's time to stop.