Tierra del Fuego (Spanish Edition) [Paperback]

Francisco Coloane (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Andres Bello (May 1999)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 8489691819
• ISBN-13: 978-8489691810
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,444,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars "... fui mecido por el mar desde mi nascimento...", September 14, 2010

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This review is from: Tierra del Fuego (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)

The prose of "Tierra del Fuego" gives quite a different impression in Francisco Coloane's original Spanish than in the English translation by Howard Curtis. Here's a sample of each, from the conclusion of the story How the Chilote Otey Died / De cómo murió el chilote Otey:

"As an experience breaker, Rivera knew that an exhausted horse obeys neither spures nor whip, but that it will not fall while it still feels its rider on its back. That was why he kept his story very short. No sooner had he finished it than he got off his horse and the noble beast collapsed. Under the snow. the whole of Patagonia was like a white poncho climbing the slopes of the Payne Mountains to its high towers, which pointed somberly at the sky like three colossal fingers. And so it was that the memory of how the Chilote Otey died was preserved."
- That's not bad writing, mind you, but it's 'generic', the standard male-action English of post-Hemingway America, not quite distinctive enough to match the Alaskan stories of Jack London but close enough to suggest the comparison. But now the Spanish:
"Como buen amansador, Rivera sabía que un caballo reventado no obedece ni a espuela ni a rebenque, pero no cae mientras sienta a su jinete encima. Por eso su relato fue muy breve, y, al terminarlo, se bájo del caballo al mismo tiempo que la noble bestia se desplomaba. Con la nevada, toda la Patagonia parecîa un gran poncho blanco que ascendía por los faldeos del Payen hasta sus torres que, como tres dedos colosales, apuntaban sombríamente al cielo. Y así conservó memoria de cómo murió el chilote Otey."
The English translation is word-for-word, but the words ring differently. The vocabulary is of a different texture. This is the elegant Castilian of the 'tertulio', the traditional literary soirée of the Hispanic middle class in the plaza cafés of Old and New Spain. Coloane's style is anything but rough-and-ready! It's as "formal" - the Spanish sense - as the language of Pio Baroja, Unamuno, or Perez Galdos. It sounds, and is, specific to a venerated literary tradition.

Coloane was himself a "Chilote", a person from the island Chiloé, at the frontier of the glaciers and fiords of Chile's Antarctic south. It's worth a visit to google maps and photos, if you decide to read this collection of stories, to get a sense of just how rugged Patagonia is. Start with "Torres del Payne", a region that is now a spectacular National Park where one can tour by kayak and foot. I've been there, done that. I'd be willing to declare that it's the most beautiful place on Earth, but it's no country for 'softies'. Coloane's stories, yet more than London's, begin where ease and comfort stop. They are tales of hardened men pitted against each other and against a land that is often too hard even for the hardest of them.

Like Jack London, Coloane was a lifelong communist, and more of an active one than a mere barroom talker. Official recognition of his genius didn't come to him from the Chilean ruling class until after his death in 2002, at age 82. His stories were written over a period of 60 years, but chiefly from about 1945 to 1956, the year of the Spanish publication of the collection "Tierra del Fuego". The strangest, most colorful story in this collection is the second -- On the Horse of Dawn / En el caballo de la aurora -- which portrays the amnesiac hallucinations of a 'bookkeeper' who survives being tossed from a mustang. It's almost impossible to conceive that this story was written before 1956! Amongst the 'visions' of the injured bookkeeper are the insight that birds, particularly 'ostriches', are evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, and the still-controversial assertion that humans had reached and occupied southern Chile in to interglacial period, possibly 20,000 years ago! Can we credit that writers and fishermen from the remotest crannies of Patagonia realized such notions before all the paleontologists and archaeologists of North America?

There's something deeper in Coloane's tales than simple realism. More is at stake, as evidenced by his style, than harsh survival and the cruelty of tough men to anyone weaker. Coloane is not, as I read him, another 'social Darwinist' survival-of-the-fittest refugee from civilization. The 'nature' in which he sets his stories is not 'implacable' or 'hostile". It's simply nature, without any touch of the Pathetic Fallacy. At least that's my impression, that Coloane never suppose Nature to have Will, whether benevolent or malevolent, though clearly some of the characters in his stories do make that supposition. And it's Nature at the height of what we human perceive as beauty, so beautiful in fact that a Man is lucky even to have a chance to die there.