The Russian is trying to keep his eyes open because he paid good money for the show but has been sampling the nightlife rather heavily. The Israeli is knocking back wine by the gallon and trying to pick up the Brasilian. The Englishman is complaining that he ordered his steak well done but it's just about mooing still. I haven't done this before - the full tourist deal: tango show with 'free' tango lesson included, dinner, the works. It's all ultra-slick, the busload of tourist cattle herded from point to point with efficiency and charm by young, handsome, smiling Buenos Aireans in black fedoras. The tango lesson is a mixed experience. Whether the move I can only term the 'legover' at the end of the twenty-second routine we get taught is hot or just plain wrong depends on whether your partner is a lithe, black-eyed Brasilian or a sixty-five-year-old housewife from Kansas City with arthritis. My conclusions from the lesson and the show? Firstly, that the learning of tango presents a major testicular hazard. Secondly, that tango is hotter than swing (the style of dance I've been learning in Oz). Yes, even hotter than belboa.

The dancers descend with intent into the aisles. Uh-oh. I am, however, comfortable in the knowledge that, despite my astonishing record for being singled out for public humiliation at every show I attend, the Russian is between me and danger. The Russian was between me and danger. The dancer is coming our way and I never saw a sleepy Russian move so fast. In a flash he's on the other side of the table and the dancer is raising her spangly finger... Nooooooo!! Yep, there's no escaping it. I join the damned in the aisle. I do my brave best to hold my own with the professional tango dancer. Then suddenly - baddaboom baddabang! - the other victims are returned to their seats while I'm abducted by three black-clad Argentinians, 'disappeared', then returned with fedora on head to be swept back down the aisle in the arms of the hottest of the tango dancers. Lights. Applause. Then the sweet anonymity of my seat. What was all that about? The biggest question though is: Why me? Why always me?

Ah well, that was my little touristy indulgence. Not exactly my thing, but kinda fun nevertheless, and the tango was spectacular. I think the Israeli got the girl too.

So I'm leaving Buenos Aires tonight for Cordoba, and I wish I could linger. My impressions of this city have changed a lot from my first post. Yes, it's dirty and grandiose and noisy. But it's not nearly as third world as I first thought. There are some very salubrious districts, you can get pretty much anything (except, it seems, a SIM card that works properly in my iPhone 4), and the lifestyle is modern and with-it. It's seductive and exciting and bursting with artists and musicians. I love this place, and I can fully understand the westerners I've met who've decided to live here, or 'commute' between their life in Australia or wherever and their life here. If only I had six months and I was twenty-five and fancy-free again. I'd hit the Spanish lessons hard and... (sigh).

I spent the day in the Recoleta district yesterday, wandering the famous cemetery where Eva Perron, among other Argentinian luminaries, is buried. It's spooky and atmospheric and a piece of walk-in art. Photos don't show it of course, but here's one anyway:


On the Spanish front, I'm improving. I woke up the other morning and stuff had sunk in somehow. I could say things. I can now read about 80% of what I see. Perhaps 'read' is the wrong word. 'Decipher' maybe. I can make sentences that amazingly have the desired effect upon their recipients. Ooh look! I say magic words, he does things! I just can't understand anyone. I swear these Argentinians can't speak proper Spanish! The consonants sometimes change for mysterious reasons, and my ability to interpret the word as I learned it is tenuous enough. It's hopeless...

OK, time to go find some lunch.

Day two

I'm warming to this city. I sat today in the Plaza de Majo in the microcentro, the centre of town, and made a video postcard for my son Jude. There were marchers there - I was able to make out that they were protesting about and memorialising the killing of activist students by the previous government. I was shocked - and ashamed of my ignorance - that Argentina's history of repression was so recent. I could translate with a few guesses the headline of their leaflet: "When we asked for work they murdered us. When we demanded a life of dignity they imprisoned us."

The city looks much less third world here: impressive old European buildings, edifices on a grandiose scale, but decaying, graffiti-ridden, their pretensions to national slendour belied by the dirt and the squalor of the sprawling city all around. I wandered down the long avenue towards the city's famous obelisk, another vast monument to vaulting ambitions unrealised. Echoes of Albert Speer's Berlin, almost... Lots of shops for the wealthy here, ritzy opulence cheek-by-jowl with your typical third-world vendor: some guy in a three by three metre alcove flogging cheap soap, cigarettes, Pepsi.

I manage a conversation in part Spanish, part English with a hawker from Chile who is in Argetina studying architecture at university - so he tells me - but he looks like a near beggar. Education is free here, he explains. He's almost as new to Buenos Aires as me - it's his first week. He smiles wistfully about the differences between his little village and this mega-metropolis. The Spanish is different, he complains. Not "vos" for "you", but "tu". And the food. He looks sad. I take pity and buy one of his pendants, probably for way too much. I don't even haggle. That westerner-in-a-developing-country conflict:I'm a mug. No, it's the least I can do. I'm being generous. No, I'm a mug, but I don't care. Of course if any Argentinian heard me call it a developing country they'd probably flip. But this kid... it's India again. And the two beggars on the subway, a boy maybe ten chanting his cry for alms, a hoarse, cawing sound, and his sister or brother - hard to tell - probably three or four and filthy from head to foot. The boy holds her and talks to her because she's crying. I can make out the word word "baño". Bathroom. He's ten and he's the adult.

None of this is or should be shocking to me. But there's still the sadness. Maybe the difference from India is that I didn't have a child myself back then. It shocked me then because it was new and I was privileged and naive. It saddens me now because I look at that filthy, bare-footed kid and think, "that's Jude." Might as well be but for the accidents of fate.

May I say once again how it pains me to be so linguistically incompetent? I should perhaps add that I have some natural prowess with languages, and my Chilean friend was most impressed when I said I only started learning Spanish a month ago. (On the other hand, he asked me where I learned Spanish - "It's very funny". I laughed and said, "In Australia". I wasn't going into the iPhone thing again!) But quick learner or not, a month is a month. It's atrocious.

The daily minor humiliations kill me. Example:

Waiter comes to take my order. I want to say "I'm still deciding", but the grammatical complexities of that are beyond me in the moment. I can barely conjugate the two forms of "to be" on the spot. I come up with "I decide..." The waiter looks at me blankly, and finallyI get out the word "still". "Decido .... todavia." My expression (of pain? fear? insanity?) causes him to back away with raised palms as if I had produced a pistol instead of a dodgy Spanish utterance. "No problem, take your time," he says in perfect English. After he's gone I drag up some kind of grammatical insight. "Estoy decidiendo todavia". That would have worked quite well. The problem is when you put it all together properly, people talk actual Spanish to you, which is naturally hopeless.

Example two: I catch taxi, explain I want to go to "Estacion plaza Italia". He nods and off we go. Great. I relax. Then he starts up. Yippity blabbity blabbity blab. I trot out the usual line - my Spanish is very bad. I'm a beginner. He tries again. Yippity yoppity yappity yop. "Perdon, no entiendo". Sorry, I don't understand. No problemo: plaza Italia! Si, plaza Italia! (Phew). I get to said train station, hop out, run across to the subway entrance and ... it's locked up. Ah. So that's what yippity yappity blabbity blab means. Thank God he's left so I don't have to crawl back into the same taxi for the rest of the journey home. In the new taxi I make polite conversation about the size of Buenos Aires, the difficulties of learning Spanish etc. More yippity. Understand? he asks in English. "Si, entiendo" I say. I just can't bear to say no again, even though I in fact haven't a clue. I try to fool myself into believing I got away with it. I didn't.

The food tastes of Buenos Aires. I don't know how they do it. It looks just like an Australian vege lasagne, but it tastes like Buenos Aires. Not bad exactly. Just somehow Argentinian.

Slept like a flea-ridden dog last night. Body doesn't believe the relative position of earth and sun. Day of the zombie awaits...

Hola, Buenos Aires

A city is like a lover - smell is everything. I remember on my first trip to India, when Mumbai was still Bombay, how I was struck by the city's pervasive perfume. A sweetish smell, like a spice, but freighted with complexity. A smell of rosewater and shit and betelnut and grimy human living. Even the fruit juice I drank tasted of it, as if it were some kind of obligatory local condiment. It scared me, as a twenty-one year old venturing for the first time into the third world, because of its complete alien-ness, its suggestion of layers upon layers of ingrained life. Coming from my sanitised Australian suburb, the floral-fecal smell of Bombay challenged my white, middle-class squeamishness, my unconscious rejection of the physicality of existence.

Buenos Aires has a particular smell too. A very different one from Bombay circa 1989, but a particular aroma that, once you register it consciously, makes you think, what is that? It also makes you wonder, as a lover's smell can, are you and I going to get along? Or are we too chemically different, will we react to one another like incompatible transplants? Because smell is a city's chemistry, and I'm convinced it works on and with our chemistry too, that there's a reaction. Perhaps that reaction somehow becomes the fate we experience in that city - whether it breaks or steals our heart, makes us king or robs us blind...

I am holed up now in a guest house somewhat further from the city centre than the internet ad promised, and I have actually lost track of how long I haven't slept for. I think it's about 28-odd hours now, so if my prose is lacking, I trust you'll cut me some slack. In fact, I'm just now starting to become delirious, and my eyelids keep spontaneously closing, so I'll keep it short. ish.

First impressions of BA: it looks like a third world city, it smells like a third world city, it functions like a third world city, but it costs like a first world city. Strange. What's more everyone speaks in Spanish all the time. Curiouser and curiouser. Now I never flattered myself that my Spanish was anything but dreadful, but, well it's even dreadfuller than that. I did have something resembling a Spanish conversation with the taxi driver who ripped me off from the airport. A conversation in which it took me about thirty seconds to remember the word for 'twelve'. Absurd. I had to actually count up to it in my head to get it. In fact -I'll admit it - I never did get it. I remembered the word for 'fourteen' and used that instead because it was close enough for the purpose (how many hours was the flight?). It was pure stage fright of course - my first actual conversation in actual Spanish in actual Argentina.

I was relieved that the receptionist at the guesthouse spoke English very well. He asked if I spoke any Spanish and I replied (in nice Espanol) that I was learning, but had only been doing so for a month. Any class in particular, he asked. I continued to explain in Spanish that I'd learnt it from an iPhone app. That seemed to amuse him for some reason. Later he wrote the word 'hoy' on a map and then, after explaining it meant 'today', said, with just a touch of irony, 'But you probably know that from your iPhone program.'

I said, 'It's a good program.'

And he said, 'Sure. You made a whole, properly formed Spanish sentence before and everything.'

Could it be there are limits to the iPhone's power?? My world, my world is crumbling!

Moving right along... I wandered down to San Telmo, the old, cobble-paved district where they sell lots of pricey antiques. After browsing for a while I thought I'd buy a certain young someone a present of a big old Argentinian coin, only it turned out to cost 750 pesos (divide by three-ish). But they do have the most fabulous old junk, including swords and daggers that were obviously real antique weapons, still sharp. Try buying one of those in the nanny state! (OK, I believe in our weapons laws, but still... there's something so charming and liberating about unregulated countries.)

Another thing I failed to fully appreciate about Buenos Aires ... it's eff'n big. Fourteen million people according to the taxi driver (unless my Spanish betrayed me again). It's eff'n big and it's eff'n noisy and Buenos Aires? Good airs? No. No, these are not good airs at all. Time to follow in Mumbai's footsteps and get a new name. Malos Olors, I suggest. Catchy.

(The following is cross-posted from the Kill Your Darlings blog - KYD asked me to write a post which would speak to my story 'Shock' which appeared in KYD volume II.)

When I wrote the story ‘Shock’, what was foremost in my mind was the idea of vulnerability and exploitation. It’s a story about age exploiting youth, white exploiting black, male exploiting female. It’s a theme that’s been on my mind again recently because of two non-fiction books I’ve just finished reading: Jonathon Safran-Foer’s Eating Animals — an expose of factory farming and a plea for vegetarianism — and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, an account of the extraordinary cupidity and stupidity which led to the Global Financial Crisis.

KFC and GFC. Although ostensibly about two quite different phenomena, I had the feeling I was reading about two ends of the same exploitative economic machine. On the one hand, the giant, toxic cesspits next to factory-style hog-farms in the US that poison rivers and cause health problems for miles around; on the other mortgage-backed bonds comprised of worthless, toxic loans built on the back of the American poor. The millions of dollars creamed off the top of the economy by bankers and traders on Wall Street are in a sense the final, abstracted product of the same exploitative system that, at its other end, produces cesspits so poisonous that to fall into one is to die.

Both books reminded me that we cannot really escape the systems we inhabit. The interchangeability of money means that, in a sense, exploitative economic practices such as factory farming, clear-felling and greed-driven money markets taint every dollar in the economy - we are always ‘buying in’ to the ethics of the system as a whole.

In ‘Shock’, Smithy - a white male approaching middle age - exploits and deceives a young African American girl who mistakes him for her internet date. It’s the type of interpersonal exploitation that occurs all the time, even if the premise of the story exaggerates the element of deception often involved in sexual seduction. There are internet sites that elaborate complex psychological strategies for the seduction of young women, and to engage in such behaviour (to be a ‘player’) seems to have at least as much dubious macho kudos about it as ethical stigma. And there can be no doubt that much of the widely viewed and circulated pornography on the internet is based on an exploitation that as viewers we can hardly be unaware of, yet choose to overlook.

It’s a scary thing, but the more I look for it, the more exploitation I find. It has become normalised in so many areas. But what drives it? In ‘Shock’, Smithy is driven by a ravenous emotional hunger that turns him into an opportunistic sexual predator. It’s no doubt a gross simplification, but I wonder if such hunger isn’t the driver behind most exploitation: this sense of lack and emptiness, a black hole of desire that both feeds and is fed by the messages we tell ourselves and are told by advertisers and the media.

About a quarter of the way through, I wanted to stop reading Eating Animals. Not because the descriptions of horrific animal suffering disturbed me (though they did), but because I recognised that the ethical argument against meat was irresistible, and it wasn’t a message I wanted to hear. It’s one thing to enjoy the pleasure of moral outrage, another to give up roast chicken forever!

And yet, as of two weeks ago, I’m a reluctant vegetarian. Thanks a lot Jonathon Safran-Foer!

On loving German... and two more translations

There's a scene in '30 Rock' in which Liz is asked by Jack if she speaks German, and Liz replies in German, 'Yes, I think it's the most beautiful language in the world.' Then Jack asks her a question and she replies with a preposterously long outburst of German-sounding syllables, for which the subtitled translation is 'Yeah'. Uh huh: German is horribly ugly and has absurdly long words. That's the joke of course. Here's another: Italian is sung, French is spoken, English is spat, German is vomited. (I can't remember where I heard that one). It's a truism that German is ugly, guttural and harsh. And it can be. It's fortunate for film-makers that the Nazis were German and not, say, French, because those Nazi officers just wouldn't sound right barking out their orders in a romance language. But German's supposedly guttural sound is overstated. The most guttural sound in German is the ch in 'Acht', which is actually a much softer sound than the glottal consonants that one finds for instance in Arabic.

In fact I suspect German's reputation for ugliness is a hangover from World War II: Much of the world was exposed to the sound of German by the hate speeches of Hitler and Goebbels. The ugly, hateful sentiments of these tirades could have made any language sound hideous. Mussolini's speeches in Italian don't sound like a Rossini opera either: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr2swTOI49Q). But it can't be denied that German was a particularly well adapted linguistic vehicle for fascist ideology. There is a line in one of Goebbels' speeches that sticks in my mind particularly as an example of German at its ugliest, when uttered with Goebbel's shrill viciousness: "Wir sind nicht hier, um Kompromisse zu machen, sondern um zu zerstören und vernichten." We are not here to make compromises, but to destroy and annihilate.

And yet I love German and flinched a little at the 30 Rock gibe, because this preconception about German's ugliness actually closes people to the beauty in the language. Good example: the German poetry recited in the 2006 German film 'Das Leben der Anderen' (The Lives of Others). The film also includes a beautiful song version of the Borchert poem 'Versuch Es' ('Try It') which you can listen to here. I'm sure every language has its beauty and I dare say if I'd learned, say, Spanish at school instead of German, I'd probably love that language. But there's something about the rich complexity of German that I just find incredibly satisfying to speak. It's as if the rush of plosives and sibilants satisfies a sort of thirst in me. I am aware of the weirdness of how that probably sounds to someone who hasn't been possessed by a foreign language in that way. Perhaps the fact that German remains a second language - always that slight gap removed - allows me to hear it with a kind of detachment that my complete oneness with English does not permit for my native tongue. I can hear German both as pure 'speech-music', and understand its meaning.

This musical appreciation has its payoff in terms of my facility with the language. Germans often mistake me for a native speaker at first. That is purely to do with vocal mimicry (though my grammar is good) - if I talk for long enough the little idiomatic lapses and vocabulary stutters will eventually expose me. I've only spent six weeks in Germany and that was many years ago, so I haven't experienced the immersion required for complete mastery.

There seems to be a familial thing about this passion of mine: my grandfather Brinley Newton-John was a Welshman with an exceptional facility with German. He was Professor of German at Melbourne University and his German was so good he was used by British Intelligence to interrogate German officers during the war. His technique: to take them out to dinner and loosen their tongues with wine. They would mistake him for a German and soon enough spill the desired information.

Enough on me and my German. Here are two of my favourites from among the poems by Martin Auer I've recently translated. (Auer has translated these two poems into English himself, and you can find his (somewhat different) versions at martinauer.net.)

Tommy

I’m going to have a child, says Tommy
Boys don’t have children, says Annalise
Well I am!

Tommy’s belly gets bigger
What is your child doing? says Annalise
It is growing and getting bigger, says Tommy, I can already hear it talking
Children don’t talk in your tummy! says Annalise
Well mine does!

Why am I alone? says the child in Tommy’s belly
You’re with me, says Tommy

There are houses, says Tommy, and gardens and fences
and there’s the sky
I know, says the child

Do you want to be born? Tommy asks the child
What will happen then? says the child
Everything that is always happening, says Tommy
I want to try it!
But don’t get a fright! says Tommy

Where has your child gone? asks Annalise
It has run off into the world, says Tommy
Little children don’t run off into the world!
Well mine did!

Tommy dreams of a sea that is still dark in the morning
There is the wind, says Tommy, and long grey clouds that are fast
I know, says the child
The child runs to the sea
In the morning he plays alone in the sand
Play with me, says the child to the sea, and the sea plays with him

I died, says the child
I’ve come back into your belly
There are ships, says Tommy, and big machines
I know, says the child

Children don’t come back into your tummy! says Annalise
Well mine did!

I’m a mermaid, she says

I’m a mermaid, she says,
I come through the water mains.
My family lived in the south
before they moved to this town.
They live in a lift
over on second street
and when they eat breakfast
the dentist from the twelfth floor
always dips his coat in their coffee.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

And in the park it’s so bright today,
the air is like silver.
And baby gets an ice-cream
and has a choking fit.
And a little flying camera
takes photos of us with pink bows,
and the man selling pretzels
goes broke before our eyes.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

Well aren’t these glorious times, she says,
there are free vouchers for everything.
And yesterday I had myself insured
against melancholia and fear of death.
And now everyone has a phone in their car,
a credit card and an insurance number.
And even the police
wear valentines in their hair.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

I’m a mermaid, she says,
I can never drown.
But whenever I see goldfish
I feel terribly sick.
And maybe tomorrow peace will break out,
then we’ll go paint the town red.
And maybe there won’t be peace,
But we’ll soon see.

Another Martin Auer poem translated from the German

On the day we go over the border

On the day we go over the border,
can you see the city already, over the river?
On the day we go over the border
can you see it?

We will find a boat
tied up, hidden in the bushes.
We will throw a rope with a hook on it.
We will crawl on our bellies in the mud,
dig a tunnel under the river,
and the river will rain down on us,
heavy drops from the dark stone.
We will go over the border.

On the day we go over the border,
can you see the fields already, over the river?
On the day we go over the border
can you see them?

We will hold on under a train,
balance on high voltage wires
at daybreak, high over the guards.
We will leap over the rapids
and if they shoot at us
we will turn into birds
and fly away, over the border
into the other country
into the other time
on the other side
over there
over the river.

Poetry translations

Here are my first translations of some of Martin Auer's poems. More to follow soon. A couple of links for German speakers:

http://www.myspace.com/Martinauer

http://www.martinauer.net/

And completely without a word

And completely: without a word, you know?
As if you’d suddenly been blinded and just hadn’t noticed it
because you were still asleep.
Or drowned all of a sudden in your own dress
Yes: as if you had a dress made of water
and your head was stuck inside it, you know?
you couldn’t get your eyes over the collar.
Or as if — but that’s going too far, nobody would understand —
as if a rose made of air was growing on you
somewhere on your shoulder, but nobody knew,
only your jacket would never sit quite right
because of the rose.
Or as if — listen! — as if you’d already said every word
and there weren’t any more left, you know?
no more words you could say
and the whole dictionary
was empty.

Quiet waters sing

Quiet waters sing,
sing far away, behind the clatter,
behind the noise and the chatter,
quiet waters sing.

Quiet waters sing,
far away behind crying and moaning,
audible still through wailing and groaning,
quiet waters sing.

Quiet waters sing,
behind the laughter and the flurry,
far away, through cold, through death and hurry,
you hear quiet waters.