Cesar Aira had his translator Chris Andrews with him, and a linguistic assistant Ramon [didn't catch the name]. One audience member thanked them for an elegant interview and that's the perfect word. There was a simpatico between Aira and his translator that was tangible throughout the conversation and Aira's writing and themes were opened up for us. Ramon did not seem a good match - the gentle Chris would have been fine on his own - but it was a thoughtful gesture to have all that linguistic support - and it was barely necessary in theend.
Estelle Tang has done a blog post at MWF that Chris Andrews recommended and since I know nothing about Aira's writing and Miriam knows only slightly more, I have to limit my comments to what I heard and Miriam jotted down. She's reading The Seamstress and the Wind at the moment and she says that reading it is like listening to free jazz. There's a certain letting go that is required. And on the idea of jazz, the concept of improvisation is a big part of how Aira writes and edits. He writes each day in a cafe - just one or two small pages, he says - and that's it. Very little revision. Improvised writing, not unlike improvised music in its execution. He reads sometimes as many as 10 hours a day. Maybe that's the equivalent, in a way, of the hours of practice that an improvising musician needs to do, to be able to perform, unrevised, on stage. It may be a long bow, but it mades some kind of sense at the time.
Cesar Aira had a certain studied nonchalance about him - he talked about his writing by saying it was 'just me' for the good bits and teh bad bits. A kind of ironic shurgging of the shoulders. He explained the word sprezzatura to us, yet seemed to embody it. Elegant, restrained, intelligent. Very very Buenos Aires.
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