El burlador de Sevilla

El burlador de Sevilla (Cátedra, 2010)
attributed to Tirso de Molina
Spain, c. 1630

With apologies to Amanda and Tom, who read and reread all three acts of El burlador de Sevilla [The Trickster of Seville] w/me for June's Caravana de recuerdos group read while I was out picking up the beer and munchies on the "Latino time" that's now dragged into late July, I've been putting off writing about this Siglo de Oro classic because I don't really have all that much to say about the play.  Didn't love it.  Didn't hate it.  Don't quite understand its accumulation of four centuries of hype.  On second thought, that last part isn't entirely true because one of the most understandably appealing things about the play is that it boasts the memorably unappealing title character in the form of the original Don Juan.  "Unappealing," as I've just used it, is of course a value judgement about the character's womanizing ways.  What's appealing about him as a character, though, is the way he's so dedicated to his craft!  In the first scene alone, for example, he has to flee Naples after having impersonated a duke and falsely wedded the Duchess Isabela just to enjoy the duchess' favors.  Early in the second act, in the midst of leaving a trail of seduced and deceived women in his wake upon his return to Spain, he brags about how he came about his nickname: "Sevilla a voces me llama/el Burlador, y el mayor/gusto que en mí puede haber/es burlar una mujer/y dejarla sin honor" ["Seville sometimes refers to me as the Trickster, and for me there is no greater pleasure than to deceive a woman and to leave her without honor"] (verses 1395-1399).  In the third act, the incorrigible Don Juan gleefully chides yet another "false bride" of his in an aside: "¡Qué mal conoces/al burlador de Sevilla!" ["How poorly you understand the Trickster of Seville!"] (2229-2230).  In short, the character is a singularly compelling villain in that he never seems repentant for his behavior no matter what harm it causes--and this in a play in which a friend of his can casually joke about a woman who survived a bout of "el mal francés/por un río de sudores" ["syphillis sweated out in a river of fever"] (1308-1309) and in which another woman spurned by Don Juan asks for him to be killed for having been the "homicida de mi honor" ["murderer of my honor"] (1657).  The undeniable negative charisma of Don Juan and the earthy realism of that VD reference aside, another couple of reasons I might/probably will revisit the play in the future are that it's mischievously "poetic"--loved the description of "la espumosa orilla/del mar de Italia" ["the foamy shores of the Italian sea"] as the site of Don Juan's "cárcel" ["prison"], in reference to the cad's initial expulsion from Castile to Naples (117-121); ditto the description of Isabela as a "fea" ["ugly woman"], even though she must be an "ángel" ["angel"], when compared to the daughter of the Commander of Calatrava, whose beauty moves the King of Castile to astronomically rhapsodize her as "el Sol de las estrellas de Sevilla" ["the Sun of all the stars of Seville"] (1190-1199)--and goofily entertaining w/r/t the way the poor skirt-chasing Trickster eventually receives his supernatural comeuppance at the hands of a guest of stone from beyond the grave: I mean, I understand that revenge is a dish best served cold and all, but nobody ever told me that it could be jazzed up by scorpions, fingernails, and snakes!

In his introduction to the Cátedra edition of El burlador de Sevilla, Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vázquez does a pretty convincing job of casting doubt on Tirso de Molina as the author of the work.  The arguments are too complicated to go into here, but I'll try to follow up on this in a later post if anyone's interested.  Until then, thanks again to Amanda and Tom for reading this along with me.

La música de los domingos

"La música de los domingos"
by Liliana Heker
Argentina, 1997

Now that it's safe to avoid jinxing my adopted home team from achieving their best World Cup finish in the last 25 years (¡Vamos Argentina!  ¡Vamos Carajo!), I thought I'd share a futból/soccer/football piece or two during the second half of Spanish Lit Month to help chase away the World Cup hangovers that all but the Deutschland fans and/or the Messi haters must be feeling at this point in time.  First up: Liliana Heker's "La música de los domingos" ["The Sunday Music"], a very satisfying short story barely seven pages in length which manages to do a great job of simultaneously paying tribute to and poking fun at the rabidity which "the beautiful game" inspires in its fans all while touching on the ways fútbol fandom can unite and divide families.  As fate would have it, the #10 of this story is the cranky unnamed grandfather of the narrator who's only referred to as "el viejo" ["the old man"] throughout: a diehard fan of Boca who insists on gathering his entire family around him every Sunday to watch various matches from the early afternoon until after midnight and whose favorite pastime, aside from the sport itself, is looking out into the street and lamenting, "Lástima la música" ["What a shame about the music"].  One day, Uncle Antonito, a River Plate supporter who becomes fed up after enduring one too many mocking serenades from his Boca Juniors fanatic of a relative, asks the viejo what music could he possibly be complaining about since the only music to be heard in the house is his; the old man, interrupting, authoritatively and dismissively but somewhat enigmatically replies: "No hablo de la música que se escucha, Antonito; hablo de la que falta" ["I'm not talking about the music that can be heard, Antonito; I'm talking about the music that's missing"] (114).  The narrator, self-described as "una mujer casadera" ["a woman of a marriageable age"] who would prefer not to waste her weekends "vociferando los goles como una desgraciada" ["screaming at goals like a miserable wretch"] just to keep her crochety old grandfather company (114-115), says that she would have been more than willing to leave things at that.  However, her twin cousins, not so easily defeated, pester the grandfather until he finally explains to them what he means by "the music that's missing."  The answer: "la música de los domingos" or "the Sunday music" (115).  In the remainder of the story, Heker displays a light touch and a warm, sentimental streak in the manner in which her narrator seems to gradually become aware of how her grandfather's passion for futból is tinged with nostalgia for the Buenos Aires of days gone by.  "Parece que poco a poco fueron entendiendo qué quería decir el viejo con 'música de los domingos'" ["It seems that, little by little, the twins were beginning to understand what the old man meant by 'Sunday music'"], she writes.  "Algo que en otros tiempos había estado en todas partes, dijo, y que se podía escuchar desde que uno se levantaba.  Como una comunión o una sinfonía, parece que dijo" ["Something that in former times was everywhere, he said, and that could be heard from the moment one woke up.  It was like a communion or a symphony, it seems he said"] (115).  When the twins decide to give their grandfather the gift of  what he refers to as "Sunday music" for his birthday (it falls, appropriately enough on a Sunday), he gets dragged to their quasi-tenement house near Paternal, in a foul mood promptly insults the barrio, and then gets rejuvenated when treated to an unexpected, staged show of "Sunday music" in which the whole neighborhood seems to be in on the joke: radios blare different football matches from behind apartment windows, two or three boys in a doorway sing the grandfather's favorite football chants, little kids behind a wall yell as they star in their own matches with each other: "decían pasámela a mí, decían dale, morfón" ["they were saying pass it to me; they were saying come on, ballhog"] (117).  Although it'd make little sense for me to belabor this summary any further given the fact that I don't think "La música de los domingos" is even available in English, suffice it to say that Heker's attention to detail--and in particular to the spoken language of her characters--is such that the description of the voices on the radio ("Cabezazo de Gorosito...recibe Moreno con el pecho, la duerme con la zurda, gira y..." ["What a header from Gorosito...Moreno stops the ball with his chest, controls it with his left foot and..."]) and the reactions of the "fans" on the street ("¡Goool!, gritaron los muchachos del portón" ["'Goalll!,' shouted the kids in the doorway"]) is handled in such a way that it makes it easy to picture the grandfather's astonishment as he's confronted with the rousing, Argentinean fan chants of "Oléee, olé-olé-olá" and "esta barra quilombera no te deja de alentar" coming from the hallways, the patios and the terraces which have seemingly transformed themselves, fútbol fairy tale like, into the "tribunas" or "stands" of his memory or imagination (118-119).  A lovely story winningly told.

Source

"La música de los domingos" appears on pp. 111-119 of the Roberto Fontanarrosa-edited Cuentos de Fútbol Argentino [Argentinean Football Stories] (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1997).

*

Other short stories in the collection:

Adolfo Bioy Casares/Jorge Luis Borges, "Esse est percipi"

Marcelo Cohen, "Fantasía española"

Humberto Costantini, "Insai izquierdo"

Alejandro Dolina, "Apuntes del fútbol en Flores"

José Pablo Feinmann, "Dieguito"

Inés Fernández Moreno, "Milagro en Parque Chas"

Roberto Fontanarrosa, "Escenas de la vida deportiva"

Rodrigo Fresán, "Final"

Elvio E. Gandolfo, "El visitante"

Héctor Libertella, "La cifra redonda"

Diego Lucero, "Hoy comienza el campeonato y habrá fiesta para rato"

Marcos Mayer, "Ver o jugar"

Pacho O'Donnell, "Falucho"

Guillermo Saccomanno, "Tránsito"

Juan Sasturain, "Campitos"

Osvaldo Soriano, "Gallardo Pérez, referí"

Luisa Valenzuela, "El mundo es de los inocentes"

*

Diego Alejandro Majluff has posted an audio version of Heker's story at his blog Escribiendo con lápiz, which I strongly recommend for those able to follow along in Spanish.

Spanish Lit Month 2014: 7/6-7/12 Links

Amanda, Simpler Pastimes

El burlador de Sevilla by Tirso de Molina

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Barcelona Shadows by Marc Pastor

Caroline, Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat

The House of Bernarda Alba - La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca

JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Miguel, St. Orberose

Las islas extraordinarias by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

Obooki, Obooki's Obloquy

Fiesta in November by Eduardo Mallea

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

La asesina ilustrada by Enrique Vila-Matas

Scott, seraillon

Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Tom, Wuthering Expectations

The Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina

Miguel Hernández by Miguel Hernández

Tony, Tony's Reading List

Paradises by Iosi Havilio

Tony Messenger, Messengers Booker (and more)

Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez

Violet, Still Life with Books

Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

La asesina ilustrada

La asesina ilustrada (Tusquets Editor, 1977)
by Enrique Vila-Matas
Spain, 1977

I have good news and bad news for you Spanish Lit Month yobbos tonight.  The good news is that the previous Vila-Matas that I read, 1985's devilishly entertaining Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil, is finally going to be translated into English next year just in time for its 30th anniversary.  The bad news is that the most recent Vila-Matas that I read, 1977's disappointing La asesina ilustrada, well, let's just say that it really isn't all that entertaining at all.  Now a book about a manuscript that kills is a killer idea to be sure--especially one blessed with such an inspired title as La asesina ilustrada, which can be rendered as either The Illustrated Assassin or The Well Read Killer or even The Killer Made Famous,* three descriptions which fit the villainous title text to a t--but unfortunately this sophomore effort from the young Vila-Matas is rather plodding in its attempts to cobble together a death-by-writing spin on the locked room mystery and entirely lacking in all the biting wit and genre-bending storytelling savoir-faire to be found in later works by the author.  As proof of the 88-page novella's soporific qualities, I have absolutely zero quotes from La asesina ilustrada to share for which I apologize in the timeless words of an actual memorable villain from non-Spanish Lit Month days gone by: "Youths!  I invoke your sympathy.  Maidens!  I claim your tears."

*[Edit: Thanks to JacquiWine and Stu for informing me that La asesina ilustrada has been rendered into English as The Lettered Assassin in the translation of EV-M's Never Any End to Paris: a much better choice than any of the "creative" ones I submitted above!]

Enrique Vila-Matas

La ciudad de las ratas

La ciudad de las ratas [La Cité des rats] (El cuenco de plata, 2009)
by Copi [translated from the French by Guadalupe Marando, Eduardo Muslip & María Silva]
France, 1979

As far as rodent/human epistolary novels set in the City of Light go, La ciudad de las ratas [original title: La Cité des rats; English approximation: City of Rats] is probably in a league of its own.  Probably?  Literally!  Prologuist and co-translator Eduardo Muslip conveniently enough for me describes the work as "una mezcla de relato de aventuras, fábula rabelaisiana y novela experimental" ["a mix of adventure tale, Rabelaisian fable and experimental novel"] (5), to which I'd only add that its gross out humor and sheer wrongness are comparable in sicko comedic verve and scale to the night I saw Pink Flamingos at a midnight screening in the early '80s only to find entire rows of people walking out on the flick at staggered intervals.  Quite an impression!  Quite a parallel!  Narrated by the likeable sewer rat Gouri in conjunction with his human friend and the purported translator of the tale Copi, La ciudad de las ratas spins a wild, orgiastic tale--again, literally!--in which the struggle for the rat nation to survive amid a cosmic struggle involving the Dios de los Hombres [God of Mankind] and the Diablo de las Ratas [Devil of the Rats] leads to an all too human situation in which the Île de la Cité with Notre-Dame de Paris intact splits off from its European moorings and drifts to the New World with the U.S. and Russian navies in hot pursuit.  A foundational tale of a sort.  Although things end on a somewhat apocalyptic note beyond the mere smashing of the stained glass windows at the Sainte-Chapelle and the destruction by fire of the Académie française and the Louvre as you might imagine if you're at all familiar with Copi's earlier Enrique Vila-Matas translated "El uruguayo"/"L'Uruguayen," I won't say anything more about the vachement violent ending since I don't want Fnac to lose any sales over a careless abuse of the spoiler alert function on my keyboard.  That being said, here are three things I thought were really cool about the novel even though I probably could have done without occasional provocations like the "comedic" necrophilia scene near the end: 1) In a novel in which absurdism and realism reign side by side in monarchical harmony (or something) and in a novel in which some of the star sidekicks of Gouri and his rat friend Rakä so to speak include characters known as la Reina de las Ratas [the Queen of Rats] and el Emir de los Loros [the Emir of the Parrots], I for some reason couldn't stop laughing at two strategically placed words from the otherwise nondescript line "Todos los demás, hámsters incluidos, me gritaban '¡coraje, coraje!" encaramados a las ramas del sauce" ["Everybody else, hamsters included, were shouting 'Be brave!  Be brave!' to me while perched atop the branches of the willow tree"] having to do with the occasion when Gouri suddenly finds himself under attack from a human child (39).  "Hamsters included."  A nice touch!  2) The intrusive translator trick.  "Nunca supe cuál es la parte real y cuál la imaginaria en este relato, tal vez por falta de curiosidad" ["I never learned what was the real and what was the imaginary part of this story--perhaps out of a lack of curiosity"], the translator admits at one point.  Later, in the translator's afterword, he amusingly adds that "Creí útil cortar algunas de mis notas, cuya erudición sobrepasa y anula la imaginación, por respeto al estilo fluido y fresco del autor, que quise conservar" ["I thought it a good idea to cut out some of my footnotes, whose erudition surpasses and annuls the imagination, out of respect for the fresh and fluid style of the author which I wanted to preserve"] (139).  3) Somewhat incredibly given a story in which a bat serves as a form of aircraft for the Queen of Rats and her court, some verses from Jorge Manrique's 1476 "Coplas que fizo por la muerte de su padre" ["Verses Written on the Death of His Father"] manage to get worked into a scene in which the translator Copi tells how, during a particularly lonely period in his life in Paris in the late '70s, he first met the rat Gouri on the sidewalk of the rue Dauphine, took him home, and "ebrio a morir, le recitaba a Gouri el más bello poema que conozco, con mi execrable acento español" ["dead drunk, with my horrible Spanish accent, recited to him the most beautiful poem that I know"] (114).  Why would Manrique's Coplas show up in a work as envelope-pushing in its sensibilities as La ciudad de las ratas? I sure would love to ask its author!  However, my guess, that the poem had some strong personal significance for the flesh and blood Copi can't entirely be confirmed by the fictional Copi who in the translator's afterword merely notes that the poem excerpt comes from the first and the beginning of the second coplas of the Castilian soldier Jorge Manrique (1440-1479), is blessed with a rhyme that's "cerca de la perfección" ["close to perfection"], and relates "los últimos momentos del padre del soldado; el poeta cita este acontecimiento como ejemplo para conducir al lector a reflexionar sobre la brevedad de nuestras vidas, comparándolas con los 'ríos que van a dar a la mar", que es 'el morir'" ["the last moments of the soldier's father; the poet cites this event as an example for the reader to reflect on the brevity of our lives, comparing them with the 'rivers that flow out to the sea,' which is 'our dying'"] (139).

Copi, a/k/a Raúl Damonte Botana

(Buenos Aires, 1939-Paris, 1987)

I read La ciudad de las ratas/La Cité des rats for the Paris in July 2014 fête hosted by Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza and her co-hosts Adria of Adria in Paris, Karen of A Wondering Life and Tamara of Thyme for Tea and for the year-long Books on France 2014 Reading Challenge hosted by Emma of Words and Peace.
*
As luck would have it, almost all of the Manrique lines cited by Copi in this novel appear in this post here with an accompanying English translation from Edith Grossman.

Spanish Lit Month 2014: 7/1-7/5 Links

 Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares

As promised, here's the first week's collection of links for Spanish Lit Month 2014 being hosted by Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and me.  Thanks to all of you who have contributed a post or two so far or who are planning to do so later in the month.  Feel free to let me know if I missed any submissions, and in the meantime rest assured that any SLM posts published between 7/6 and 7/12 will be rounded up here next Sunday.  Haven't committed to participating yet but are thinking about it?  Please join us!  You can satisfy our exacting admission requirements by contributing as little as one measly post dedicated to any work of Spanish-language literature (novel, poem, short story, etc.)* that strikes your fancy.  Happy reading!  *Works of Catalan-language literature may be substituted by any/all interested in doing so.  Also, some of the links below originally appeared in June because a couple of bloggers were apparently just too excited to wait until July to get started!

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Caroline, Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat

The Depths of the Forest - El interior del bosque by Eugenio Fuentes

Grant, 1streading's Blog

The Truth About the Savolta Case by Eduardo Mendoza

Things Look Different in the Light by Medardo Fraile

Outlaws by Javier Cercas

JacquiWine, JacquiWine's Journal
The Infatuations by Javier Marías

Karen, BookerTalk

The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende

Miguel, St. Orberose
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos
¡Bienvenidos a Spanish Lit Month 2014!
Continuación de ideas diversas by César Aira
Crónicas de Bustos Domecq by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares

Rise, in lieu of a field guide
Ang Kuwento ng Haring Tulala by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
The Tenant and The Motive by Javier Cercas
Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla

Scott, seraillon
Things Look Different in the Light by Medardo Fraile

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog
Liveforever by Andrés Caicedo
The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela

Tony Messenger, Messengers Booker (and more)
Firefly by Severo Sarduy

Crónicas de Bustos Domecq

Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (Losada, 1998)
by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares
Argentina, 1967

In his commentary on Crónicas de Bustos Domecq [Chronicles of Bustos Domecq] for Los libros esenciales de la literatura en español: narrativa de 1950 a nuestros días, the critic Ignacio Echevarría claims that "quién acerca este libro a su oído puede todavía escuchar los ecos de las carcajadas con que fue escrito a cuatro manos" ["whoever holds this book up close to his ears will still be able to hear the echoes of the peals of laughter with which it was written by the four hands who penned it"] (Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 2011, 57).  In his commentary on the work for the great blog Obooki's Obloquy, the critic and title character and Spanish Lit Month 2014 participant Obooki claims that "one imagines [Borges and Bioy Casares] laughing a lot writing it."  Who the hell am I to argue with these second four hands?  In other words, Crónicas de Bustos Domecq is a delightful and laugh out loud funny book not to mention a particularly lively specimen of the fake essay genre.  "Homenaje a César Paladión" ["Homage to César Paladión"], sort of a four-page takeoff on Borges' classic short story "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" ["Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"], is an excellent introduction to the fun and games here: a defense of a serial plagiarist, one César Paladión, whose life's work revolves around publishing exact repros of texts as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Goethe's Egmont, and Virgil's Georgics--all under his own name.  Bustos Domecq, a would be avant-garde art critic given to flights of grandiloquence and prone to peppering his Spanish with copious amounts of show-off French and Latin, takes great pains to extol Paladión, celebrating the "writer"'s excesses because "ya había ido más lejos" ["he had already  gone further"] than his contemporaries in matters of style; where Ezra Pound had merely led off one of his Cantos by including a "copioso fragmento" ["copious fragment"] of Homer's Odyssey, for example, Paladión clearly surpassed him because "anexó, por decirlo así, un opus completo, Los parques abandonados, de Herrera y Reissig" ["he annexed, so to speak, a complete opus, Herrera y Reissig's Los parques abandonados"] (25).  Paladión, we are told, "le otorgó su nombre y lo pasó a la imprenta, sin quitar ni agregar una sola coma, norma a la que siempre fiel" ["claimed authorship of the work and passed it on to the printer without adding or removing a single comma, a standard to which he was always faithful"]--a great achievement when compared to "el libro homónimo de Herrera" ["Herrera's homonymous book"] because the original Los parques abandonados "no repetía un libro anterior" ["didn't repeat an earlier book"] (Ibid.).  Late in in life, Paladión, with no knowledge of "las lenguas muertas" ["dead languages"] according to his chronicler (26), ambitiously set his sights on the classics of antiquity.  His The Gospel According to Luke, "obra de corte bíblico" ["a work biblical in nature"] as it's devilishly described (24), is unfortunately interrupted by the wordsmith's death; however, not to fear because Paladión still had time to grace us with The Georgics "según la versión española de Ochoa" ["in Ochoa's Spanish translation"] and, a year later, "ya consciente de su magnitud espiritual, dio a la imprenta el De divinatione en latín" ["now conscious of his spiritual magnitude, he submitted the De divinatione in Latin to the printer"].  Bustos Domecq, a true believer as an aesthete, can barely restrain himself, and neither could I when I read the irrepressible outburst that follows: "¡Y qué latín!  "El de Cicerón" ["And what Latin!  Ciceronian Latin!"] (26).  In her prologue to this winning Borges and Bioy collaboration, Julià Guillamon notes that "la vulgaridad barroca" ["baroque vulgarity"] of Bustos Domecq and the fact that the character's writing offers something far removed from that which you'd expect from a "crítico coherente" ["coherent critic"] (13-14), make him "encarna los valores a los que se opusieron toda su vida.  Es católico, nacionalista, pronazi, peronista, mercantil e interesado" ["incarnate all the values which (Borges and Bioy Casares) opposed throughout their lives.  He's Catholic, a nationalist, pro-Nazi, a Perón supporter, money-grubbing, and self-promoting"] (Ibid.).  In other words, a great character!  Some of these flaws produce some truly inspired comedy.  In "El ojo selectivo" ["The Selective Eye"], an essay on a sculptor who's a practitioner of what BD refers to as "la escultura cóncava" ["concave sculpture"] (96) or what in reality is the open spaces or plain old air to be found in between the charlatan's generic busts and casts, Bustos Domecq interrupts his reminiscence about a fancy cultural night dedicated to agape and the muses to lash out at a waiter whom he describes as "ese Tántalo de gallego con frac" ["that Spanish Tantalus in tails"] (95).  The reason for this obscure mythological insult?  The waiter had forgotten to bring dessert to the critic's side of the table.  Quelle horreur!  Later in the same piece, Bustos Domecq confesses to having been the "boletero" or ticket seller at one of the concave sculptor's expositions on an evening that saw an incensed public take to physically abusing the artist.  Bustos Domecq escapes to a nearby hotel, where he says he gathered information for a "estudio detectivesco" ["detective study"] of his by the name of La víctima de Tadeo Limardo ["Tadeo Limardo's Victim"] (97).  What does this really have to do with the sculptor?  Using the royal "we," Bustos Domecq is all too happy to explain via a footnote at the bottom of the same page: "Dato importante: Aprovechamos la ocasión para remitir a los compradores a la adquisición inmediata de Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, de H. Bustos Domecq.  (Nota de H.B.D)" ["Important fact: We take advantage of the occasion to suggest customers make an immediate purchase of Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi by H. Bustos Domecq.  (Note by H.B.D.)"].  For non-Borges and -Bioy Casares fans, suffice it to say that the footnote joke gets better once you understand that the Isidro Parodi book was a detective parody pseudonymously attributed to H. Bustos Domecq way back in 1942.  For confirmed Borges and Bioy Casares fans, suffice it to say that the footnote joke gets a lot of play here including one footnote attributed to the proofreader (70, pedantic genius!) and, in a fitting encore, another H.B.D. clarification in which readers are encouraged to consult a study by the name of Una tarde con Ramón Bonavena ["An Evening with Ramón Bonavena"].  Where can one get a hold of this study?  Don't be silly.  Naturally, it's to be found "inserto en el indispensable vademecum Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (Buenos Aires, 1966)" ["inserted in the indispensable vade mecum Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (Buenos Aires, 1966)"] (110) which is on sale now!

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) & Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999)