Photo by J. F. Bonhomme
Silvia Baron Supervielle
published in Spanish in Quimera (Barcelona) 178 (March 1999)
Born in 1934 in Buenos Aires, Silvia Baron Supervielle is the descendant of French and Spanish immigrants to Uruguay and Argentina. Raised largely by her paternal grandmother, she did not see herself as a writer until long after she settled in Paris in 1961---a move she regards as a mysterious process and which she considers a sort of return corresponding to the earlier migration of her ancestors.
Though her native tongue is Spanish, since the late 1960s she has written nearly all her work in French. Most of her writing involves an ongoing meditation on the passage from one shore to the other, from one language, one set of origins, to another. As part of her change of language, she also became a translator; in this way Argentine poets she felt close to (Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Macedonio Fernández, Roberto Juarroz, Arnaldo Calveyra) might accompany her into French. She has also translated Marguerite Yourcenar’s plays into Spanish.
The most recent of her eleven books of poetry is Autour du vide (2008; Around the Void). She has also written nine books of narrative prose, plus essays and other work. The following interviewtook place at her home on the Ile Saint Louis in Paris, on June 26, 1997.
To start with your biography, in your family there is a Spanish-Uruguayan branch and another that's French. How did the French branch end up predominant?
My mother, who was Uruguayan of Spanish ancestry, died when I was two years old. That was decisive, since I was raised by my grandmother who was the daughter of a Frenchman who emigrated to Uruguay. She had a library in Argentina that was full of French books. As an Argentine girl, my schooling was in Spanish, but my first home was with this grandmother who raised me in the French cultural tradition. I also inherited many of her memories and a certain nostalgia, because she herself had been educated in France.
But what was your first language?
My first language was Spanish, of course, since I spoke Spanish with my father and my sister and my classmates as well. So, I didn't know what it was to be French. I felt profoundly, and I still feel myself absolutely and naturally Argentine. Simply, there was this French influence and upbringing that I lived when I was very young, until my father remarried. After, I had half-brothers who were completely Argentine and, once I was about thirteen or fourteen, that first French nucleus was left behind.
Your second last name, Supervielle, did that assume an important legacy? Why did you keep it as part of your professional name?
There was no influence in the beginning; I understood that I was a writer much later. I took part in novel and poetry contests, I sent out my things, but really I wasn't thinking about becoming a writer or anything else. The writer Jules Supervielle was my grandmother's first cousin, but he was like a double first cousin because his parents and my grandmother's parents were brothers and sisters. Such things happened along the Río de la Plata! In my family there was more than one marriage among siblings. Jules Supervielle was an infant when his parents died, who left his upbringing to my grandmother's parents, so that he was like her own brother. I met him as a girl at a ranch where we used to go in Uruguay and then in my grandmother's house, on one of his visits to Argentina. But in all that I simply felt a spectator; it's as if I were looking to reserve myself---now with time I realize---for something that could happen further on, but which I didn't yet guess or foresee. It's not that I was indifferent, but I preferred other books, other directions in my reading, and other curiosities. He formed part of my grandmother's family and I was very independent, I felt different.
With respect to my last name, I have to make a big leap in time. My mother's two last names were García Arocena, and my father was already named Baron Supervielle, which were the last names of my paternal grandfather, Esteban Baron, and of Ana Supervielle. Such that for me and my siblings---there were five of us---as well as my father's brothers and sisters, our last name was Baron Supervielle. There was a bank, the Banco Supervielle, founded in Uruguay by my grandmother's father, the first immigrant in the family, with a small branch in Buenos Aires, which was run by my father. That bank still exists today in Buenos Aires.
When you arrived in Europe, did you think of being a writer?
No. It's possible that I was a writer in the making, but I think I was the last to know. When I started to write, in the 1970s, Hector Bianciotti brought a series of my poems written in French to the journal Les Lettres Nouvelles, edited by Maurice Nadeau. And it was just before publishing them that I thought about the question of my name. I went to see Maurice Nadeau, I said, "What do I do about my name?" He replied, "I don't know. Do you like it like that?" I told him yes, but there was the question of Jules Supervielle and, on the other hand, I didn't like Silvia Baron by itself. He said he didn't either. I answered him, All right, it's my first publication and I don't want to get it wrong. There was also the possibility that I could take my mother's name, but it was so distant and so, let's say, somewhat painful for me, choosing that name which sounded so Spanish, that I felt it was like usurping something I didn't feel belonged to me. To which he, a bit exhausted, said: "Fine, what do you have on your papers?" I told him, "Silvia Baron Supervielle." And he said, "All right, for better or worse, let the poems come out like that."
You came to Paris in 1961. You've said that all that was a mystery. Why a mystery? Why did you decide to stay?
I never knew I would stay so long, let alone stay forever. I had already made two trips to Europe, and I had also gone to the United States. In the United States I had felt like staying, although that was rather a desire to escape---from my family, my nucleus, my social group, everything. There was a Latin American journal, called Vigencia or something like that, and I had a friend at the journal who told me: "Why don't you stay a little and write articles for the journal?" I was a bit tempted, but something told me no, that I should return. So I went back to Argentina and a few years later I traveled again to Europe, but that time I did it alone. A friend had invited me and I stayed a while at her house, enjoying Paris, this marvelous city, and all at once I couldn't bear to go on in that house. For the first time I thought, "I want to stay longer in Paris." I moved to a small hotel on the Rue Saint-Dominique, Le Pavillon, which still exists. And then I thought, All right, I have to work.
Everything was very different then. I didn't have papers or anything, but I quickly found work. It was at the La Hune bookshop, which had a sort of book stand at the Paris Biennale, in the Musée d'Art Moderne. They hired me for a month, and that was just what I was looking for, since I didn't know how long I would stay. Of course, I had no money; I didn't want to ask my father nor was he about to send me any. I was so happy that I kept extending my stay. That moment when I said "I want to stay a little longer" was profoundly mysterious, like a gestation that was happening inside me. It had to do with being alone confronting life, work, anonymity, and the freedom that was opening up before me. When the Biennale ended, the booksellers asked me if I wanted to work in the bookstore. To show you how easy it was to get work at that time. And I said yes. My lot was cast. I didn't tell them how long I wanted that job nor did they say anything either. It was then that I rented a small apartment, here on the island (Ile Saint Louis). I haven't moved from here since then, though it's changed a lot. I liked its feeling of a village, protective and warm. Moreover, many artists lived here and there was a very friendly bistrot, Chez Alice, on the Rue des Deux Ponts, where we all used to meet, artists and writers, and you could eat a delicious meal for practically nothing. Nowadays, all the restaurants are for tourists, very expensive and bad.
What was the difference for you between living in Paris and living in Buenos Aires?
To begin with, Paris had a halo already from Buenos Aires, from my home and family. Later, on the first two trips I made, I saw that people were right. Behind the city, as behind a piece of writing, there is a hand, a spirit that created it. This city can dazzle, but that dazzling responds to a spirit as well, to something that is very attractive. Paris, in that moment, was not just a city lit up by extraordinary lights---especially at night---but rather it was also a city that offered you the light of what you were and that helped all artists who came to live there or aspiring artists who had not yet found their way. Paris was a city that set the example for you, that gave the key to what one could become. What Paris offered was an experience that was sometimes difficult but very constructive, and which clarified---at least for me---many doubts and aspects that were unknown to me. After, you have a job, you make friends, little by little you find your place, however small, and you learn to fit in, living on your own. All of that counted.
Bianciotti has said that there are two very important muses for the writer, nostalgia and remorse. As a writer, how have you felt nostalgia from here? In your books it seems there is a nostalgia for something that does not yet exist, for something beyond, something more poetic.
It's true. The nostalgia I feel is an expression, it forms part of creation. Very different from nostalgia is separation, which is more painful. When there are people I love who go away, the separation is terrible. Here nostalgia blends with that flat space where I spent so many vacations and which has remained engraved in my mind---that plain, that interminable thing, the pampa---and this nostalgia gets mixed up a little with the landscape and forms part of the writing. The pain of separation is something else, it's the insurmountable distance, but where there is no remorse, at least for me. It's not being able to do a thing when people close to me are ill or left alone. It's the pain of not being together.
What has been your experience returning to Argentina?
Every time I've returned it's been more or less the same, they're always painful experiences. I never let more than two years go by, because if not it was going to be truly unbearable facing the change in people, in my family and friends. It's really tricky, returning, you have to measure it well so that it hurts as little as possible. I've found a sort of balance: the least painful is to make a trip every year and a half or two years and not stay longer than three weeks. At the end of that time we start to grow---as hair and nails grow---invisible roots that sink into the earth. And each day that passes, it's more painful to pull them up. The only trip that was different is the one I made this year, because for the first time I returned as a writer.
Has your work been translated into Spanish?
No, unfortunately. This year I became aware that I need to get moving so that my books, even one or two, are translated into Spanish. That return was very strange. In all my previous trips I had left aside my life as a writer, which is my life, like someone who goes to visit family on vacation. Perhaps, and I only think of this now, because I wanted it to remain a secret, and also because I was afraid. I wasn't sure how to make it known there, which after all is my country. So, it was a very strange sensation to return as a French writer, since the French Embassy had invited me, during the book fair, to give five talks at the Biblioteca Nacional, the Fundación Borges, and the Alliance Française. That is, I was invited as a French writer who also spoke Spanish. But it wasn't easy finding myself in a situation where no one knew me or hardly at all. And people were very surprised. I was very moved because a lot of people came. I hope that has consequences and produces results.
Isn't it difficult to return as well to your native tongue?
Luckily, no. I realize that there's nothing to be done, that the language does become lost a little. But I've always tried to hang onto Spanish, I write my letters in Spanish and sometimes I've been asked for a text in Spanish. The talks in Buenos Aires I did directly in Spanish, which required a lot of work.
You've never been tempted to translate yourself?
No, because that seems very strange to me. I don't know how Beckett and all those marvelous writers did it; they're demi-gods, because that is tremendously difficult. But now, with this desire I have for my books to be published in Spanish, if an editor were to ask me, maybe I'd do it. Above all with the poems.
One of your recurrent images is the coast, the shoreline. And you've lived for many years on an island here in Paris, although in this case it's another type of shore . . .
Yes, they are different, but there are always shorelines and flowing water. I remember that Silvina Ocampo used to say that the color of the Seine resembles the Río de la Plata. And it's true, although the colors are not identical. There you have a lot of sun, and that sun lends blue and rosy tints to the brown of the Río de la Plata, it becomes like a rosy brown, very dense, you can see that the earth is very mixed in with the water. In contrast, here there are currents, and the gray sky turns the water more green, almost copper. I always say that the water flowing in the Seine goes to the sea and the sea, to the Río de la Plata, which becomes transformed into the Seine.
In your work as a translator, were you already translating before seeing yourself as a writer or did both paths develop in tandem?
I think it was a natural movement in translating myself to this new language---which I knew but not too well, it was a language that was distant and still remains distant to me. Some people asked me about certain writers and so I set to translating a few poems to show them. After, I began to fall in love with those texts and to really like doing it. It accompanied my own work and brought me closer to the other shore in memory. Gradually, I became a translator just as I was becoming a writer. That was mysterious as well, I must say, and formed part of the same movement: writing and carrying beside me writers I loved.
How did it happen that you changed languages? Why did you decide to do so?
It seemed to me that I would never be able to find the thread, to establish a harmony, to achieve some kind of wholeness if I kept writing in Spanish. Besides, I knew writers who were aware that I wrote and wanted to read something of mine. But they didn't read Spanish. So I decided to translate my poems into French, but something very strange happened to me. Suddenly I found a terrain where I recognized myself and which was mine, where it was so difficult finding the word and the language that I wrote very short poems, very pared down, with barely four or five words. Instead of translating the poems I had written, longer rhythmical poems, I thought no, I'm going to show them poems in French. That's how I started to write these poems that are of such little means, I understood that that's exactly what I am, this sort of poverty of words, this fear of the language. I realized that I had found something, a place that was mine. That poverty was like a mirror that was imposed on me. What I mean is that perhaps the same thing would have happened to me in another country and with another language. It wasn't due to French, from which I also wanted to remain apart, but to that distance between the language and me, which resembled the distance I wanted to exist around me, on both sides, a distance that obliged me to pare things down. That's how I became a writer in French. For me it was a discovery, which has nothing to do with the idea of the past or the French language tradition. It's true that I came to Paris because of this French influence that I had. But it could have been another country, Italy or England, especially those two countries, or Portugal too. And maybe the same thing would have happened to me with another language and I would have found a terrain that was mine as well.
In your work there is a deep sense of solitude that's striking. The characters in your prose works are solitary figures. Are you looking to capture or give form to a specific way of being alone?
Yes, I think things can happen to a character who is alone, because it's really a matter of saying something as closely as possible about oneself. If I seek characters who are alone, in empty spaces, it's because it seems to me that through them, I myself am trying to find something or touch something essential, something about life, about the world, about the beyond. Writing can arrive at a true expression where life and space are embodied, everything that life pares away. It's a place outside of the present and the past, where time doesn't count. As if it were a devastated place where we must start all over again, and as if in this rebirth we might manage to touch something essential.
In at least two of your books the figure of the horse is very present. What sense does that have for you?
What's going on is that, since I am Argentine and I spent those summers, first in Uruguay and later in Argentina, in those enormous spaces . . . One place in particular was extraordinary, with dunes that went all the way to the sea, and we would ride among them until we reached the shore. Later, having become a city dweller, those memories are marvelous. The horse is a symbol for many things and for that contact with nature. It's probably the animal that I love most, it has a very noble aspect. And that way it has of crossing through space . . . I like the noise it makes, I like to see how it goes away and comes close, that state of being half wild and half domesticated, but without ever losing its wildness. The sensation of freedom it gives, especially in those spaces that are so immense. When I write, sometimes, it's as if I were riding again.
In your prose books the characters seem ambiguous, of vague contours. Even in things that are very concrete: for example, they never eat. How do you conceive of these characters?
It's true that I don't make use of real life for writing. It costs me a huge effort to put in writing real, practical details. I set them aside instinctively because it seems to me a waste of time to describe a character doing things that I do every day: going down in the elevator, cooking, eating. When I sit down to write, sometimes characters appear who have a connection to me but who might not be me. For example, in L'or de l'incertitude (The Gold of Uncertainty) my grandmother appears as well as a person who looked after me, a Spanish woman named Lola, but whom I called Lina. So sometimes real things come up, but generally my characters remain as though suspended in space, without my trying. I leave them like that. Little by little I realize that I'm paring things down further. The last one, the boy in La frontière (The Border), is totally alone, and there is this other character who watches. Often I make this sort of counterpoint between a character who watches, who could be the writer, and another character whom that one sees moving about. There was something of that already in L'or de l'incertitude. But I don't know, I feel that everything remains open in front of me, and maybe one day I'll want to tell a more concrete story. I don't rule it out. But up until now, writing has been a sort of music for me, and I choose what brings me closest to that music and to the visions that I have.
Do you see yourself as a Latin American writer?
What I know is that I do not write like the French. Many people tell me that I bring something different, a kind of fantastic realism. Although I do not see myself in most novelists and short story writers of that tendency, which I like; but perhaps without meaning to I do have something of that. Once someone told me: really, you're a foreigner on both sides. And that's how I feel, but I think it's been like that since I was born.
Inevitably we have to ask: What notion of country and nationality do writers have? What notion of country do Argentines have? For the most part, Argentines are children or grandchildren of immigrants. That's different in the old countries of Europe. An Englishman, a Frenchman, an Italian, a German have another relationship to their countries. They have a specific tradition and they come not just from a city, but from another country within their countries, with its dialects. You can't compare them. We were transplanted from before, so it's like a second exile. In my family there have been I don't know how many exiles. In the middle of all that, how to define if I am Argentine? But I don't like to be told that I'm not Argentine. I am. Why? Because it is the land of my most distant memories, the most important ones. And where all the people live that I love, that is, really extraordinary friends, who do not forget me and who write to me, and to whom I write as well. A fidelity in friendship. I keep this really strong connection to Argentina, but at the same time I do not at all have the feeling for the patria, the fatherland. And if they tell me I'm French, that's not the point at all! At the same time, it's a country that has given me the opportunity to be, to write, that has opened its arms to me and to which I am very grateful. I can't deny that. Really, in the end one is a total exile! But perhaps we also achieve unity in that total exile.
In my recent trip to Argentina, in addition to the conferences, they invited me to do a talk at a high school, the Lycée Jean Mermoz, a French high school linked to the embassy. I was going to meet a group of students, thirteen to sixteen years old, children of French people employed by French businesses who were there for a while and then returning to France, and also children of French-Argentine couples and of Argentines who were attached to France. They were studying in Spanish and French, and were all at a high level. The first thing the teacher said when he introduced me was: all these students have two cultures (I saw the children's sad faces), they have two cultures and they're as if split in two. You are the example, he added, of a person with two cultures and two countries. I don't know why, but I didn't like that way of introducing me. So I told him, Look, let's consider this from another angle. Not only do these children and I have two cultures, but I wish we had ten. I wish that I had more English culture, which is a country and a literature I adore, and that I knew the German romantics better, whom I adore and whom I cannot read in their language, and I wish we had more. So it's not a question of these children being split in two and they have to figure it out in order to stop being so, but that they go on opening themselves to many more cultures, and those who leave are going to possess wonderful memories of this country that forms part of their childhood. The children were so delighted! They began to laugh, to ask questions: how do you go about translating, changing languages? They were enthusiastic, because finally someone was not speaking to them of being divided and of the two cultures that pulled them from one side to the other. I think they felt a sort of triumph over that idea and they discovered there was a way of living that is broader, more universal. Again, those notions of country, of fatherland, of local culture---in fact, we Argentines have been non-local from the start, because we were told we had to read French, English, Italian. So we weren't like that. I am the result of that melting pot. We're from everywhere, and also from nowhere at all.
So, what term do you prefer to describe yourself?
You know what I really don't like? Franco-argentine. I hate that. Even today I feel more Argentine than French. I haven't cut with that at all, I haven't become French. I prefer a thousand times more for people to tell me I'm Argentine and leave it at that, an Argentine who went away, a lost Argentine.
Do you maintain ties to Latin Americans in Paris?
I have always felt very close to Argentines and also to Uruguayans, and rather distant, but for lack of opportunity, from other Latin Americans. Because they have not come to me, and also because just with those first two countries I already see a lot of people. People call me, they come over, my house is always open to visitors, I like that.
How do you get along with the French literary world?
I'm rather far removed from that world. I have friends, several writers for example. One person I admire a lot and who always responds to me, though I don't see him often, is the poet André du Bouchet. I know that he follows what I do. Yves Bonnefoy as well. Nathalie Sarraute, rather, I follow her; she's a woman I admire greatly and whom I go to see now and then. But sometimes I don't call her so as not to bother her. She has always been very gracious in opening her door to me, and I know that she reads my books. Another friend whom I've known for a long time is Angelo Rinaldi, who also has a very unique body of work; he's part of tout Paris because he's a big critic at L'Express. But these relationships are somewhat distant. Because a writer is also a human being, and what makes me comfortable with Argentines is that they see me as a human being. We seldom speak of books. They call me to have coffee or a meal and we talk about friends in common or whatever. By contrast, in my contacts with writers, it takes some effort for me to assume the role of writer.
There's a spiritual dimension in your work, linked perhaps to that quest to pare things down. What is religion for you? Something you struggle with or which accompanies you?
It's something that I do not want to renounce, nor betray. It seems to me that here in France religion is very intellectualized. I don't go to church, I don't fulfill any obligations. I'm very selfish, I tell myself that I'm doing more or less the same thing when I write poetry: I'm praying, patiently. But I need to believe something. A priest friend who was previously a writer---Eugenio Gusta, he wrote a lot in the journal Sur---he wrote in his memoirs that he had known me and that I seemed to have nostalgia for faith. That seemed rather accurate to me, like a thing that is lost. But at the same time I believe that when one feels nostalgia for something, one still has it.
What brought you to write Nouvelles cantates (New Cantatas; a rewriting of passages from the Bible)?
I was interested in that idea of literature in the Bible, the strangeness of the poetry that is found there. And, too, it was a return to my beginnings. It seemed to me that it was something that would bring me closer to a knowledge of God. And since that book fascinated me---it was extraordinary, I couldn't imagine a greater magical realism than you find there, more marvels, and in so many different tones---I chose those passages like that, in a very personal way.
How do your books of prose come about? With the first two [L'or de l'incertitude, Le livre du retour (The Book of Return)], it seems that one follows the other.
Yes, they resemble each other. The third one [La frontière] is a bit shorter---I wanted it to be clearer and I thought that if the style, the language were more concise, perhaps the substance, which is mysterious for me, would reach the reader with more clarity. What happened to me when I began to write prose is that I wanted to lengthen my phrases, having spent so long writing these poems that are so spare. So, it was like playing a little with the language and letting myself loose, however it came out. I had no idea what would happen when I started. Perhaps I let myself go too much, I don't know; these days I think the prose is a bit complicated. But that's how it was, I needed to do it at that moment.
published in Spanish in Quimera (Barcelona) 178 (March 1999)
Born in 1934 in Buenos Aires, Silvia Baron Supervielle is the descendant of French and Spanish immigrants to Uruguay and Argentina. Raised largely by her paternal grandmother, she did not see herself as a writer until long after she settled in Paris in 1961---a move she regards as a mysterious process and which she considers a sort of return corresponding to the earlier migration of her ancestors.
Though her native tongue is Spanish, since the late 1960s she has written nearly all her work in French. Most of her writing involves an ongoing meditation on the passage from one shore to the other, from one language, one set of origins, to another. As part of her change of language, she also became a translator; in this way Argentine poets she felt close to (Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Macedonio Fernández, Roberto Juarroz, Arnaldo Calveyra) might accompany her into French. She has also translated Marguerite Yourcenar’s plays into Spanish.
The most recent of her eleven books of poetry is Autour du vide (2008; Around the Void). She has also written nine books of narrative prose, plus essays and other work. The following interviewtook place at her home on the Ile Saint Louis in Paris, on June 26, 1997.
To start with your biography, in your family there is a Spanish-Uruguayan branch and another that's French. How did the French branch end up predominant?
My mother, who was Uruguayan of Spanish ancestry, died when I was two years old. That was decisive, since I was raised by my grandmother who was the daughter of a Frenchman who emigrated to Uruguay. She had a library in Argentina that was full of French books. As an Argentine girl, my schooling was in Spanish, but my first home was with this grandmother who raised me in the French cultural tradition. I also inherited many of her memories and a certain nostalgia, because she herself had been educated in France.
But what was your first language?
My first language was Spanish, of course, since I spoke Spanish with my father and my sister and my classmates as well. So, I didn't know what it was to be French. I felt profoundly, and I still feel myself absolutely and naturally Argentine. Simply, there was this French influence and upbringing that I lived when I was very young, until my father remarried. After, I had half-brothers who were completely Argentine and, once I was about thirteen or fourteen, that first French nucleus was left behind.
Your second last name, Supervielle, did that assume an important legacy? Why did you keep it as part of your professional name?
There was no influence in the beginning; I understood that I was a writer much later. I took part in novel and poetry contests, I sent out my things, but really I wasn't thinking about becoming a writer or anything else. The writer Jules Supervielle was my grandmother's first cousin, but he was like a double first cousin because his parents and my grandmother's parents were brothers and sisters. Such things happened along the Río de la Plata! In my family there was more than one marriage among siblings. Jules Supervielle was an infant when his parents died, who left his upbringing to my grandmother's parents, so that he was like her own brother. I met him as a girl at a ranch where we used to go in Uruguay and then in my grandmother's house, on one of his visits to Argentina. But in all that I simply felt a spectator; it's as if I were looking to reserve myself---now with time I realize---for something that could happen further on, but which I didn't yet guess or foresee. It's not that I was indifferent, but I preferred other books, other directions in my reading, and other curiosities. He formed part of my grandmother's family and I was very independent, I felt different.
With respect to my last name, I have to make a big leap in time. My mother's two last names were García Arocena, and my father was already named Baron Supervielle, which were the last names of my paternal grandfather, Esteban Baron, and of Ana Supervielle. Such that for me and my siblings---there were five of us---as well as my father's brothers and sisters, our last name was Baron Supervielle. There was a bank, the Banco Supervielle, founded in Uruguay by my grandmother's father, the first immigrant in the family, with a small branch in Buenos Aires, which was run by my father. That bank still exists today in Buenos Aires.
When you arrived in Europe, did you think of being a writer?
No. It's possible that I was a writer in the making, but I think I was the last to know. When I started to write, in the 1970s, Hector Bianciotti brought a series of my poems written in French to the journal Les Lettres Nouvelles, edited by Maurice Nadeau. And it was just before publishing them that I thought about the question of my name. I went to see Maurice Nadeau, I said, "What do I do about my name?" He replied, "I don't know. Do you like it like that?" I told him yes, but there was the question of Jules Supervielle and, on the other hand, I didn't like Silvia Baron by itself. He said he didn't either. I answered him, All right, it's my first publication and I don't want to get it wrong. There was also the possibility that I could take my mother's name, but it was so distant and so, let's say, somewhat painful for me, choosing that name which sounded so Spanish, that I felt it was like usurping something I didn't feel belonged to me. To which he, a bit exhausted, said: "Fine, what do you have on your papers?" I told him, "Silvia Baron Supervielle." And he said, "All right, for better or worse, let the poems come out like that."
You came to Paris in 1961. You've said that all that was a mystery. Why a mystery? Why did you decide to stay?
I never knew I would stay so long, let alone stay forever. I had already made two trips to Europe, and I had also gone to the United States. In the United States I had felt like staying, although that was rather a desire to escape---from my family, my nucleus, my social group, everything. There was a Latin American journal, called Vigencia or something like that, and I had a friend at the journal who told me: "Why don't you stay a little and write articles for the journal?" I was a bit tempted, but something told me no, that I should return. So I went back to Argentina and a few years later I traveled again to Europe, but that time I did it alone. A friend had invited me and I stayed a while at her house, enjoying Paris, this marvelous city, and all at once I couldn't bear to go on in that house. For the first time I thought, "I want to stay longer in Paris." I moved to a small hotel on the Rue Saint-Dominique, Le Pavillon, which still exists. And then I thought, All right, I have to work.
Everything was very different then. I didn't have papers or anything, but I quickly found work. It was at the La Hune bookshop, which had a sort of book stand at the Paris Biennale, in the Musée d'Art Moderne. They hired me for a month, and that was just what I was looking for, since I didn't know how long I would stay. Of course, I had no money; I didn't want to ask my father nor was he about to send me any. I was so happy that I kept extending my stay. That moment when I said "I want to stay a little longer" was profoundly mysterious, like a gestation that was happening inside me. It had to do with being alone confronting life, work, anonymity, and the freedom that was opening up before me. When the Biennale ended, the booksellers asked me if I wanted to work in the bookstore. To show you how easy it was to get work at that time. And I said yes. My lot was cast. I didn't tell them how long I wanted that job nor did they say anything either. It was then that I rented a small apartment, here on the island (Ile Saint Louis). I haven't moved from here since then, though it's changed a lot. I liked its feeling of a village, protective and warm. Moreover, many artists lived here and there was a very friendly bistrot, Chez Alice, on the Rue des Deux Ponts, where we all used to meet, artists and writers, and you could eat a delicious meal for practically nothing. Nowadays, all the restaurants are for tourists, very expensive and bad.
What was the difference for you between living in Paris and living in Buenos Aires?
To begin with, Paris had a halo already from Buenos Aires, from my home and family. Later, on the first two trips I made, I saw that people were right. Behind the city, as behind a piece of writing, there is a hand, a spirit that created it. This city can dazzle, but that dazzling responds to a spirit as well, to something that is very attractive. Paris, in that moment, was not just a city lit up by extraordinary lights---especially at night---but rather it was also a city that offered you the light of what you were and that helped all artists who came to live there or aspiring artists who had not yet found their way. Paris was a city that set the example for you, that gave the key to what one could become. What Paris offered was an experience that was sometimes difficult but very constructive, and which clarified---at least for me---many doubts and aspects that were unknown to me. After, you have a job, you make friends, little by little you find your place, however small, and you learn to fit in, living on your own. All of that counted.
Bianciotti has said that there are two very important muses for the writer, nostalgia and remorse. As a writer, how have you felt nostalgia from here? In your books it seems there is a nostalgia for something that does not yet exist, for something beyond, something more poetic.
It's true. The nostalgia I feel is an expression, it forms part of creation. Very different from nostalgia is separation, which is more painful. When there are people I love who go away, the separation is terrible. Here nostalgia blends with that flat space where I spent so many vacations and which has remained engraved in my mind---that plain, that interminable thing, the pampa---and this nostalgia gets mixed up a little with the landscape and forms part of the writing. The pain of separation is something else, it's the insurmountable distance, but where there is no remorse, at least for me. It's not being able to do a thing when people close to me are ill or left alone. It's the pain of not being together.
What has been your experience returning to Argentina?
Every time I've returned it's been more or less the same, they're always painful experiences. I never let more than two years go by, because if not it was going to be truly unbearable facing the change in people, in my family and friends. It's really tricky, returning, you have to measure it well so that it hurts as little as possible. I've found a sort of balance: the least painful is to make a trip every year and a half or two years and not stay longer than three weeks. At the end of that time we start to grow---as hair and nails grow---invisible roots that sink into the earth. And each day that passes, it's more painful to pull them up. The only trip that was different is the one I made this year, because for the first time I returned as a writer.
Has your work been translated into Spanish?
No, unfortunately. This year I became aware that I need to get moving so that my books, even one or two, are translated into Spanish. That return was very strange. In all my previous trips I had left aside my life as a writer, which is my life, like someone who goes to visit family on vacation. Perhaps, and I only think of this now, because I wanted it to remain a secret, and also because I was afraid. I wasn't sure how to make it known there, which after all is my country. So, it was a very strange sensation to return as a French writer, since the French Embassy had invited me, during the book fair, to give five talks at the Biblioteca Nacional, the Fundación Borges, and the Alliance Française. That is, I was invited as a French writer who also spoke Spanish. But it wasn't easy finding myself in a situation where no one knew me or hardly at all. And people were very surprised. I was very moved because a lot of people came. I hope that has consequences and produces results.
Isn't it difficult to return as well to your native tongue?
Luckily, no. I realize that there's nothing to be done, that the language does become lost a little. But I've always tried to hang onto Spanish, I write my letters in Spanish and sometimes I've been asked for a text in Spanish. The talks in Buenos Aires I did directly in Spanish, which required a lot of work.
You've never been tempted to translate yourself?
No, because that seems very strange to me. I don't know how Beckett and all those marvelous writers did it; they're demi-gods, because that is tremendously difficult. But now, with this desire I have for my books to be published in Spanish, if an editor were to ask me, maybe I'd do it. Above all with the poems.
One of your recurrent images is the coast, the shoreline. And you've lived for many years on an island here in Paris, although in this case it's another type of shore . . .
Yes, they are different, but there are always shorelines and flowing water. I remember that Silvina Ocampo used to say that the color of the Seine resembles the Río de la Plata. And it's true, although the colors are not identical. There you have a lot of sun, and that sun lends blue and rosy tints to the brown of the Río de la Plata, it becomes like a rosy brown, very dense, you can see that the earth is very mixed in with the water. In contrast, here there are currents, and the gray sky turns the water more green, almost copper. I always say that the water flowing in the Seine goes to the sea and the sea, to the Río de la Plata, which becomes transformed into the Seine.
In your work as a translator, were you already translating before seeing yourself as a writer or did both paths develop in tandem?
I think it was a natural movement in translating myself to this new language---which I knew but not too well, it was a language that was distant and still remains distant to me. Some people asked me about certain writers and so I set to translating a few poems to show them. After, I began to fall in love with those texts and to really like doing it. It accompanied my own work and brought me closer to the other shore in memory. Gradually, I became a translator just as I was becoming a writer. That was mysterious as well, I must say, and formed part of the same movement: writing and carrying beside me writers I loved.
How did it happen that you changed languages? Why did you decide to do so?
It seemed to me that I would never be able to find the thread, to establish a harmony, to achieve some kind of wholeness if I kept writing in Spanish. Besides, I knew writers who were aware that I wrote and wanted to read something of mine. But they didn't read Spanish. So I decided to translate my poems into French, but something very strange happened to me. Suddenly I found a terrain where I recognized myself and which was mine, where it was so difficult finding the word and the language that I wrote very short poems, very pared down, with barely four or five words. Instead of translating the poems I had written, longer rhythmical poems, I thought no, I'm going to show them poems in French. That's how I started to write these poems that are of such little means, I understood that that's exactly what I am, this sort of poverty of words, this fear of the language. I realized that I had found something, a place that was mine. That poverty was like a mirror that was imposed on me. What I mean is that perhaps the same thing would have happened to me in another country and with another language. It wasn't due to French, from which I also wanted to remain apart, but to that distance between the language and me, which resembled the distance I wanted to exist around me, on both sides, a distance that obliged me to pare things down. That's how I became a writer in French. For me it was a discovery, which has nothing to do with the idea of the past or the French language tradition. It's true that I came to Paris because of this French influence that I had. But it could have been another country, Italy or England, especially those two countries, or Portugal too. And maybe the same thing would have happened to me with another language and I would have found a terrain that was mine as well.
In your work there is a deep sense of solitude that's striking. The characters in your prose works are solitary figures. Are you looking to capture or give form to a specific way of being alone?
Yes, I think things can happen to a character who is alone, because it's really a matter of saying something as closely as possible about oneself. If I seek characters who are alone, in empty spaces, it's because it seems to me that through them, I myself am trying to find something or touch something essential, something about life, about the world, about the beyond. Writing can arrive at a true expression where life and space are embodied, everything that life pares away. It's a place outside of the present and the past, where time doesn't count. As if it were a devastated place where we must start all over again, and as if in this rebirth we might manage to touch something essential.
In at least two of your books the figure of the horse is very present. What sense does that have for you?
What's going on is that, since I am Argentine and I spent those summers, first in Uruguay and later in Argentina, in those enormous spaces . . . One place in particular was extraordinary, with dunes that went all the way to the sea, and we would ride among them until we reached the shore. Later, having become a city dweller, those memories are marvelous. The horse is a symbol for many things and for that contact with nature. It's probably the animal that I love most, it has a very noble aspect. And that way it has of crossing through space . . . I like the noise it makes, I like to see how it goes away and comes close, that state of being half wild and half domesticated, but without ever losing its wildness. The sensation of freedom it gives, especially in those spaces that are so immense. When I write, sometimes, it's as if I were riding again.
In your prose books the characters seem ambiguous, of vague contours. Even in things that are very concrete: for example, they never eat. How do you conceive of these characters?
It's true that I don't make use of real life for writing. It costs me a huge effort to put in writing real, practical details. I set them aside instinctively because it seems to me a waste of time to describe a character doing things that I do every day: going down in the elevator, cooking, eating. When I sit down to write, sometimes characters appear who have a connection to me but who might not be me. For example, in L'or de l'incertitude (The Gold of Uncertainty) my grandmother appears as well as a person who looked after me, a Spanish woman named Lola, but whom I called Lina. So sometimes real things come up, but generally my characters remain as though suspended in space, without my trying. I leave them like that. Little by little I realize that I'm paring things down further. The last one, the boy in La frontière (The Border), is totally alone, and there is this other character who watches. Often I make this sort of counterpoint between a character who watches, who could be the writer, and another character whom that one sees moving about. There was something of that already in L'or de l'incertitude. But I don't know, I feel that everything remains open in front of me, and maybe one day I'll want to tell a more concrete story. I don't rule it out. But up until now, writing has been a sort of music for me, and I choose what brings me closest to that music and to the visions that I have.
Do you see yourself as a Latin American writer?
What I know is that I do not write like the French. Many people tell me that I bring something different, a kind of fantastic realism. Although I do not see myself in most novelists and short story writers of that tendency, which I like; but perhaps without meaning to I do have something of that. Once someone told me: really, you're a foreigner on both sides. And that's how I feel, but I think it's been like that since I was born.
Inevitably we have to ask: What notion of country and nationality do writers have? What notion of country do Argentines have? For the most part, Argentines are children or grandchildren of immigrants. That's different in the old countries of Europe. An Englishman, a Frenchman, an Italian, a German have another relationship to their countries. They have a specific tradition and they come not just from a city, but from another country within their countries, with its dialects. You can't compare them. We were transplanted from before, so it's like a second exile. In my family there have been I don't know how many exiles. In the middle of all that, how to define if I am Argentine? But I don't like to be told that I'm not Argentine. I am. Why? Because it is the land of my most distant memories, the most important ones. And where all the people live that I love, that is, really extraordinary friends, who do not forget me and who write to me, and to whom I write as well. A fidelity in friendship. I keep this really strong connection to Argentina, but at the same time I do not at all have the feeling for the patria, the fatherland. And if they tell me I'm French, that's not the point at all! At the same time, it's a country that has given me the opportunity to be, to write, that has opened its arms to me and to which I am very grateful. I can't deny that. Really, in the end one is a total exile! But perhaps we also achieve unity in that total exile.
In my recent trip to Argentina, in addition to the conferences, they invited me to do a talk at a high school, the Lycée Jean Mermoz, a French high school linked to the embassy. I was going to meet a group of students, thirteen to sixteen years old, children of French people employed by French businesses who were there for a while and then returning to France, and also children of French-Argentine couples and of Argentines who were attached to France. They were studying in Spanish and French, and were all at a high level. The first thing the teacher said when he introduced me was: all these students have two cultures (I saw the children's sad faces), they have two cultures and they're as if split in two. You are the example, he added, of a person with two cultures and two countries. I don't know why, but I didn't like that way of introducing me. So I told him, Look, let's consider this from another angle. Not only do these children and I have two cultures, but I wish we had ten. I wish that I had more English culture, which is a country and a literature I adore, and that I knew the German romantics better, whom I adore and whom I cannot read in their language, and I wish we had more. So it's not a question of these children being split in two and they have to figure it out in order to stop being so, but that they go on opening themselves to many more cultures, and those who leave are going to possess wonderful memories of this country that forms part of their childhood. The children were so delighted! They began to laugh, to ask questions: how do you go about translating, changing languages? They were enthusiastic, because finally someone was not speaking to them of being divided and of the two cultures that pulled them from one side to the other. I think they felt a sort of triumph over that idea and they discovered there was a way of living that is broader, more universal. Again, those notions of country, of fatherland, of local culture---in fact, we Argentines have been non-local from the start, because we were told we had to read French, English, Italian. So we weren't like that. I am the result of that melting pot. We're from everywhere, and also from nowhere at all.
So, what term do you prefer to describe yourself?
You know what I really don't like? Franco-argentine. I hate that. Even today I feel more Argentine than French. I haven't cut with that at all, I haven't become French. I prefer a thousand times more for people to tell me I'm Argentine and leave it at that, an Argentine who went away, a lost Argentine.
Do you maintain ties to Latin Americans in Paris?
I have always felt very close to Argentines and also to Uruguayans, and rather distant, but for lack of opportunity, from other Latin Americans. Because they have not come to me, and also because just with those first two countries I already see a lot of people. People call me, they come over, my house is always open to visitors, I like that.
How do you get along with the French literary world?
I'm rather far removed from that world. I have friends, several writers for example. One person I admire a lot and who always responds to me, though I don't see him often, is the poet André du Bouchet. I know that he follows what I do. Yves Bonnefoy as well. Nathalie Sarraute, rather, I follow her; she's a woman I admire greatly and whom I go to see now and then. But sometimes I don't call her so as not to bother her. She has always been very gracious in opening her door to me, and I know that she reads my books. Another friend whom I've known for a long time is Angelo Rinaldi, who also has a very unique body of work; he's part of tout Paris because he's a big critic at L'Express. But these relationships are somewhat distant. Because a writer is also a human being, and what makes me comfortable with Argentines is that they see me as a human being. We seldom speak of books. They call me to have coffee or a meal and we talk about friends in common or whatever. By contrast, in my contacts with writers, it takes some effort for me to assume the role of writer.
There's a spiritual dimension in your work, linked perhaps to that quest to pare things down. What is religion for you? Something you struggle with or which accompanies you?
It's something that I do not want to renounce, nor betray. It seems to me that here in France religion is very intellectualized. I don't go to church, I don't fulfill any obligations. I'm very selfish, I tell myself that I'm doing more or less the same thing when I write poetry: I'm praying, patiently. But I need to believe something. A priest friend who was previously a writer---Eugenio Gusta, he wrote a lot in the journal Sur---he wrote in his memoirs that he had known me and that I seemed to have nostalgia for faith. That seemed rather accurate to me, like a thing that is lost. But at the same time I believe that when one feels nostalgia for something, one still has it.
What brought you to write Nouvelles cantates (New Cantatas; a rewriting of passages from the Bible)?
I was interested in that idea of literature in the Bible, the strangeness of the poetry that is found there. And, too, it was a return to my beginnings. It seemed to me that it was something that would bring me closer to a knowledge of God. And since that book fascinated me---it was extraordinary, I couldn't imagine a greater magical realism than you find there, more marvels, and in so many different tones---I chose those passages like that, in a very personal way.
How do your books of prose come about? With the first two [L'or de l'incertitude, Le livre du retour (The Book of Return)], it seems that one follows the other.
Yes, they resemble each other. The third one [La frontière] is a bit shorter---I wanted it to be clearer and I thought that if the style, the language were more concise, perhaps the substance, which is mysterious for me, would reach the reader with more clarity. What happened to me when I began to write prose is that I wanted to lengthen my phrases, having spent so long writing these poems that are so spare. So, it was like playing a little with the language and letting myself loose, however it came out. I had no idea what would happen when I started. Perhaps I let myself go too much, I don't know; these days I think the prose is a bit complicated. But that's how it was, I needed to do it at that moment.