I failed to enamor the girl at school, but she did tell me that I wrote very well. Instead of remembering that eighty percent of the poem was Cernuda’s, I concluded that it was my own verses — elaborated thanks to the company of a great poet — that the girl had liked. This gave me immense confidence from that day on, it had a decisive influence on my subsequent literary development. Gradually the percentage of copying in my poems decreased and slowly, but with a certain amount of confidence, my own personal style evolved, always constructed — to a greater or lesser extent — with the collaboration of those writers whose blood I sucked for my own benefit. Without haste, I began to acquire a little of my own style, nothing dazzling, but sufficient, something that was unmistakably mine, thanks to vampirism and the involuntary collaboration of the rest, those writers I laid hands on to find my personal literature. Without haste, arriving always after, in second place, accompanying a writer, all the Cernudas I discovered along the way, who appeared first, original. Without haste, like Walsers secondary or Joseph Roth’s discreet characters, who pass through life in endless flight, placing themselves on the margins of the reality that troubles them so much and also on the margins of existence — in the face of the mechanism of sameness so dominant in the world today, to defend an extreme residue of irreducible individuality, something that is unmistakably theirs. I discovered mine in the others, arriving after them, first accompanying them and later liberating myself.
I think I can now say, for example, that thanks to Cernuda’s protective staff I began to walk on my own and to find out what kind of writer I was, and also not to know who I was, or, better put, to know who I was, but just a bit, in the same way as my literary style is just an extreme residue, but that will always be better than nothing. The same can be applied to my existence: I have just a bit of my own life — as can be observed in this timid dictionary — but it is unmistakably mine, which, to be honest, to me already seems a lot. Given the state of the world, it is no small thing to have a bit of autobiography.
I know myself little; perhaps it’s better like this, to have a life that is “deliberately slender” (as Gil de Biedma would say), but at least to have a life, which not many do. Perhaps it’s better like this, for, as Goethe said to Eckermann, “I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.”
Never to know oneself. This is what Musil thought happens in private journals. He believed that the diary was the only narrative form of the future, since it contains within itself all possible discursive forms. However, he did not exactly maintain this with enthusiasm, rather he believed that it was a waste of time or a fantasy to think that the diary can, for example, help us to know ourselves. The diary he himself kept illustrates his distrust of this form, being nothing other than the crushing negative of an autobiography, its most perfect challenge. In Musil’s version, the diary was the ultimate genre without qualities, not so strange if we know that he was of the opinion that in private journals the person writing “has nothing to listen to there,” and he wondered what one is meant to be listening to: “Diaries? A sign of the times. So many diaries get published. It is the most comfortable, the most undisciplined form. And yet it is possible that soon only diaries will get written, and the rest will be considered undrinkable […]. It is pure analysis: nothing more, nothing less. It is not art. Nor should it be. What is the point of listening to oneself there?”
Never to know oneself, or to know oneself just a bit, and to be a parasite on other writers in order to possess a scrap of personal literature. This could be said to be my plan for the future from the day I began copying Cernuda. Perhaps what I have done is to lean on others’ quotations in order to get to know my reduced territory, befiting a subaltern with a few vital sparks, and at the same time to discover that I shall never know myself very well — because life is no longer a unity with a center, “Life,” according to Nietzsche, “no longer resides in totality, in an organic and complete Whole”—and yet I shall be able to be many people, a frightful conjunction of the most diverse destinies and a set of echoes from the most varied places: a writer doomed possibly, sooner or later — obliged by the circumstances of the time in which he happens to live — to try his hand at not the autobiographical, but the autofictional genre, although I think perhaps it will be some time before this doom befalls me; I am currently entangled in an engaging tribute to Truthfulness, involved in a desperate effort to tell truths about my fragmented life, before, perhaps, the time should come for me to pass over to the sphere of autofiction, where no doubt, if no other option is open to me, I shall pretend to know myself better than I really do.
Walter Benjamin said that in our time the only work truly endowed with meaning — critical meaning, as well — would have to be a collage of quotations, excerpts, echoes of other works. In its time, I incorporated into that collage relatively personal ideas and phrases, and slowly created for myself an autonomous world, paradoxically echoing other works very closely. All of this to realize that, owing to this manner of working, I would never attain anything or barely attain much, like the trainee majordomos of the Benjamenta Institute. But there is no reason why this should stop me, here in this dictionary, from telling truths about my fragmented and slender but sufficient life.
However that may be, I was a parasite and I suffered for it. In Nantes the drama reached its highest point. And I came down, as tends to happen when one scales the peaks of tragedy. I came down and saw that I did not have to worry about my parasitical past, rather to convert it—revert it — into my own artistic program, to turn into a literary parasite on myself, to make the most of the reduced but autonomous part of my anxiety and of my work that I could consider to be mine. Then I read “Second Hand” by Pauls and relaxed even more when I saw, for example, that Borges had been a highly creative and astute case of literary parasitism.
Nothing so comforting as Pauls’ idea that an important dimension of Borges’ work involves the writer arriving always after, in second place, in a subordinate’s role — with a minimal biography, but with a biography, which is already saying a lot — this writer always arrives later and does so to read or comment on or translate or introduce a work or writer who appears first, originally. It was Gide who said that it calms the nerves to know that the original is always the other.
GIRONDO, ROSARIO (Barcelona, 1948). Let others hide behind pseudonyms or make up heteronyms. Personally I’ve always gone for the metronymic. Does that word exist, does the word metronymic exist? I would say what is named exists. I have always signed my books Rosario Girondo, Rosario Girondo is my mother’s name. I have often had to hear that it was my pseudonym. No, it is my metronymic. How many times do I have to say it? How can the mother’s name be a pseudonym?
I remember my mother as a fragile and strange being, at times lost among barbiturates, always depressed and difficult, dreaming of trains that ran her down, my father’s silent enemy. She kept a diary in rigorous secret, no one ever knew that she recorded her life in a few square notebooks, which I found after her death and read. Even her handwriting was unusual in those notebooks, it was an insect’s handwriting, microscopic, a special handwriting for her diaries, very different, for example, from the one she used for more than forty years for the shopping list.