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César Aira

Argentine writer and translator

César Aira (Argentine Spanish: [ˈsesaɾˈajɾa];^[1] born 23 February 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentinian writer and translator, and an exponent of contemporary Argentinian literature. Aira has published over a hundred short books of stories, novels and essays. In fact, at least since 1993, a hallmark of his work is a truly frenetic level of writing and publication—two to five novella-length books each year.^[2] He has lectured at the University of Buenos Aires, on Copi and Arthur Rimbaud, and at the University of Rosario on Constructivism and Stéphane Mallarmé, and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela.^[3]

Work

Besides his fiction, and the translation work he does for a living, Aira also writes literary criticism, including monographic studies of Copi, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and the nineteenth-century British limerick and nonsense writer Edward Lear. He wrote a short book, Las tres fechas (T

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Biography

César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own – so far. He declared that he might have become a painter if it weren’t so difficult (‘the paint, the brushes, having to clean it all’). He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, ‘a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels.’ By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but.

His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luis Borges’ literature of ideas. He has been called many things: ‘slippery’ (The Nation), ‘too smart’ (New York Sun), ‘infuriating’ (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of ‘perplexing episodes’ (New York Review of Books). He’s also been called ‘one of the three or four best writers worki

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César Aira by María Moreno

César Aira’s body of work is a perfect machine for invention—he writes without necessity or any apparent forebears, always as if for the first time. Aira’s creative approach has never changed: he reads exhaustively every author in every genre, from every period and every country, as if it were possible to process it all. He has compiled an archive so vast and diverse that it becomes impossible to consult. Each individual trace added to the mix is erased by its juxtaposition with all the others. Aira likes it all and writes accordingly.

He rarely agrees to be interviewed—never doing so in his own country, and almost never outside of it—because he reserves literary invention and originality for his own literature. There would seem to be in Aira a dream of autonomy: everything within the work, nothing outside it.

At times it is tempting to describe Aira’s writing procedure in the simplest of ways: writing by picking up with the last line written the day before, planting something implausible in the work, and then continuing to write until he has made