“Index Card,” the final story in Argentine author Ángel Bonomini’s collection The Novices of Lerna, begins with an epitaph. Paul Béranger, it reads, “wrote commentary on the works of a minor poet, but his major contribution lies in the sagacity and depth of his judgment and his revolutionary views on poetry, which to some extent influenced the work of Mallarmé.”

What follows is a tale by turns absurd, tragic, and bitingly funny. Joachin Despines is a writer desperately seeking critical acclaim. When the French literati ignore his published work, he hatches a scheme to fake his death and canonize Despines, “France’s greatest poet,” under a new name: Paul Béranger.

As is often the case in Bonomini’s fiction, things seldom go according to plan — the characters’ or their creator’s. Béranger is hailed as one of the country’s finest literary minds, and Despines once again fades into obscurity. Crestfallen, the poet-cum-critic kills himself, for real this time, on the day he was scheduled to deliver his induction speech at the Académie. We learn, perversely, that the speech was titled, “Joachin Despines: A Holy Poet.”

More than half a century after the collection’s original print run, Bonomini shares more in common with Despines than even he could have anticipated. Over a period of decades, he published some 90 short stories and eight volumes of poetry, earning a Fulbright Grant in 1974. Bonomini also worked as an editor for Life Magazine, where he translated various works into Spanish, including those of Ernest Hemingway, before joining La Nacion as an art critic.

Although he earned his share of critical acclaim, perhaps none is more storied than the letter he received in 1972 from the Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares that read, in part, “Borges came over [and] I proposed we read…The Novices of Lerna. We were dazzled.” 

By the time of his death in 1994, however, Bonomini was just as likely to be remembered as the one-time boyfriend of the iconic singer-songwriter María Elena Walsh, with whom he published a collection of poetry, Argumento del enamorado / Báladas con Ángel (Lover’s Argument / Ballads with Ángel). In his obituary for Clarín, friend and former mentee Marcelo Moreno dubbed him the “secret master” of Argentine fantastic literature. Bonomini has been all but forgotten in the decades since, but Jordan Landsman’s exuberant new translation of The Novices of Lerna disproves the axiom that you only get one chance to make a first impression.

A uniquely Argentine voice

Axioms aren’t the only linguistic conventions that this collection defies. Bonomini regularly turns language on its head while stubbornly refusing to engage in simple moralism. Instead, through a menagerie of passionate, obsessive, and deranged personae, he suggests that we are mysteries even to ourselves. “I am not speaking in metaphors when I say that man is tragically fallen inside the mirror,” declares the alternately mad and visionary narrator of The Report. “His anguished inability to see himself forces him to trust in precisely that which will inexorably betray him.”

That Bonomini has imagined the radio address of a dictator in the immediate aftermath of a coup d’etat is hardly coincidental. The Novices of Lerna was first published in 1972, just six years after the Revolución Argentina established General Juan Carlos Onganía as de facto president and four years before Isabel Martínez de Perón was overthrown by the military dictatorship known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (The National Reorganization Process).

“Let’s face it, History is prediction and clairvoyance is History,” Bonomini writes presciently. “Heroism is nothing more than a certain type of act that crystallizes without knowing its necessity, its likelihood, its consequences. Every action comes before the dilemma that resulted in choice. The firing squad precedes the betrayal.”

The written word in this instance has the power of a gun.

Among many other things, Bonomini’s voice is unmistakably Argentine. In The Singer, he describes a Buenos Aires confronting its collective mortality as it grieves the loss of its most distinguished vocalist. Employing a single-sentence stream of consciousness, Bonomini writes that the singer’s death “brushed my home like the wing of a great bird dropping a little bit of ash with every wingbeat but it swept through the house and my house was everyone’s house.”

Later, the narrator jokingly describes himself as “cualquier cacatúa” (“any cockatoo”), which Landsman reveals in a footnote is slang for somebody mediocre or insignificant. The phrase, we’re also told, is pulled from the tango Corrientes y Esmeralda by Celedonio Flores, who used it to describe the “nobodies” on “skid row” that idolized Carlos Gardel — Argentina’s most famous tango singer and the short story’s unnamed subject.

Perfect doppelgängers and strange selves

Bonomini’s fiction often operates as a form of puzzle that presents no solution. In the collection’s eponymous near-novela, an underachieving lawyer from Buenos Aires, Ramón Beltra, is offered a six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland, where he encounters two dozen perfect doppelgängers from disparate countries. A deadly plague begins picking them off one by one, save Beltra, and the mystery of Lerna deepens. Is the university rector conducting some kind of wicked experiment, or have the novices never existed and Bonomini is commenting on the elusiveness of the self, tragically fallen into a series of mirrors? The story, frustratingly, offers no easy answers.

One of the more haunting short stories in the collection, Aromatic Herbs, explores one man’s recurring dream: a woman, Eleonora, is waiting for him beside a convertible just outside the airport of a small French city. Each time he departs with her in the convertible, and each time her flowing scarf gets tangled in one of the car’s rear wheels, leading to a horrific crash. (Bonomini likely took his inspiration from the modern dancer Isadora Duncan, who was nearly decapitated under similar circumstances in Nice in 1927.) Yet before each accident, the man never feels more alive.

Fans of The Twilight Zone might recognize the story’s similarities with one of the show’s most famous episodes, Shadow Play (1961). But whereas Charles Beaumont and Rod Serling depict a man reliving his execution as an unfathomable nightmare, Bonomini refuses to pass judgment. “Could it be,” his character muses, “that this is my heaven, or my hell, and I’ll repeat my dream forever and ever, like a blessing or a curse?”

Whether Ángel Bonomini will posthumously enjoy a new literary renaissance remains to be seen. Few authors, dead or alive, inspire their own Paul Béranger, even one as demented and ultimately ineffectual as Joachin Despines. If they’re lucky, they’ll get a Jordan Landsman — someone who can bring their work, once more, spectacularly to life.

The Novices of Lerna was published by Transit Books and can be purchased in Argentina here.