The Adventures of China Iron

"Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has a very poetic prose. I consider her prose to be one of the best among Argentinian writers, and that’s partly why I chose this book. Another reason as to why I selected it is that our current government also tried to ban it. The reason behind this is a little difficult to explain, but it’s important to say that the inspiration for the novel came from a very important text in Argentine literary tradition, Martín Fierro by José Hernández. Martín Fierro is like an epic poem about a man, who works in the fields in the Pampas. He is running away from the police, who want to arrest him for something he didn’t do. He is a gaucho. As he needs to run from the law, he abandons his wife and children. Cabezón Cámara takes the wife figure in Martín Fierro and puts her together with another woman, a white woman who had been a ‘cautiva’, a woman kidnapped by the Indigenous people as revenge for the white men usurping their land. The figure of the ‘cautiva’ is, by the way, also a tradition in Argentinian literature. In the novel, the white woman is actually the wife of a British man who had come to Argentina to occupy land and make a very big estancia , like an estate. Cabezón Cámara combines these two characters, the wife of Martin Fierro and this British woman, and she makes them run away together, discover love together. Maybe the censors in Argentina thought that it is not a good story for the younge generations, that is, to be exposed to the idea that two women can be very happy running away together. I don’t know. I can’t understand it. The Adventures of China Iron is indeed a book of adventures, written in beautiful prose, with extraordinary characters. It’s an interesting lens through which to rethink our country’s literary tradition, and how it must change."

"When I was speaking a moment ago about appreciating the challenges posed to translators, this is a book that we thought would be a very challenging prospect for a translator –translators, in fact. They have really done something remarkable with this book. This is a novel set in 1872. We are in the Pampas grass of Argentina. China is a young woman who is eking out an existence and trying to make ends meet. She has a fairly deadbeat husband who is conscripted, and she finds herself on a kind of odyssey through the landscape. She befriends someone called Liz who has come from Scotland, and they have a friendship which blossoms on this very strange voyage. Along the way, they discuss notions of nationhood and empire. Liz is somewhat enamoured with the British Empire, and speaks rapturously about it at points, and they reflect on that in relation to Argentina in the midst of all of this beautiful landscape that they’re travelling through. This is a novel that very deliberately echoes and subverts a foundational text of Argentina: a gaucho epic called Martín Fierro , which is essentially a novel-in-verse, a ballad narrated by a gaucho who is a kind of wandering minstrel, very much a masculine figure who is out there in the elements, telling the story of the pain and the suffering of Argentinians – mainly of men – with a sort of buoyant swagger. Cabezón Cámara is very deliberately invoking that tradition, subverting it, querying it, making it something new. Things which are very monolithically masculine in the original, in this novel are multiple, feminine or queer. They are rendered in much less swaggeringly male terms. There is this blossoming, loving relationship between the two women. It’s also a critique of national myth-making and of the stories which nations tell about themselves and the ways in which the mythologizing of nationhood is a devious project. “It’s a critique of national myth-making and the ways in which the mythologizing of nationhood is a devious project” It’s a novel that has a lot of really incisive and subversive funny things to say about masculinity, about nationality, about empire building. And it does it in such an inventive and innovative way. This is a book that has a really playful sense of literary past. It’s taking this gaucho tradition and reconfiguring it into something really contemporary. It’s also something that works without having any of those cultural reference points. It is just a really engaging saga, a road trip. It’s a really joyful book as well. Just to say, about the translators: Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre have done an absolutely superb job on this, because the translation manages to have a sense of all of that playfulness, that sense of engaging with the literary tradition of the gaucho epic. They’ve channelled all of that and retained its vitality, its vigour, its nimbleness. They’ve also managed to make it occasionally very moving and reflective. It’s a really fine work of artistry. A couple of the panel who had read the original in Spanish, and read the translation, remarked on the fact that what a really exceptional work of translation this is. I don’t think it is. There are a number of these books that draw on the myth kitty of their various cultures. But that doesn’t mean you need to know it in advance. I had not read much about Fierro before I read The Adventures of China Iron . These are all books that would still engage a reader if they don’t have those reference points. I think it just adds another layer to it if you’re interested to find out more. Above all, these are all books that resonate on a universal human level. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is really a human story about a family broken apart by war and trying to piece itself back together. The Adventures of China Iron is a story about love and friendship and growing up and throwing off the ideas of an older generation. These books open up layers of understanding with other cultures, and they do it through human stories that we can all relate to."