“Misunderstanding is the inner force of metamorphosis,” shoots César Aira in one of his sprawling novels of that crazy literature made up of parts, albeit with a whole. They multiply and also mutate, pointing to Ariel Magnus, a storyteller and essayist for several Aira-like labels, large or small, domestic or foreign, who this year, via Interzona, published the Spanish translation of Nazis and Jews and the controversial Soy la peste, a tango mano a mano with Chat GPT. And of a literature that plays between the misunderstandings of realities and words: “Foreignness in language and culture helps my passion for playing with languages, which was part of my sentimental upbringing when I grew up among Germans and Jews, although the mix is the same,” admits translator Magnus from his home in Berlin. “Without transformation there would be no sequel,” Aira continues on another page, and Magnus, a little more down-to-earth, deals the blow to the current plague, “the originality with AI is over. Book would be the manifesto of the final battles “That we will defeat the AI.” In other words, it’s revenge and farewell.”
“I am not the plague that destroys bodies, but the one that attacks the words, ideas and voices that once rang from the depths of man. I am that force that takes with insidious precision what was once authentic and unique and reproduces it until it is stripped of its soul,” admits the not innocent Chat GPT in Magnus’ novel. Other catastrophes, the same goal of soul destruction, detailed in the non-fiction books “Nazis and Jews”, originally published as “Nazis and Jews”. Nazis and Jews in Exile in Argentina, 2023, and translated by Magnus himself. “I didn’t change much in this work based on journalistic research and personal memories because I thought I had written it for a German audience and a German language. For Argentines it would be completely different,” says the man who usually changes the states of family memory in his novels, such as in “The Feast of the Faun” (Seix Barral), where his great-grandfather appears in the 1920s brothel in Buenos Aires.
Friends are enemies. Nazis y Jews grew out of a promotional tour of The Chess Players of Buenos Aires (The One Who Moves the Pieces, Tusquets, 2017) in the company of his German publisher at Kiepenheuer & Witsch, where Magnus shares a catalog with David Foster Wallace and Patti Smith, among others, and arises from the questions of a Teutonic audience inspired by the “anecdotes of how Jews and Nazis walked door-to-door on the same block in Buenos Aires lived together” Aires was amazed. And they were very surprised that I was able to tell it with a certain lightness that isn’t really lightness. It’s like the icing in the cake that feels light, but not daddy, says the author of the book, available in five languages.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
“And how am I supposed to tell you this if I don’t do it with humor?” asks Magnus, always laughing left and right, and returns to the passage in which the brother endures the anti-Semitic complaints of the students of the Goethe School in a game against the Pestalozzi School in the late 1990s: “My grandfather made soap with you.” “Either I laugh, or I can’t think of any other option than to be outraged fifty years after Auschwitz – Magnus is the grandson of Holocaust survivors – when someone repeats this atrocity in a school fight. Then here the presence of Nazism after the war caught my attention and in the end they always ask me the same questions: How do you return to this country? What do you feel in Germany?”, concludes the youngest winner of the IV Ciudad de Estepona Novel Prize Lies the truth, inspired by the incredible story of the “left-wing Nazi” Heinrich Jürges, who lived in Argentina in the 1950s, was a minor official of Goebbels, contributed a lot of false data about Peronism and Nazism and is published by the Spanish Pre-Textos.
Who are these dead? “I didn’t feel like writing this text. It didn’t work. And I tried the GPT chat,” admits Magnus about the origins of a project for “I Am the Plague”, which had been lying in paper mills for ten years and was based on the translation of a story by Hofmannsthal (1900), which in turn took up one by Goethe (1795) and was based on the ghostly love adventure of De Bassompierre (1663). related. These Russian dolls, literary spaces that Magnus implants in miniatures of worlds, as he did with Marcel Proust in Combray, slowly acquire a dystopian tone with the new version of the AI, as the knight approaches the gravediggers: “What remains when everything is burned is you, talking to yourself.”
“In Von Hofmannsthal’s story there were open questions, for example: Who are these dead? Although he expands them a lot, there is a lot more meat, I wanted to solve them more. So in the Interzona edition you read the historical variants and mine with free AI. And they screwed us, although no one bothered to read it or notice the more on the cover, not even on Instagram, where small hearts are supposed to rule,” laughs Ariel.
“I was impressed that something so hot was there. I still think it’s a positive reaction because it’s certainly a malevolent machine. But then again, you have to take responsibility. For now,” concludes Magnus. Where the innocent human word resists, there will be a world, there will be history, in the face of the threat of the insignificant replica of this unimaginative present.
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