Roberto Arlt was an Argentine writer born in the federal capital of the country, in the province of Buenos Aires. He dedicated himself to writing and journalism, among other things, leaving a completely raw and original new facet in Argentine literature, unleashing something similar in other foreign authors such as William burroughs.
Arlt was born in the midst of Argentine poverty on April 2, 1900, the son of the union of Kart Arlt Y Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer. His childhood was really difficult having to suffer all marginality head on. At the age of 8 he was expelled from the school he attended, so he worked in various trades while trying to learn all he could about literature on his own. He was a book store assistant, a dyer’s apprentice, a painter, a mechanic, a charcoal maker, a brick factory manager, and a port stevedore before he was able to get a job at a local newspaper.
Immediately the marginal social background that he had lived was reflected in a controversial column that Arlt wrote commonly called Porteñas Etchings. The name is born based on the alcoholic drink that is difficult to swallow and the fact that they are mostly stories from the area of the Federal Capital, known as the port area.
Leftist tendencies and his past made Arlt take an interest in the Marxism and this greatly influenced his writing, showing marginality as no one had done so far. The new face of literature went hand in hand with Arlt while the most conservative of the Argentine aristocracy continued to lean towards authors such as Jorge Luis Borges.
Samples of such works can be your first novel The Rabid Toy (1926) that can be classified as conventional but at the same time full of energy. The mad seven, his next novel published in 1929 would be the peak of his literal acuity, then continued by the sequel The flamethrowers.
Both in the novels and in his stories and plays, the theme of bizarre characters and crazy media is recurrent, completely alienated by their environment, seeking a completely illogical goal in the midst of the urban chaos of the beginning of the century.
Finally after a hard and extremely exhausted life Arlt died in 1942 of cardiac arrest. True to his unreal and unconventional theme, his coffin was lowered from his apartment by means of a crane that took it out of the window.
After being translated into various languages, it inspired authors who would try to portray poverty, crime and madness as he did. According to critics, his closest followers would be William burroughs, Iceber slim and Irving welsh, whom however Arlt would destroy if they were contemporary.
His popular bibliography includes:
- The Diary of a Morphine Man (1920)
- The Rabid Toy (1926)
- The mad seven (1929)
- The Flamethrowers (1931)
- The Sorcerer’s Love (1932)
- Buenos Aires Etchings (1933)
- The Hunchback (1933)
- Spanish etchings (1936)
- The gorilla breeder (1941)
- New Spanish Etchings (1960)
Here is a Buenos Aires etching in which Arlt unloads himself before the readers due to the difficulty of his surname:
I HAVE NOT THE BLAME
Whenever I deal with letters from readers, I usually admit that I get some compliments. Well, today I received a letter in which I was not praised. Its author, who must be a respectable old woman, tells me:
“You were very young when I knew your parents, and I know who you are through your Arlt.”
That is to say, it supposes that I am not Roberto Arlt. Which is alarming me, or making me think about the need to look for a pseudonym, because the other day I received a letter from a reader of Martínez, who asked me:
“Tell me, are you not Mr. Roberto Giusti, the councilor of the Independent Socialist Party?”
Now, with all due respect for the independent councilor, I declare no; that I am not and cannot be Roberto Giusti, at most I am his namesake, and even more so: if I were a party councilor, I would in no way write notes, but rather I would dedicate myself to sleeping truculent naps and to “settle in” with all the that they needed a vote to pass an ordinance that would give them millions.
And other people have already asked me: “Tell me, is that Arlt a pseudonym?”
And you understand that it is not a pleasant thing to go around showing people that a vowel and three consonants can be a surname.
It is not my fault that an ancestral lord, born who knows what remote village in Germania or Prussia, was called Arlt. No, it is not my fault.
Nor can I argue that I am a relative of William Hart, as a reader who gave him for photography and his stars asked me; but I don’t like that they put sanbenitos on my last name, and they are looking for three feet. Is it not, perhaps, an elegant, substantial name, worthy of a count or a baron? Isn’t that a surname worthy of appearing on a brass plate on a locomotive or on one of those rare machines, which have the addition of “Arlt’s multifaceted machine”?
Well: I would like to call myself Ramón González or Justo Pérez. No one would doubt, then, my human origin. And they would not ask me if I am Roberto Giusti, or no reader would write to me, with a Mephistophelic typewriter smile: “I already know who you are through your Arlt.” Already at school, where for my happiness they expelled me at every moment, my last name began to give the principals and teachers a headache. When my mother took me to enroll in a grade, the director, twisting her nose, raised her head, and said:
-How do you spell “that”?
My mother, without being indignant, would dictate my surname again. Then the director, humanizing herself, because she was faced with an enigma, exclaimed:
-What a strange last name! What country is it from?
-German.
-Ah! Very good very good. I am a great admirer of the kaiser – added the young lady. (Why will all the principals be “young ladies”?) In the grade the Stations of the Cross began again. The teacher, examining me, in a bad mood, when he reached my name on the list, he said: -Hey, how do you pronounce “that”? (“That” was my last name.) Then, satisfied to put the pedagogue in a hurry, he dictated:
-Arlt, loading the voice in the ele.
And my surname, once learned, had the virtue of remaining in the memory of all those who spoke it, because no barbarism occurred to the degree that the teacher did not immediately say:
-Must be Arlt.
As you can see, he had liked the surname and its musicality.
And as a result of the musicality and poetry of my last name, I was thrown out of the degrees with alarming frequency. And if my mother was going to complain, before speaking, the director would say to her:
-You are Arlt’s mother. Not; no ma’am. Your boy is unbearable.
And I was not unbearable. I swear. The unbearable was the last name. And as a result of him, my father spanked my sheepskin numerous times.
It is written in the Kabbalah: “It is both above and below.” And I think the Kabbalists were right. It is both before and now. And the problems that my last name caused, when I was an angelic toddler, occur now that I have beards and “twenty-eight septiembres”, as the one who knows who I am says “through her Arlt.”
And to me, this blows me away.
It pisses me off because I have the bad taste of being delighted to be Roberto Arlt. It is true that I would rather call myself Pierpont Morgan or Henry Ford or Edison or any other “it”, of those; But in the material impossibility of transforming myself to my liking, I choose to get used to my surname and wonder, at times, who was the first Arlt of a village in Germania or Prussia, and I say to myself: What a barbarism that ancestral ancestor must have done to call him Arlt! Or, who was the citizen, burgomaster, mayor, or standard-bearer of a bourgeois corporation, who came up with these blank letters to designate a man who had to wear beards down to his waist and a face furrowed with wrinkles thick like snakes?
But in the impossibility of clarifying these mysteries, I have ended up resigning myself and accepting that I am Arlt, from here until I die; unpleasant thing, but irremediable. And being Arlt, I cannot be Roberto Giusti, as a Martinez reader asked me, nor an old man, as the sympathetic reader who met my parents at the age of twenty, when I “was very young,” supposes. This tempts me to say, “God give you a hundred more years, ma’am, but I’m not who you suppose.”
As for calling myself that, I insist: I am not to blame.