Abel Parentini Posse (7 January 1934 – 14 April 2023) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, poet, career diplomat, and politician. Posse was a diplomat for the Argentinian Foreign Service from 1966 to 2004.
He is the author of fourteen novels, seven collections of essays, an extensive journalistic work that included 400-odd articles, together with a series of short stories and poems. Posse was a regular contributor to the liberal-conservative daily La Nación in Buenos Aires, as well as other Argentine dailies (such as Perfil and La Gaceta de Tucumán) and Spanish papers (ABC, El Mundo and El País). He was also editor in-chief of the Revista Argentina de Estudios Estratégicos (Argentine Journal of Strategic Studies).
For his narrative fiction, Posse received several distinguished awards. In November 2012, he became a numbered member of the Argentine Academy of Letters.
Early life and education Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934 in the city of Córdoba, Argentina.[Sobre sus recuerdos de este período, leer Antonio López Ortega, «Conversación con Abel Posse», Imagen, Caracas, 10/1987, n.º 100, p.3-6. When he was two, the family moved to Buenos Aires for his father's work.
Posse's father, Ernesto Parentini was one of the founders of Artistas Argentinos Asociados and the producer of the feature film La Guerra Gaucha (1942). Posse's mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to a Creole-landed oligarchy of Galician descent that held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. One of Posse's aunts was Esmeralda Leiva de Heredia, better known as “La Jardín”, an actress and friend of Eva Perón. One of Posse's maternal great-grandfathers was a patron of the arts, while Julio Argentino Roca, twice president of Argentina, was a relative.
Posse grew up near Buenos Aires's Rivadavia Street. Through his father's profession, Posse was exposed to the city's artistic and cultural life, which he would later evoke in his literature. Posse mingled with Argentine show business stars, such as like Chas de Cruz, Pierina Dealessi, Ulises Petit de Murat, and Muñoz Azpiri, as well as the tango composers, Aníbal Troilo and Homero Manzi, which gave him an encyclopaedic knowledge of the tango repertoire and culture.
Posse went to primary school at the Colegio La Salle. When he was 8, he wrote and illustrated little books that he would sell to his grandmother, who lived in the same apartment complex. In 1943, at the age of 13, Posse launched himself into his first literary project, an unfinished novel set in Imperial Rome. Posse went to secondary school, from 1946 to 1952, at the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. There, he became friends with other artists and writers, such as the translator, Rogelio Bazán. Amongst his teachers, was the orientalist philosopher Vicente Fatone who stirred an interest in philosophy evident in several of his novels.
University education Posse studied at the Law Faculty in Buenos Aires until 1958. During the day, he endured lectures "by fascist-Peronist professors” while enjoying Buenos Aires at night.
According to Posse, his nighttime meetings and conversations in Buenos Aires cafés allowed him to deepen his knowledge of Russian and French literature, German philosophy, and Oriental spiritualism. He met Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Ricardo Molinari, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Ramón Gomez de la Serna and Rafael Alberti. He also became close friends with the poets Conrado Nalé Roxlo and Carlos Mastronardi, as well as Borges, who opened the doors of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE) for him and who would later help him to publish his first short stories and poems in the daily, El Mundo.
It was at this time that Posse became attracted to Peronist ideas despite having been born into an anti-Peronist family. A public demonstration on 17 October 1945 also left an impression on him, together with the public grieving aroused by Eva Perón's funeral in 1952. These years of Posse's life are depicted in certain passages of La reina del Plata (1988) and La pasión segun Eva (1994), a fictional biography of Eva Perón's final days.
After military service in 1955, Posse completed his university studies in 1958. The same year, he wrote a screenplay, “La cumparsa” (The Troupe), which was given an award by the National Institute of Cinematography.
After graduating, Posse travelled to Europe. With a university scholarship, Posse undertook doctoral studies in political sciences at the Sorbonne in Paris. Just before his travels, he published his first poem, “Invocación al fantasma de mi infancia muerta”, in the literary supplement of El Mundo.
While in Europe, he deepened his knowledge of the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke and Trakl, studied Sartre, and met Pablo Neruda. In Paris, he also met the German student, Wiebke Sabine Langenheim, who would become his wife.
In 1961, Posse spent two semesters in Tübingen, Germany, the home of Hölderlin. That same year, his poem, “En la tumba de Georg Trakl”, the first ever text signed as Abel Posse, was awarded the Rene Bastianini prize of the SADE in Buenos Aires. During his stay in Tübingen, he began writing his first novel, Los bogavantes, which he would finish in 1967.
Career
From Buenos Aires to the Foreign Service Posse returned to Buenos Aires in 1962. After a competitive selection process, he taught as an assistant in constitutional law under professor Carlos Fayt at the University of Buenos Aires. With little enthusiasm, he also began to work as a lawyer. Sabine traveled to Argentina and a while later they were married. In 1965 he was admitted to the Argentine Foreign Service after a public selection process (20). Until 2004 he would live most of his life abroad, as such most of his works were written outside of Argentina, although he always defended his Argentine identity, his literary production was well served by Ricardo Güiraldes’ adage, “distance reveals” (21).
Moscow (1966–1969) Abel Posse's only son, Ivan, was born in Moscow in January 1967. At this time in the Russian capital, he also finished writing his first novel, Los bogavantes, set in Paris and Seville, centered on a trio of characters, two of whom are students and one a Foreign Service employee, embodying the ideological tensions of the early 1960s. This neo-realist novel played an important part in his literary career. Under the pseudonym of Arnaut Daniel, Posse submitted it to the 1968 Planeta Prize. It featured among the four finalists, and although it had been virtually declared the winner by the judges José Manuel de Lara and Baltasar Porcel, under Francoist pressure the judges had to overturn their decision, due to some charged erotic scenes, above all because of its critical and ironical references to the regime's military. Once it had been published in 1970 by Editorial Brújula in Argentina, thanks to the support of Ernesto Sabato and Posse's father, and after it received the Sash of Honour of the SADE, Los bogavantes was later published in Barcelona in 1975 where it was the object of Francoist censorship. All 5000 copies were purged of two pages that ridiculed the masculinity of army officers. This singular publishing episode (22) brought him under the attention of those who were the leading literary publishers of the time, Carlos Barral and Carmen Balcells; the latter would become his literary agent.
Lima (1969–1971) Abel Posse was posted to Peru in 1969 and appointed cultural secretary of the embassy in Lima. For him Peru represented the discovery of Inca culture, the “revelation of the Americas” (23) which compelled him to identify himself with his Creole roots of North-Western Argentina (24). A visit to Machu Picchu inspired a long poem of 240 verses, Celebración de Machu Picchu, which he wrote in Cuzco in 1970 and published much later in Venice in 1977. Also in 1970, he wrote his most ambitious poetical piece, Celebración del desamparo, which was amongst the finalists of the Maldoror Poetry Prize although Posse decided against publishing it. In those years he read José María Arguedas and the great Cuban stylists: Alejo Carpentier, Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy. He also researched the life of Argentina's national independence hero, General José de San Martín, and in 1971 was admitted to the Instituto Sanmartiniano de Lima. In Peru he also wrote his second novel, La boca del tigre (1971), inspired by his personal experiences in the Soviet Union. This novel, clearly influenced by Ernesto Sabato's neo-realist style of fiction, helped the author to articulate his distrust of the overbearing ideologies of the time, in order to criticize the exercise of power in the contemporary world and to reflect on the place of the individual in that historical juncture. This thematic concern foreshadowed the ideas about history in his later novel Daimon. La boca del tigre, which received the third National Prize of Argentine Literature, hints at his initial musings on the notion of Americanness (americanidad). (25) The influence that the Argentine philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Günther Kusch would have on Posse's fiction and indeed his own worldview after his encounter with him and his readings of La seducción de la babarie (1953) and América profunda (1962). Consequently, Kusch's thought on the fundamental ontological and cultural antagonism between the West's homo faber with the Americano “man of being” and the symbiotic relationship of Amerindians with the Cosmos (“the Open”) was to become a leitmotif in Posse's work, and particularly in his “Trilogy of the Discovery of America”.
Venice (1973–1979) Posse was named Consul General for Venice in 1973, where he lived for 6 years. It was here that he wrote Daimon (1978), between October 1973 and August 1977, the novel which began the “Trilogy of the Discovery of America”. This novel has as its protagonist a fictional avatar of the Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre (1510–1561). In this text, the conqueror, known for his cruelty which is depicted by chroniclers as the archetypal madman and traitor, raises from his ashes eleven years after his death together with the ghosts of his Marañones. Thus begins the “Jornada de América”, through four centuries of painful Latin American history, on which he casts a disillusioned gaze, by seeing it as an “Eternal-Return-of-the-Same”; that is the eternal annihilation of man's liberty against which Lope de Aguirre's rebelliousness is powerless to arrest. This fruitless trans-historical rebellion drives him to an ambiguous death in the mid-1970s in Latin America, a condition that bears a resemblance to the death of Ernesto Che Guevara's revolutionary venture in Bolivia. Several scenes of torture suffered by the protagonist clearly resemble the atrocities committed by the Argentine military during the country's last military dictatorship. (26) This novel constitutes a milestone in Posse's poetics, as it is enthused with Rabelaisian elements in a baroque style, by continually resorting to the use of humour and ambiguity, to parody, intertextuality, anachronism, the grotesque, and continuous paratextual dialogue with the reader, characteristics which would reach their highest intensity in the subsequent novel, The dogs of paradise (1983). Daimon was shortlisted for the prestigious Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1982.