Francisco Coloane, the phoenix of Tierra del Fuego with flamboyant success
Francisco Coloane, on the right, with Victor de La Fuente, in the studio of Radio France Internationale, in 1994. © RFI
Text by: Léopold Picot Follow
8 mins
Francisco Coloane died 20 years ago, on August 5, 2002. Born on the island of Chiloé, in southwestern Chile, the multi-life writer, sailor, map designer, sheep herder, is the one of Latin America's most influential literary figures, considered the region's Jack London.
He will have twice returned to success: once young in Chile, then ten years before his death internationally.
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Everything happens in Patagonia.
Imagine a Native American frozen in an iceberg, who pursues like a curse the white sailors who slaughtered his people.
Imagine a gold digger who takes himself for a king, and builds his kingdom surrounded by unfamiliar individuals.
Imagine whalers, a still inexperienced ship's boy, Indian hunters, wild landscapes, a violent and united humanity, where barbarism mixes with sociability, blurring conventions, the better to denounce the horror of colonization.
Add to it a raw style straight out of the silver mine of South American writing, chiseled dialogues, a slang forged in Tierra del Fuego, subtle ellipses and a biting humor;
you get Francisco Coloane.
An old sea bass
Francisco Coloane was above all a worker, a man who had practiced many trades.
Born in 1910, he helped his father on fishing boats at a very young age, sometimes even hunting whales.
Victor De La Fuente, director of the Chilean edition of Le Monde diplomatique and close to the writer, says that he was marked by "
his strength, at all levels, like his characters, who were incredibly strong men typical of the southern Chile, people working in harsh conditions.
»
Hoy se celebran 110 años del natalicio de Francisco Coloane y quiero compartirles un fragmento del cuento Tierra del Fuego, que aparece en el volumen de cuentos Cabo de Hornos.
pic.twitter.com/4BDJsUqXp9
— Daniel Hidalgo (@dan_hidalgo) July 19, 2020
As a young man, Coloane lived in Patagonia as a foreman in an explorer sheep farm, but also as a map designer, sailor or even oil prospector.
To Victor De La Fuente, years later, he tells how he did not then need to be lulled by adventures, like those that the journalist watched (
Sandokan
, for example) because he lived them.
He who wrote since childhood, it is these lands and its peoples that inspire him with the stories that will make him successful.
Francisco Coloane was an exceptional character, profoundly good and funny, in contrast to his physique built for the hard life of the South.
Its French translator, François Gaudry, remembers: “
I immediately appreciated it.
Coloane had quite an extraordinary presence.
He was a handsome man, a handsome old man, with very fine white hair, a big beard… the face of an old sea bass
.
" Victor de La Fuente, who accompanied him several times to the Étonnants Voyageurs festival in Saint Malo, says: "
I remember that once, it was May Day, and I said to him, '
Francisco, he there is no demonstration in Saint Malo
".
He replied
: "
Let's both demonstrate
", and we demonstrated together to celebrate May 1. He was quite funny (...) he had a great sense of humor, he invented stories, he was very open.
"
Two rebirths
From the 1950s, Francisco Coloane was a well-known author in Chile, notably for
The Last Foam
, published in 1941. Victor De La Fuente, much younger than him, read him in high school, his work was on the literature faculties program. .
This period is a change, a second birth: Coloane goes from prolific worker to writer, national figure.
Quickly, however, it was set aside, considered too scholarly and overtaken by the appearance of a new generation of talented authors.
Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda in the studio at RFI (October 2019).
© RFI/Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint
It was the writer Luis Sepúlveda, who considered him his master, who decided to do everything to have his works translated abroad.
This is where François Gaudry intervened in the 1990s. During the Étonnants Voyageurs festival in Saint-Malo, Alvaro Mutis, a Colombian author whom he had just translated, recommended two works to him:
Tierra del Fuego
and
Cap Horn
.
"
I first discovered that they were collections of short stories.
However, the collections of short stories, my faith, make the French editors a little hesitant: they think that that sells very badly.
I was a little hesitant because I was just starting to work in editing and translation, but I read this news and immediately got me excited: it was great, I had never read something similar.
Neither one nor two, the translator took up his best pen to convince his publisher, who accepted in 1993.
This originality makes translation not very easy, says François Gaudry.
Francisco Coloane speaks of a very particular region, little described in novels and scientific works.
"
The difficulty came on the one hand from identifying precisely the geographical space he was talking about, the plant space too, from talking about the species of trees, brush and plants... So, for me, it was quite a research work to restore as accurately as possible this universe he was talking about
”,
explains the translator.
Same challenge for translating the vocabulary of indigenous peoples, little studied at the time, or even that of the navy, very specific, or slang.
“
For a translator who is not familiar with maritime language, with boat parts, with maneuvers, this is a great difficulty: you must not make mistakes in the translation, otherwise you risk sinking the boat. !
So much so that there too, I had to equip myself with very precise marine literature, such as topographies of ports, of the seabed
,” smiles François Gaudry.
La greatest dedicatoria de mi vida.
From Francisco Coloane, en su último viaje a Tierra del Fuego.
Fue mi primer gran entrevistado.Yo era estudiante de periodismo en la Chile.
Julio es el mes de su natalicio (1910).
An indestructible man.
#periodismo @ClichePrensa pic.twitter.com/1jxUdLcHsJ
— Patricia Stambuk (@PatriciaStambuk) July 21, 2020
In France,
Tierra del Fuego
, published in 1994, was a success.
Invited on the sets of various media, including RFI, Coloane seduces, and his work is fully translated in stride.
Italy, Spain and Germany will follow.
His own country, Chile, rediscovers his work.
A second rebirth that marks him: "
He was a very humble person, he did not take himself for a great successful writer, but at the same time, he was aware that he had done a highly valued literary work in Chile. .
Being recognized abroad too, even many years later, made him happy
,” explains Victor De La Fuente.
There is a bit of astonishment, too, in the face of this sudden recognition, his translator François Gaudry laughs: "
I even remember that he said to me once, he said to me "
Figure you, we thought that I was dead
"
!
»
Coloane's beliefs
Besides being one of the most important authors of Latin American literature, Francisco Coloane is also a committed man.
A member of the Chilean Communist Party, he defied the Pinochet dictatorship by going to the funeral of his friend, Pablo Neruda.
“
It was a few weeks after the coup.
He went there, with a hundred people who marched in the procession, and he gave the eulogy of Neruda.
He wasn't afraid to do it: a lot of people were hiding, but he was there.
He always had a defiant attitude, and had an influence on the country at all levels: political, ideological, and of course literary
,” summarizes Victor De La Fuente.
The Paine Mountains, with the Torres del Paine Mountains, in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, about 1,960 km south of Santiago, on February 26, 2016. AFP - MARTIN BERNETTI
He is also very attached to denouncing the progressive disappearance of the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego.
In his stories, he denounces the violence of whites, exacerbated by the boldness of life in Patagonia, while endeavoring to restore the positive and negative nuances of such a space.
Métis himself, he draws in his texts the portrait of a "
cosmopolitanism of the margins
" according to the words of Tatiana Calderon, professor of comparative literature
in a scientific article
, that is to say the mixing of a multitude of cultures, in a space where States are struggling to impose themselves.
By exposing the barbarism of the Western world in Patagonia, Coloane reverses the stigma usually placed on Native American cultures described as "barbaric".
Proof of the importance of her work in perpetuating the memory of the Fuegians, the researcher concludes her article as follows: “
Coloane compensates for the silence of the Chilean and Argentine governments and denounces the abuses of which they are the only culprits.
Although the Fuegians can no longer speak for themselves, Coloane's testimony perpetuates their voice, while reinforcing its multicultural identity.
»
Twenty years after his death, Francisco Coloane is an author to read and reread.
Both François Gaudry and Victor De la Fuente advised his two best-known collections of short stories:
Tierra del Fuego
and
Cap Horn
.
►
To listen:
Luis Sepúlveda, Chilean writer in resistance
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