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Translating “El hornero” to “João-de-barro”: an instinctive experiment

Abstract

César Aira's short story “El hornero” was originally published in the mid-1990s in a La Plata magazine called La muela del juicio. In the case of the tale of Argentina's national bird, “el hornero”, the narrator presents himself as a cold and detached investigator, a naturalist whose initial hypothesis is that culture belongs to the so-called “animals” and nature to the so-called “men”, in an inversion characteristic of Aira’s thinking, putting humanity in the place of pure instinct, or rather, of a "strict instinctive program".

Keywords:
César Aira; “El hornero”; contemporary Latin-American narrative

Programa de Pos-Graduação em Letras Neolatinas, Faculdade de Letras -UFRJ Av. Horácio Macedo, 2151, Cidade Universitária, CEP 21941-97 - Rio de Janeiro RJ Brasil , - Rio de Janeiro - RJ - Brazil
E-mail: alea.ufrj@gmail.com