Football and Literature
Soon after I posted the link yesterday to Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card,” I got an email from Carl Bromley from Nation Books leading me to the latest issue of Bookforum where we get “The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys” by Roberto Bolaño from his Nazi Literature in the Americas. (In his note, Carl said: “I read this in Book Forum and thank god, they have posted it online… I love Bolano, the translation of his work into English over the last four years has been a rare literary joy to behold, imagine a fandango between Borges, Joyce and Proust, throw in some Bukowski, Genet, something down and dirty and you get the idea… This story will appeal to soccer/futbol fanatics too…”) An excerpt:
It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.
The boys came from a humble family, and there were only two passions in Italo’s life: football and literature. At fifteen, two years after leaving school to work as an errand boy in Don Ercole Massantonio’s hardware store, he joined Enzo Raúl Castiglione’s gang, one of the many groups of Boca Juniors hooligans that existed at the time.
