Abel Posse
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Abel Posse
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 Amerincaness (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”.