阿贝尔·波斯

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. 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).