Francisco Coloane, the phoenix of Tierra del Fuego with flamboyant success

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 from the silver mine of South American writing, chiseled dialogues, a slang forged in Tierra del Fuego, subtle ellipses and 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 the 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 ” its strength, on all levels, like its characters, who were incredibly strong men typical of southern Chile, people who worked in harsh conditions. »

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 that he did not then need to be rocked 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 liked 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 one time, it was a May Day, and I said to him “Francisco, there is no demonstration in Saint Malo“. He responded to me : “let’s both show“, 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 moss, published in 1941. Victor De La Fuente, much younger than him, read him in high school, his work is on the curriculum of the faculties of literature. This period is a change, a second birth: Coloane goes from prolific worker to writer, national figure. Quickly, however, it was put aside, considered too scholarly and overtaken by the appearance of a new generation of talented authors.

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 Cape 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, brushwood and plants… So, for me, it was a lot of work of research 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 port topographies, seabed », smiles François Gaudry.

In France, Tierra del Fuego, published in 1994, is 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 marked him: “ He was a very humble person, he didn’t 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. The fact of being recognized abroad too, even many years later, that 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 he said to me once, he said to me “Just imagine, we thought 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. sums up Victor De La Fuente.

He is also very committed 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, in his texts he paints the portrait of a ” cosmopolitanism of the margins according to the words of Tatiana Calderon, professor of comparative literature in a scientific articlethat is to say the mixing of a multitude of cultures, in a space where States are struggling to impose themselves.

By uncovering 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 the perpetuation of the memory of the Fuegians, the researcher concludes her article thus: 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: Land of Fire and Cape Horn.

► To listen : Luis Sepúlveda, Chilean writer in resistance