A Spellbound Interval

Calveyra Reads Hudson Out of Time

Abstract

At the end of 1989 and from his French residence, Arnaldo Calveyra writes Allá en lo verde Hudson, recovering extensive fragments of Far Away and Long Ago (1918) and becoming alternately a copyist, a collector, an excavator and a guest of W. H. Hudson’s writing. As will be seen, the link between both books stages the tensions between foreigner, (in)migration and hospitality. Considering the “eccentric” position they share (they both write from cultural metropolises without fully assimilating to them) Hudson allows Calveyra to “return” and recalibrate the memory of his birthplace from a temporal (from 1989 to the 19th century) and spatial dislocation (between Paris and the Argentine countryside), which becomes fragmentary autobiographical writing of his own childhood. That also enables him to update the memory of the national landscape practiced by the English writer as a way of resisting the devalued political present in Argentina.