Survival

Bone, El Bolson

Gaucho en el Bosque, El Bolson 

Si uno aguanta, es gaucho bruto;                                   

si no aguanta, es gaucho malo,

Dele azote, dele palo,
porque es lo que el necesita!
De todo el que nacio gaucho
esta es la suerte


Vamos, suerte, vamos juntos
dende que juntos nacimos,
y ya que juntos vivimos
sin podernos dividir,
yo abrire con mi cuchillo
el camino pa seguir 

If you put up with it, you're an ignorant fool---
if you don't, you're a hard case.
Go on---beat him, lash him!
that's all he's good for . . .
For anyone born a gaucho
this is his cursed fate.

So come on fate---let's go together
since together we were born;
and as we live together
and can never separate,
I'll use my knife to clear
the path we have to take

--The Gaucho Martin Fierro, Jose Hernandez

Pen and Knife

Martin Fierro, the infamous gaucho written into reality by Jose Hernandez, speaks of a life of loneliness, hardship, and danger through his story. His identity evokes an image that I saw still alive today in the Argentine consciousness, both in the city and the country. From what I have seen of las pampas, the plains of Argentina, there is a quality of the austere landscape that has imprinted itself into the figure of the gaucho--- rugged, untamed, mysterious, harsh.

The symbol of the knife that Martin Fierro refers back to over and over throughout the text stimulated my own imagination. What does it mean to hold a knife, for personal survival? Dependence only on ones' self--- fear of others. Fierro builds himself upon the ideals of self-reliance, leaving Hernandez himself, the writer of this fiction, with his own air of mystery. Did Hernandez see himself as a gaucho in his own right, using his pen, instead of his knife to lament the trials of life--- was there defense, against threats in his own world, that his pen provided?

These ponderings brought me back to classic assertions of power--- in the past, it seems some have chosen the power of words to resolve conflict , while others have found actions of physical violence necessary to survive the complexities of humanity. Simplistically, I have represented these forces as a wooden, ink pen     (carved by a knife) and a knife ( drawn by the ink pen). These two, seemingly opposing instruments, often work with, rather than against each other.