Notes Toward a Pamphlet

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Translated by Whitney DeVos. Argentine poet Samich moves from the provinces to the outskirts of Buenos Aires and decides to turn his life into a work of art. Fumbling through a world constructed of intuitions and beliefs, he has scant preparation and few firm ideas about how to do this. Nonetheless, he develops a cult following. Fiction writer and essayist Sergio Chejfec offers a series of numbered notes as an outline of Samich's thinking-in-process, investigating the pamphlet form as a "megaphone" for the dissemination of "views" bound by "a situation of existence" of a poet who "aspired to a voice permanently lowered." As if to say: by means of the pamphlet, the biography becomes the work.