'wandering and exile'

na introdução de Nicholas Shakespeare a In Patagonia, na edição que tenho, a Vintage Classics (um nome de colecção cretino, mas é a norma, enfim).

"In advance of its American publication, Chatwin drafted a letter to his agent, requesting that In Patagonia be taken out of the travel category [meu ênfase]. He wanted the blurb on the American edition to convey four points, in his opinion the key to understanding the book:

1. 'Patagonia is the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origins. It is therefore a symbol of his restlessness. From its discovery it had the effect on the imagination of something like the Moon, but in my opinion more powerful.'

2. The form described in the Daily Telegraph as 'wildly unorthodox' was in fact as old as literature itself: 'the hunt for a strange animal in a remote land'.

3. He preferred to leave the reader with the choice of tho journeys: one to Patagonia in 1975, the other 'a symbolic voyage which is a meditation on the restlessness and exile.' [de novo, o meu ênfase]

4. 'All the stories were chosen with the purpose of illustrating some particular aspect of wandering and/or of exile: i.e., what happens when you get stuck. The whole should be an illustration of the Myth of Cain and Abel.'

His letter makes clear that Chatwin had come to Argentina with a fixed idea: to retrieve from his abandoned nomad manuscript ('that wretched book', Elizabeth called it) the ideia of the journey as Metaphor, in particular Lord Raglan's paradigm of the young hero who sets off on a voyage and does battle with a monster. Such journeys are the meat and drink of our earlier stories, he told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni - an 'absolute constant, a universal in literature.' He wanted to write a spoof of this form. Where Jason had sought the Golden Fleece, he would seek the animal in his grandfather's cabinet. And if possible find a replacement scrap."

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