In what city did Abel Posse grow up?
11037532#5
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Abel Posse
11037532#6
The novelist's father, Ernesto Parentini, a porteño of Italian parents, was one of the founders of Artistas Argentinos Asociados and was the producer of the legendary feature film La guerra gaucha (1942), based on the text by the poet Leopoldo Lugones. The young Abel Posse grew up in the Argentine capital near Rivadavia street, and given his father's profession was exposed to the artistic and cultural milieu this most sophisticated of the South American capitals had to offer. The “Queen of the River Plate”, as Buenos Aires came to be known, fascinated the young man, (4) and his memories are evoked in his novel Los demonios ocultos (1987).
He was able to mingle with the glamorous stars of Argentine show business, like Chas de Cruz, Pierina Dealessi, Ulises Petit de Murat, Muñoz Azpiri, the writer of radioplays which were performed by Eva Duarte (de Perón), as well as the tango composers Aníbal Troilo and Homero Manzi. Such were the family connections to show business that one of his aunts, Esmeralda Leiva de Heredia, better known as “La Jardín”, was an actress friend of Eva Duarte. (5) Growing up in this environment enabled him to obtain an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the tango repertoire and its culture, (6) which imbues his novel La reina del Plata (1988).
Abel Posse
11037532#10
After graduating, Posse decided to travel to Europe. Thanks to a university scholarship, he undertook doctoral studies in Political Sciences at La Sorbonne in Paris. A few months prior to his travels, he published his first poem, “Invocación al fantasma de mi infancia muerta”, in the literary supplement of El Mundo (16). While in Europe, he crossed the Alps on motorbike in order to visit his sister in Italy. 
In this period he deepened his knowledge of the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke and Trakl (17). During his stay in Paris he listened to Sartre, he had as professors eminent French political scientists of the time (Duverger, Hauriou, Rivarol) and also met Pablo Neruda (18). During his stay in the “City of Light” he fell in love with a German student, Wienke Sabine Langenheim, his future wife, who would play an important role in his literary formation, guiding his readings of German literature and philosophy which infuse his works. In 1961 he spent two semesters in Tübingen, Germany, the home of Hölderlin. That same year, his poem, “En la tumba de Georg Trakl”, the first ever text signed as Abel Posse, was awarded the Rene Bastianini prize of the SADE in Buenos Aires. During his stay in Tübingen he read Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Heidegger (19). It was also here that he began writing his first novel, Los bogavantes, which he would finish in 1967.
Abel Posse
11037532#12
Abel Posse's only son, Ivan, was born in Moscow in January 1967. At this time in the Russian capital he also finished writing his first novel, Los bogavantes, set in Paris and Seville, centered on a trio of characters, two of whom are students and one a Foreign Service employee, embodying the ideological tensions of the early 1960s. This neo-realist novel played an important part in his literary career. Under the pseudonym of Arnaut Daniel, Posse submitted it to the 1968 Planeta Prize. It featured amongst the four finalists, and although it had been virtually declared the winner by the judges José Manuel de Lara and Baltasar Porcel, under Francoist pressure the judges had to overturn their decision, due to some charged erotic scenes, but above all because of its critical and ironical references to the regime's military. Once it had been published in 1970 by Editorial Brújula in Argentina, thanks to the support of Ernesto Sabato and Posse's father, and after it received the Sash of Honour of the SADE, Los bogavantes was later published in Barcelona in 1975 where it was the object of Francoist censorship. All 5000 copies were purged of two pages which ridiculed the masculinity of army officers. This singular publishing episode (22) brought him under the attention of those who were the leading literary publishers of the time, Carlos Barral and Carmen Balcells; the latter would become his literary agent.
Abel Posse
11037532#2
Abel Parentini Posse carried out uninterrupted diplomatic duties for the Argentine Foreign Service from 1966 until 2004. After his studies in Law at the University of Buenos Aires and political sciences at La Sorbonne in Paris, Posse returned to Buenos Aires where he worked as a lawyer for several years. He entered the Foreign Service through entrance exams in 1965. His initial postings were to the Argentine embassy in Moscow (1966–1969) and Lima (1969-1970); he was later Consul General in Venice (1973–1979) and then director of the Argentine Cultural Centre in Paris (1981–1985), and then posted to the embassy in Tel-Aviv (1985–1988). President Carlos Saul Menem conferred him the title of Ambassador in 1990, which he carried out in Czechoslovakia (1990–1992), the Czech Republic (1992–1996), Peru (1998–2000), Denmark (2000–2002), at UNESCO (2002) and Spain (2002–2004). In 1994 he was honoured with the Konex-Prize Merit Diploma.
Abel Posse
11037532#7
The imagination of the young Posse was awakened and nurtured by the father's personal library. (7) When he was eight he wrote and illustrated little books he would sell to his grandmother, who lived in the same apartment complex. (8) He undertook his primary education at the Colegio La Salle (9) and his secondary education between 1946 and 1952 at the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. (10) During these formative years in his intellectual development he began close friendships with people who would usher him into Buenos Aires literary circles, such as Rogelio Bazán, the translator of Georg Trakl. Posse would later dedicate a poetic tribute to the German bard.
Abel Posse
11037532#9
Posse studied at the Law Faculty in Buenos Aires until 1958. Apart from his studies “lectured by fascist-Peronist professors” (12) who bored him, he lived the “night life” fiesta of Buenos Aires, a city which in those days was home to the most important publishing houses in the Spanish speaking world and also to exiled writers and intellectuals of the Spanish Civil War. According to Posse, his night time meetings and conversations in Buenos Aires cafés allowed him to deepen his knowledge of Russian and French literature, German philosophy and oriental spiritualism. In this rich bohemian environment he met Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Ricardo Molinari, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Ramón Gomez de la Serna and Rafael Alberti (13). He became close friends with the poets Conrado Nalé Roxlo and Carlos Mastronardi, as well as Borges, who opened the doors for him of the SADE and who would later help him to publish his first short stories and poems in the daily El Mundo. 
In those years Posse became attracted to Peronist ideas. Although he had been born into an anti-Peronist family, the huge public demonstration of 17 October 1945 had left a lasting impression (14), as had the strength of Evita and her ability to bring life into the movement, together with the open public grieving aroused by her funeral in 1952. These years of university life and above all of the night life in Buenos Aires are depicted by Posse as a true “golden age” which he recreates in certain passages of La reina del Plata (1988) and La pasión segun Eva (1994), a fictional biography which conveys the last days of Eva Perón. After having undertaken his military service in 1955, during the anti-Peronist Revolución Libertadora, Posse completed his university studies in 1958. That same year, he wrote a screenplay, “La cumparsa” (The troupe), which was given an award by the National Institute of Cinematography; set in Patagonia, the troupe is composed of a group of sheep shearers who turn out to be a veritable court of miracles. (15)
Abel Posse
11037532#13
Abel Posse was posted to Peru in 1969 and appointed cultural secretary of the embassy in Lima. For him Peru represented the discovery of Inca culture, the “revelation of the Americas” (23) which compelled him to identify himself with his creole roots of North-Western Argentina (24). A visit to Machu Picchu inspired a long poem of 240 verses, Celebración de Machu Picchu, which he wrote in Cuzco in 1970 and published much later in Venice in 1977. Also in 1970 he wrote his most ambitious poetical piece, Celebración del desamparo, which was amongst the finalists of the Maldoror Poetry Prize although Posse decided against publishing it. In those years he read José María Arguedas and the great Cuban stylists: Alejo Carpentier, Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy. He also researched the life of Argentina's national independence hero, General José de San Martín, and in 1971 was admitted to the Instituto Sanmartiniano de Lima. In Peru he also wrote his second novel, La boca del tigre (1971), inspired by his personal experiences in the Soviet Union. This novel, clearly influenced by Ernesto Sabato's neo-realist style of fiction, helped the author to articulate his distrust of the overbearing ideologies of the time, in order to criticize the exercise of power in the contemporary world and to reflect on the place of the individual in that historical juncture. This thematic concern foreshadowed the ideas about history in his later novel Daimon. La boca del tigre, which received the third National Prize of Argentine Literature, hints at his initial musings on the notion of Amerincaness (americanidad). (25) The influence that the Argentine philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Günther Kusch would have on Posse's fiction and indeed his own worldview after his encounter with him and his readings of La seducción de la babarie (1953) and América profunda (1962). Consequently, Kusch's thought on the fundamental ontological and cultural antagonism between the West's homo faber with the americano “man of being” and the symbiotic relationship of Amerindians with the Cosmos (“the Open”) was to become a leitmotif in Posse's work, and particularly in his “Trilogy of the Discovery of America”.
Abel Posse
11037532#20
Copenhagen (2001–2002)
In 2001 Posse published El inquietante día de la vida, which received the Literary Prize of the Argentine Academy of Letters for the period 1998-2001. The protagonist is Felipe Segundo Posse, based on a real life ancestor of his who was heir to a vast estate of sugar mills in Tucuman province in the late 19th century. The story begins when he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and decides to abandon his family by travelling to Buenos Aires and then on to Egypt in search of the poet Rimbaud. The novel also fictionalizes historical characters like Domingo F. Sarmiento, Julio A. Roca and Nicolás Avellaneda while celebrating Argentina's development at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Abel Posse
11037532#4
Since his retirement from the Argentine Foreign Service and his return to Argentina in 2004, Posse became an ardent critic of the policies of Nestor Kirchner and his wife Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, former President of Argentina, both in his opinion pieces in the press as well as in political activities. In 2007 he backed the presidential candidature of Eduardo Duhalde, while in the same year he was a candidate in the senate ticket of Roberto Lavagna for the City of Buenos Aires. Toward the end of 2009, he was named Minister of Education of the City of Buenos Aires by Mauricio Macri (newly elected President of the country), replacing Mariano Narodwski. His posting caused a scandal due to a controversial piece he published on 10 December in La Nación (1). In this article, not only did he judge the Kirchner policies as inefficient in relation to law and order issues, but Posse also accused the Kirchners of ideological closeness to the armed left-wing militants of the 1970s (an ideology he has rejected in many of his texts) and of only telling one side of the story of the last military dictatorship. This text ignited a wave of protests in broad sectors of the left, including union and student organizations, as well as in social media, and in various newspaper outlets such as Página 12, who insisted that part of his diplomatic career had been under the watch of the previous military dictatorship. Given the intensity of these protests, Posse resigned from this post 11 days after his appointment.
Abel Posse