Sebastián Martínez Daniell

Trans. by Jennifer Croft

THE SNOW IS THE POSTCARD

The old Sherpa is of the belief that snow makes the mountain ugly. And grass, too, and any type of vegetation. Any living organism, really. But above all: snow. The old Sherpa would actually prefer for the mountain to be the mass accumulation of raw bare rock, exhibiting only the traces of erosion. Without grandiloquence. An alliance of chromatically similar minerals: a series of rocks that would paint upon the mountain’s slopes a gamut of grays and browns, ocher, tan, charcoal smidges sliding into the whitish ignominy of curdled milk. A stone that would look like the skin of a young rhinoceros alongside another that would recall the sun setting over a dromedary’s hump. And so on, from foot to summit, one rock after the next. Seen from a distance, a magnificent spectacle—struggle of fragments to achieve a single collective identity, one dun that would define, that would allow for nomenclature. Up close, the marvel of detail, of nuance, of difference.

And yet, thinks the old Sherpa, the snow is the postcard. When a tourist imagines the summit of Everest, the first thing that comes to mind is snow. The uniform snow, at once coarse and pretentious. With its infinite configurations applied to the futility of the flake. No two are alike, marvel simple minds. There’s no such thing as identical, the old Sherpa would like to respond. What we say of snowflakes could apply equally well to the waves in the ocean, the grains of sand in the desert, the bottles produced on a factory belt in Detroit. No two are the same… And the sky? one might inquire. Isn’t the sky always one in its variegation? Is it not the same celestial, even clouded, even at night? No, the old Sherpa would say: no. It's not the same, and it’s not anything. We can’t pretend the sky is anything as though there were an above, or the aspiration to be culminated, or a below, or an ahead. As though nature were not an aberrant uninterrupted concatenation of states of matter and energy, or, in even more perfidious cases, a random continuity of consciousness. And yet, in spite of everything, the snow stays unchanging on the postcard.

For the seasoned climber, on the other hand, the summit of Mount Everest is silence. If the maddening roar of the wind roving over the top of the highest peak on Earth can be considered silence.

Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob.

Sebastián Martínez Daniell was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. He has published three novels, Semana (Week, 2004), Precipitaciones aisladas (Isolated Showers, 2010), and Dos Sherpas (Two Sherpas, 2018; Charco Press, 2023). His work has also been included in anthologies such as Buenos Aires / Escala 1:1 (2007), Uno a uno (2008), Hablar de mí (2010), and Golpes: Relatos y memorias de la dictadura (2016). He is one of the co-founders of the independent publisher Entropía and is a literature lecturer at the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires.