Abel Posse

Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice as president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also from 1898 to 1904 (3).

Abel Parentini Posse (7 January 1934 – 14 April 2023) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, poet, career diplomat, and politician.

Posse was the author of fourteen novels, seven collections of essays, an extensive journalistic work, together with a series of short stories and poems.

His narrative fiction has received several distinguished awards.

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.

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.

In 1943, at age 13, Posse launched himself into his first literary project (never completed), a novel set in imperial Rome.

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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.

(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.

Amongst his teachers, the orientalist philosopher Vicente Fatone stands out as an influential figure, awakening in Posse an interest in esoteric philosophy which is evident in several of his novels, especially in Los demonios ocultos and El viajero de Agartha.

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.

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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.

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 “nightlife” 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 nighttime 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.

Posse carried out uninterrupted diplomatic duties for the Argentine Foreign Service from 1966 until 2004.

Posse was a regular contributor to the liberal-conservative daily La Nación in Buenos Aires, as well as other Argentine dailies (Perfil, La Gaceta de Tucumán) and Spanish papers (ABC, El Mundo and El País).

He was also editor in-chief of the Revista Argentina de Estudios Estratégicos (Argentine Journal of Strategic Studies).

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 radio plays 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).

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.

These years of university life and above all of the nightlife 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.

His journalistic publications include some 400 articles, many of which have been published in his collection of socio-political essays, such as, Argentina, el gran viraje (2000), El eclipse argentino.

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.

In November 2012 he became a numbered member of the Argentine Academy of Letters.