Un tratado sobre la extranjerí­a de lo propio (El uruguayo de Copi)

Abstract

El uruguayo by Copi is a language treatise, a crazy description of a country, a sour political comment, an impious burlesque of cultural values, a personal nightmare, a theatre strike in which any version of reality becomes weak and changes at the beat of a feverish imagination that releases the materials of the unconscious. Yet, it is above all the naked vision of the impossible relationship of a writer with the country he has left behind. A treatise about the horror of confronting oneself with the imprisonment reality of the past. An attempt to "calm down" the ghosts, that is to say, an attempt to make them talk and move and die and resurrect in a plot that moves among corpses and missing seas and a territory that constantly reduces. A fundamental text to search on issues related to national "identity" and the ways in which cultural displacements (with their concomitant movement between languages and visions of the world), so common in today's world, affect writing.