Named after a young Canadian poet in 1963 Leonard Cohen Delivered the draft of The Favorite Game to its publisher, Jack McCleland Initially, he refused to publish the book, claiming he was overwhelmed by “the typical narcissism of a first novel”. Cohen later said that this was his third novel, not his first, and that he had two previous novels in a drawer. In reality, it has been a year and a half since the Famous Havana Diary, which chronicled the 1961 trip to Cuba to witness the effects of the Castro revolution up close, was left unfinished (only five pages survived). The other, Ballet for Lepers was complete, and although Cohen was partially proud of it (he thought it was superior to Favorite Play), it never saw the light of day. Until now.
Leonard Cohen stopped writing fiction in 1966 after publishing The Beautiful Losers. Disappointed by the low sales of this book, the Canadian decided to try his luck as a folk singer-songwriter in the United States and recorded his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967 at the age of 33. The success of the album determined his path. Respected all over the world as the author and performer of songs, the Canadian made more than twenty albums and continued to publish poetry collections (he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Literary Award in 2011), but abandoned the novel altogether.
insatiability after death
As is often the case with artists who have achieved supposedly legendary status, Cohen’s death in 2016 triggered a demand for previously unreleased material bearing his signature. In response to this desire, his poetry collection La lama came to light in 2018, and a year later the posthumous LP Thank You for Dance was released. by the way sir Alexandra PleshoyanoIn charge of the Leonard Cohen archives kept at the University of Toronto, he began work on a manuscript containing A Ballet of Lepers, a little over 100-page novel written between 1956 and 1957 (when the author was no more than 22 years old). , in addition to 15 stories and a radio play script dated between 1956 and 1961.
The compilation that brought together all this youth production was finally released in October of last year and is now published in Spanish by publisher Lumen and in Catalan by Empúries (translations by Miguel Temprano and Míriam Cano).
In the text that closes the volume as an afterword, Pleshoyano states, “From the letters collected in Leonard Cohen’s archive, we know that he tried to publish these works on various occasions. While rejection is part of the careers of many young writers, her plight is alarming given the success of her first poetry books. It cites 1956 Let’s Compare Mythologies and 1961’s The Spice Box of the Earth, and frames, at least in a temporal sense, the notable accepted works and writings collected in this latest book.
While its bright moments (Cohen is Cohen) are not lacking, the fiction collected in A Ballet of Lepers is almost more interesting in terms of passages that can be interpreted as the author’s intuitions for the future, rather than their strict literary merits. Central to these stories are some of the themes that will guide Canadian poetic and musical works—violence, sexual desire, religion, loss, guilt, humiliation, the pursuit of freedom…—but in many cases, the youth’s desire to offend and scandalize the reader, to define a complex reality. seems to be overpowering his desire.
Images from his biography
A priori, the object of greatest interest is the novel after which the whole is named. A Ballet of Leprosy tells the story of an accountant in his thirties who lives alone in a rented room, has an affair with a woman who loves to sing annoying monologues in private moments, and has to take care of his grandfather, a grumpy man. violent and erratic behavior towards someone who knows nothing. Fascinated by the old man’s brutality, the hero falls into a spiral of atrocities whose main victim is a troubled employee of a left-luggage office. All very Dostoevsky (the author of Crime and Punishment made a decisive impact in that early period of learning).
In both the novel and the short stories, Cohen reflects images drawn from his own biography: his father’s early death, his close relationship with his mother, the family’s Judaism, the raid by an Eastern European grandfather, the Montreal landscape, artistic aspirations faced with the hostility of the world. In those moments – which will probably be the most satisfying for the fans – he describes himself in the present tense with all his rudeness -“I saw my face. Mirror Portrait of the Wasting Poet”, Writes in Very good, Herb, very good Flo) while dreaming about his future self: a “hero” man in a hat and raincoat walking “with sympathy” down a wet boulevard at night. ).
It took almost 10 years for Leonard Cohen to set music for one of his poems called Suzanne Washes You, and for that fantasy to become reality. But one figure of the musician remained in history, whose success caused him to neglect the novel.