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Luis Gusmán is undoubtedly one of the most representative authors of his generation, his 1973 work “El frasquito” (translated in Italy as “Il gemello”) marked a watershed, comparable to “El fiord” by Osvaldo Lamborghini or “Nanina” by Germán García. Gusmán is still today, in Argentina, a key figure for understanding the potential of that elusive, ghostly and perhaps now anachronistic object, which is the avant-garde.In his essay “La literatura amotinada “(2018), he revisits a concept (or rather a critical intuition) by Libertella, that of a mutinous literature, rebellious against the directives, conventions, and complacencies of the literary market: a strange, indigestible writing that not only transgresses what is established but also denies the very legitimacy of the Law that sets the boundaries of that establishment. In this interview, we asked Luis Gusmán both about that primal force of revolt, of mutiny, and about the ways in which this attitude contributes to rewriting a literary tradition and guiding the author’s own literary project. The recurring names of Héctor Libertella, Leónidas Lamborghini, Ricardo Piglia, Alberto Laiseca, and Jorge Luis Borges lead the way in this conversation.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, one of the central problems of Argentine literature was answering the question of how to write after Borges, how to relate to the omnipresence of his model. The poetics that emerged then as a generational response to that tension are still today an unsurpassed horizon for what concerns experimentation and originality: an entire generation of writers opposed to opportunistically exploiting the great international success of Latin American literature, launched two challenges, the first to cultural translation in which they were trained; the second to the impossibility of creating projects whose declared aim consisted in avoiding any mechanism of "capture" of the market. Starting from the concept of "mutinous literature", a concept proposed by one of the protagonists of that generation, Luis Gusmán, in this article four significant figures of Argentine literature of the last half century will be explored in depth, complementary and contrasting figures at the same time, problematic in the complex density of their proposals: Ricardo Piglia, Héctor Libertella, Leónidas Lamborghini and Alberto Laiseca.

A list, in alphabetical order by author and chronological order of Italian publication, updated to 30 October 2023, of all the works translated into Italian by authors who can be considered "mutineers", according to the perspective proposed by Luis Gusmán.