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This chapter proposes that the character Don Ecuménico in Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres (1948)—the first Ulyssean novel to be written in Spanish—is a composite construction inspired by both Leopold Bloom and the real-life Argentine José Salas Subirat, the first Spanish-language translator of Ulysses. Marechal takes from Joyce’s novel, and reworks in his Don Ecuménico, Bloom’s intertextual antecedents, in particular the English morality play Everyman and Dante’s version of the classical Ulysses in Canto 26 of the Inferno. This intertextual amalgam is superimposed on the autodidactic insurance man, Salas Subirat, whose translation Ulises (1945) initially perplexed the literary scene of mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires but has since then come to be considered integral to the Argentine canon. Marechal’s Ecuménico thus initiates a long process of Bloom’s Spanish-American transculturation, as well as Salas Subirat’s “Bloomification” in Argentine literary culture.

Argentina was precociously hip to Joyce’s Ulysses. So great has its literary influence been there, according to novelist and translator Carlos Gamerro, that “[a]t times it seems to be as much ours as if it had been written in Argentina” (“Joyce’s Ulysses” 177). Leopoldo Marechal’s Ulyssean novel Adan Buenosayres came out in 1948, even before Joycean aesthetics penetrated France’s literary production in the 1950s (Slote 383) and well before Luis Martin-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (1962), Spain’s first Joycean novel (Santa Cecilia 12). Already in the early 1920s, of course, the literary avant-garde was abuzz with the novelty of Joyce in both Paris and Madrid, the two nodes of the international avant-garde to which Buenos Aires was most closely attuned, and the Argentine capital was in the loop thanks to writers such as Ricardo Guiraldes, friend of Valery Larbaud, and Jorge Luis Borges, who had brought Spanish ultraismo to Argentina.