08-30-2005
Muchos libros míos andan llenos de papelitos. Algunos sirven para marcar páginas, otros se aprovechan del libro para no extraviarse. En la primera categoría hay uno que a la diestra y abajo lo conduce a uno hasta: “*It is an established fact that, despite everything society can do, girls of seven are magnetically attracted to the colour pink.” Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment.
MR es anormal dentro de la series de Discworld pues le “faltan” los pies de página. Me explico: en los primeros libros — y por primeros quiero decir los primeros ocho o diez — habían dos cosas recurrentes. Una de ellas era la mágica introducción de cada uno de ellos:
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an
astral plane that was never meant to fly the curling star-mists waver
and part…
See…
Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly thru the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination
In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness. He thinks only of the Weight.
Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast cirmference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.
The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartz-windowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.
The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A’Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe.
For example, what was A’Tuin’s actual sex? This vital question, said the Astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. In the meantime they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos.
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics.
An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.
Ese prólogo a la novela usualmente estaba conectado solo en forma vaga con su tema y se centraba más bien en A’Tuin o los elefantes. En las obras más recientes — obviando por razones comprensibles a “The Fifth Elephant” — ese prógolo ha desaparecido y ha sido reemplazado por cosas como:
Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling
slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing
so. […]
… lo cual, por supuesto, no está mal, por el contrario, una de los aspectos atrayentes de la narrativa de Pratchett es la forma en la que inicia sus relatos. Entre las cosas difíciles del género de novela está el lograr “enganchar” al lector: se le está encomendando la tarea de darle vida a la historia que se desarrolla en los siguientes cientos de páginas, y las primeras de ellas son en muchos casos las que lo hacen decidir si aceptar la tarea o no.
Pero volviendo a la segunda cosa: los pies de página. Estos son la firma característica de un libro de Pratchett. Usualmente son acotaciones humorísticas respecto a la naturaleza de un personaje (Granny Weatherwax) o respecto a su raza o “clase” (brujas). En algunos de los libros estas acotaciones se llevan varias páginas (“The Last Continent”) pero la tónica general tiende más bien a “breve”, como el ejemplo con el que abre esta nota.
Y lo raro de MR es que hay pocos pies de página. Y yo los añoro. Al punto que cuando los encuentro puedo confesar exitación. Entonces ahora dudo si esta observación repsecto al rosado es realmente tan divertida como yo pienso, o si eso más bien una ilusión producto de mi propia cabeza. No estaría mal tampoco, pues el lector pone la mitad de lo bueno en el libro.