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Cargando... Joe Wilson's Mates (edición 1979)por Henry Lawson
Información de la obraJoe Wilson's Mates por Henry Lawson
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Lawson's aim seems to have been to give his readers the most realistic possible picture of the life of farmers, miners, shearers, drovers and itinerant swagmen in the late 19th century. He was criticised in his own times for stressing the squalor and hardship they faced at the expense of the "romance of the outback" so dear to city-dwellers and non-Australian readers, as celebrated in the works of contemporaries like Banjo Patterson. However, for modern readers, Lawson's often grim realism is likely to be much more interesting than tales of jolly swagmen and billabongs.
Lawson is, obviously, constrained in what he can do by the times he is writing in and the expectations of readers of the sort of popular papers he was writing for. The swearwords that (even today) form such an important part of the language of working-class Australians have to be replaced by crimson blanking euphemisms, which give the text an incongruous flavour of Edwardian archness. References to sex and religion have to be rather indirect and allusive. However, there's at least one very striking double-entendre in the text that would never have got past a modern censor, but was obviously judged obscure enough not to be spotted by pure-minded readers in the nineties.
Alcohol is one subject that Lawson doesn't have any qualms about discussing openly and directly. We get all the gory details of the temptation to drink in the outback, and of the damage it can do to people's lives.
Lawson reflects the working-class views of the times in his political comments and in his racist attitudes (immigrants from the British Isles are OK provided that they are prepared to adopt Australian values; other Europeans are considered comical but tolerated as long as they work hard; Asians and "blacks" are despised). But these are views he wears very openly: you don't have to share them to enjoy the stories.
Something I found very interesting is the way he uses the stories to tell us about the importance of stories in the diverse, widely-scattered communities of the outback. We are often shown people exchanging stories as they sit around campfires or in shanty-bars. Stories are represented as a way of passing news around and giving "moral examples" to reinforce the local codes of behaviour. This is remarkably similar to what Thesiger says about the Bedu of southern Arabia - it probably applies to scattered communities everywhere. But you can't help wondering how easy it was for a deaf writer like Lawson to connect with an oral tradition as effectively as he did. Maybe the shearers and swagmen all talked very loudly...? ( )