“There is only Patagonia, Patagonia, which suits my immense sadness, Patagonia, and a voyage in the South Seas”, said Cendrars in The prose of the Trans-Siberian.
A complaint that Mateusz Janiszewski may have heard when it was time to take off in turn. This Polish writer, surgeon and translator born in 1975 exposes himself to History and the elements in A great circle arc. And when you go south, always further south, under Patagonia and across the Southern Ocean, it is in Antarctica that you set foot.
This is roughly the trajectory that the author takes, which is above all the story of his trip aboard a sailboat which will pass, by making an “arc of a circle”, by a Polish base located on the island of King -George. From Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, he will cross the expanses of Patagonia (“a sea of grass”) and its dizzying infinity to join the sailboat and the crew waiting for him in Ushuaia, “at the beginning from the back of the World “.
For that, he will first have to resist the monotony of the pampas, not to sink into this “ocean of flatness”. “Here,” he writes, “time does not pass, there is only space, the days are punctuated by the endless repetition of the same pictures – the same towns, the same herds of cattle, the same horses and the same road. Things near seem far away and things far away fade away into nothingness, beyond the horizon of events…”
On board of Zimodorekthey will begin by approaching Cape Horn, before turning to reach this place, at the very bottom, where “human chaos does not exist, where everything will merge in a harmony of whiteness”.
In addition to sea lions, killer whales and elephant seals, the author will above all find there the ghost of some explorers of the White Continent, such as the famous Briton Ernest Shackleton, who died in January 1922 in South Georgia, an island which belongs to the UK. Faced with the burial of this “conqueror of the useless”, haunted by the memory of the massacre of thousands of whales, Janiszewski tells us that he hears death everywhere.
After a few months, the brutal reality of sailing in the Southern Ocean reigns supreme. Like the salty humidity, which seeks to intrude everywhere, through the hull of the ship and the pores of the skin, fatigue will quickly be felt. A sailboat, in particular, especially at these latitudes, is not the most comfortable place. Would you spend two months in a washing machine? “The tremors and the roar, the shocks, the buzzing of the sheets of steel vibrating on the waves, the falls into the hollow of the waves, the seasickness, the confusion of the verticals, the loss of gravitation, the chaining of shifts, dreamless sleep—all that had exhausted us. »
Poetic and inner journey in the far south, A great circle arcdespite its somewhat jerky pace, shares with us this porous experience of a reality that is both beautiful and brutal.