By Javier Castro Bugarin
Buenos Aires (EFE).- “Love does not unite us, but fear; That may be why I love it so much”, Jorge Luis Borges once wrote when evoking his native Buenos Aires, that “eternal” city, like water and air, which gave its name to the first of his books, “Fervor de Buenos Aires”. , a collection of poems that celebrates a century of existence this year.
The president of the El Libro Foundation, Alejandro Vaccaro, one of the leading experts on the figure and work of Borges, receives EFE at his home in the Argentine capital to talk about a work that, in the words of the author of “Fictions” and “El Aleph” ended by “prefiguring everything that came after.”
“I think his first book marks two things: a great love for the lyrical voice and also for Buenos Aires, which is the city in which he always lived and the city he loved,” says Vaccaro, guarded by hundreds of books, portraits, busts and even personal objects of the famous writer.
family edition
Born in 1899 and raised in the Palermo neighborhood, then a suburb of the capital, Borges grew up in a “completely different” Buenos Aires from the one he later inhabited; “a city of neighbors”, according to Vaccaro, where people recognized each other through the streets and whose town center was relatively small.
After spending 7 years in Europe and returning to his country in 1921, Borges experienced a “rediscovery” of Buenos Aires, becoming fascinated by its neighborhoods, its characters and its mythologies, in what ended up shaping his particular worldview of the capital of Argentina.
“When he arrives from Europe, (Borges) makes a wall magazine called ‘Prisma’. He would go out at night to paste it on the walls of Buenos Aires, so that the next day the citizens could enjoy the aesthetic beauty of his poems, ”says Vaccaro about that“ impetuous young man ”who liked to“ publicize ”the works of him
“Fervor de Buenos Aires” (1923) is the result of that boundless creativity: a book of just over 60 pages and 46 poems, without index or own numbering, which was published in a local printer thanks to the impulse of Borges’s father, Jorge Guillermo, another lover of letters.
“The engraving (of the cover) was made by her sister, Norah -who eventually became one of the most prolific plastic artists of the Argentine 20th century-, so it was quite a family thing,” Vaccaro points out about a work, “Fervor de Buenos Aires”, of which barely 300 copies were printed, distributed among friends and relatives of the writer.
Buenos Aires and eternity
“At that time, I was looking for sunsets, the suburbs and misfortune; now, the mornings, the center and the serenity”, affirmed the storyteller in the prologue to the 1969 edition of “Fervor de Buenos Aires”, in which he proposed to mitigate “baroque excesses”, iron out “roughness” and cross out “sensitivity and vagueness”, eliminating several poems along the way.
However, Borges never denied that work that his literary genius already ventured, “because of what it hinted at, for what it promised in some way”; a collection of poems of great poetic quality, which sang to that Buenos Aires “of low houses and, towards the west or towards the south, of country houses with gates”.
“There have always been authors who have written to Buenos Aires. Borges has kept it throughout his life, because poems about Buenos Aires appear published in his books from the 1960s and 1970s. Buenos Aires is permanently present in Borges’s work, ”says the president of the Fundación El Book.
The city that Borges fell in love with has changed a lot in the last century: “Today everything is rather superficial” and “the development of beauty in environments has been lost”, Vaccaro believes, which would probably arouse criticism from the writer.
“I think before it was thought otherwise. Surely, Borges would have had a critical vision of a modernity that, I insist, destroys everything ”, he underlines.
Classic among the classics
Current modernity would upset a Borges who, like the rest of the classics, “is not modern”; characteristic that converts his books into works capable of transcending “horizontally all eras”.
“When an author achieves that, it is because it is a classic. That is why Borges not only transcends times, but he is also universal; it is read, for example, in China, Korea and Japan”, affirms Vaccaro, concluding that the Argentine 20th century, which included other writers such as Julio Cortázar, Marco Denevi or Silvina Ocampo, was a “golden century”. .
The truth is that, one hundred years after that “fervor”, Buenos Aires is very different, but thousands of singular souls still pass through its streets, unique before God and in time and, without a doubt, “precious”.