Rebellion and experimentalism – the signature of the vanguard – are the historical and cultural legacy bequeathed by Argentina’s literary reviews. The country’s small magazines assumed their present shape in the twenties, that auspicious decade of economic and social optimism. As cultural manifestos were vigorously being penned across the globe, Buenos Aires adopted its own reputation as the intellectual hub of South America – the so-called ‘Paris of the South’, a coinage that still lingers today.

But beneath the surface of bohemian glamour lurked glaring social contradictions that informed much of the groups’ cultural and political struggles. Portals of poetic, philosophical and artistic trends, the reviews fostered a strong artistic community, lending writers a sense of collective purpose.

This week’s Top 5 lists some of the literary journals that have acquired a mythical status in the cultural imagination. Many of the polarised views and vitriolic debates of the 1920s were stirred by two competing literary factions: the Florida group – dubbed the Martinfierristas – and their counterpart, the Boedo group, contributors to Claridad. Cosmopolitan, urban and elitist on the one hand and international and socialist on the other, they constantly pushed artistic and political boundaries. Of a much less militant strand, the long-running magazines Sur and Contorno were instrumental in providing a forum for the writers of Argentina’s literary golden age.

Victoria Ocampo with her review 'Sur' (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia)

Sur

Founded in 1931 and published regularly until 1970, Sur was the most vocal literary and cultural outlet in Argentine letters in the twentieth century. Sponsoring a cross-fertilisation of the arts – poetry, philosophy, history and the visual arts – it secured its iconic status for a generation of writers for whom the small magazine was a natural counterpart of the literary salon.

Its longevity was due, in large part, to the sound financial footing of its founder and lifelong editor, Victoria Ocampo, as well as the intimate friendship she cultivated with one of the country’s most famous writers Jorge Luis Borges. Sur provided the occasion for a number of literary encounters, including the introduction of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Ocampo’s younger sister, Silvina Ocampo.

Despite its name, Sur’s contributors ranged far beyond the local scene, including Virginia Woolf, Jean Paul Sartre and William Faulkner, to name just a few. Cultivating ties with foreign luminaries did lead to its derogative branding as extranjerizante - a term that indicated its allegiance to cosmopolitan, elitist, European models.

Whilst never brandishing a manifesto, and in spite of its apolitical ‘art for art’s sake’ agenda, the magazine articulated its own brand of liberalism – a resistance to mass culture and nationalist populism. Many cultural positions adopted throughout the twentieth century were often positioned by their adherence to, or distance from, Sur’s creative manual to the arts scene.

Claridad cover (courtesy of Claridad)

Claridad

A screaming face bursts out of montaged buildings; a man brandishes a florescent torch; a Grecian goddess dances precariously on a sphere, beneath which reads ‘the pedestal of social peace’. Founded by Antonio Zamora, Claridad hit the press in 1926 with the stated mission to mediate the cultural debate, until that time monopolised by another review named Martín Fierro. Inspired by the French magazine Clarté, it gave voice to a militant group of intellectuals who advocated social integration fostered through the arts.

Claridad’s editions serve as documents tracing the developments of leftist thought in the first half of the twentieth century. Its ideals addressed both the influx of immigrant workers and the internationalism of the left. The first editions provided a platform for Russian literature, French social realism, and the dissemination of new national voices – especially those affiliated with the Boedo group, as well as the work of Argentine artists Xul Solar and Emilio Pettoruti.

Designs by the so-called ‘People’s Arists’ served as a vehicle for the dissemination of social protest and the struggle of neglected sectors of society. Its provocative, ideologically-freighted covers owe much to the futurist and constructivist aesthetic taking off across Europe.While reviews of films by directors Léon Klimovsky and Alfonso Longuet introduced readers to the experimental gaze of Soviet and German expressionist cinema, the Boedo group believed that aesthetic development was inseparable from political consciousness.

Martín Fierro from 1924

Martín Fierro

Founded by Evar Méndez in 1924, the innovative literary magazine acquired a mythic status in its mere three years of publication. A product of the wave of the avant-garde literary reviews that sprang up in vanguard circles throughout the 1920s, Martín Fierro set out to disperse the new ideas that were taking Europe by storm, and assimilate them into the national agenda. Recalling the eponymous epic poem by José Hernández, the Martínfierristas sought to explore the ‘topography’ of criollismo – collapsing distinctions between national tradition and a modern, democratic aesthetic. The gaucho was subsequently recast as a cosmopolitan, flaneur figure, and a frequenter of the shabbier districts of the city.

Martín Fierro’s signature is a wry, sardonic humour, notable in its pseudo-obituaries. Apollinaire, Picasso, Corbusier, and Stravinsky were just some of the eminent international figures that found their way on to Martín Fierro’s pages – as well as Argentine writers including Leopoldo Marechal and Raúl González Tuñón.

The provocative ‘Manifesto of Martín Fierro’, penned by the avant-garde poet Oliverio Girondo, clearly owes much to the Futurists’ vitriolic agenda, debunking moribund traditions and catapulting Argentina into the twentieth century. Méndez discontinued the publication in 1927, unhappy that a faction of the group were using its pages to garner support for the presidential campaign of populist leader, Hipolito Yrigoyen.

Contorno cover from 1953

Contorno

Hailed as a landmark publication upon its inception in the mid-1950s, the contornistas occupied a niche ground in political and cultural journalism. Founded by brothers David and Isamael Viñas, it produced only ten editions over the space of six years but, in that period, successfully formulated a new critical idiom. In keeping with a core group of  Argentine intellectuals, one of Contorno’s most salient features was its militant anti-Peronism – viewing the 1955 overthrow as a moment of liberation. Their provocative manifesto, ‘Terrorism and complicity’ set out to dismantle the pillars of an antiquated arts tradition and bourgeois complacency. Contorno’s revisionary approach did, however, come under severe criticism from those who believed the magazine served merely as a vehicle to dismantle the cornerstones of Argentine tradition.

Despite its eschewal of the past, Contorno sought to advance a cultural agenda that would account for the stark realities of Argentine life, reproblematising relations between literature and society. The periodical published the work of an important coterie of writers, including influential contributors such as Juan José Sebreli, Oscar Masotta and Alejandro Rozitchner.

Highlight entries include Roberto Arlt and the Argentine novel and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and the essay. Acutely aware of its place in the avant-garde tradition, it contextualised its own project with an essay, ‘Martinfierristas: their time and ours’.

Proa reviews

Proa

Proa, the oldest Latin American publication still in print, was founded by Argentine writers Borges, Macedonio Fernández and Eduardo González Lanuza in 1922. Coeval with Martín Fierro, it shared many of its vanguard populist principles – including free circulation in libraries, bookstores and amongst friends.

Originally emulating the triptych design of the Spanish magazine ULTRA, it provided a platform for eminent European and Latin American writers of the era. Two years later, Proa was relaunched from Borges’ Recoleta abode with $50 capital, donated by Georges Braque, Alfredo Brandan Caraffa and Pablo Rojas Paz. The new version, with illustrations from Borges’ sister Norah, as well as Pedro Figari and Adolfo Gramojo, showcased the works of Pablo Neruda, Raúl González Tuñón, Roberto Arlt and Eduardo Mallea. But, constantly stymied by a lack of capital, Proa stopped publishing again the following year.

Silvina Ocampo and Bioy Casares relaunched the magazine in 1988 – a project that Borges ad unsuccessfully attempted since 1982. Proa’s content includes short stories, poetry, essays, literary, film and visual arts criticism. The magazine was again forced out of print following the 2001 economic downturn but was subsequently taken on until 2003 by Chilean publishers. In its third phase, Proa still has a circulation of over 17,000 with a wide distribution throughout Latin America.

This week the Beyond Borges series continues with a writer that the Argentine critic David Viñas once said he preferred to Jorge Luis Borges.

Journalist, fiction writer and political activist Rodolfo Walsh was a prolific and diverse writer. Famous for his 1957 book ‘Operación masacre’ and the open letter he addressed to the Argentine military junta one day before his murder, Walsh is remembered as a writer who sought not only to defend the free press but also to expose and share the truths he uncovered.

A hugely original and influential author, he is considered a forerunner of a style of writing known as ‘new journalism’ and is the undisputed but often overlooked founder of investigative journalism.

Rodolfo Walsh is celebrated as one of Argentina´s most famous journalists

Early Life and Politics

Walsh was born in the Argentine province of Rio Negro in 1927. At five years old he moved to the province of Buenos Aires and was later sent to boarding school due to family separation.

After completing his secondary education, he began studying philosophy but dropped out, taking on a variety of jobs before eventually accepting a job as a proofreader at the publishing house Hachette.

By his mid twenties he’d fully immersed himself in a writing career, contributing short stories to magazines such as Leóplan and Vea y Lea. In 1953 he compiled the first Argentine anthology of detective fiction and that same year was awarded the municipal literature prize for his own book of short stories titled ‘Variaciones en rojo’.

Politically, Walsh became easily disillusioned. As a teenager he’d joined the right wing Nationalist Liberation Alliance, an organisation he later denounced as being a Nazi front. By the mid 1950s he was neither a supporter of Peronism or of the hard policies of post-coup leader Pedro Eugenio Aramburu.

Whilst he’d initially supported the uprising that had overthrown president Juan Domingo Perón in his second term, he became unhappy with the country’s new leadership within a year. In 1958 he expressed his disappointment with having to choose between the unwelcome ideologies of one party and the equally unwelcome ideologies of another: “What I don’t properly understand is how they intend to make us choose between the Peronist barbarity and the revolutionary one. Between the murderers of Ingallinella and the murders of Satanowsky”.

New Journalism

Besides several famous open letters, Walsh published a variety of literature from 1953 until his death in 1977. His bibliography includes short stories, several investigative novels, two plays and three posthumous works.

The cover of Rodolfo Walsh's 1969 book 'Quién mató a Rosendo?'

The fictional characters in his early books were well rounded and served as Argentine interpretations of classic detective figures such as Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin. His subsequent texts followed less fictional and more documentary lines however, such as the investigative novels ‘Operación masacre’, ‘Caso Satanowsky’, and ‘Quién mató a Rosendo?’.

All three appeared as thoroughly researched investigations into real life murders and together formed an exemplary trilogy of what would later be labelled ‘new journalism’.

Of these texts by far the most famous and most commented upon is ‘Operación masacre’. First published in 1957, it exposed the illegal execution of a group of innocent civilians mistaken for Peronist sympathisers. Walsh described himself as having written the book “on the spur of the moment”, and later revised it on two separate occasions before publishing it in its final form in 1969.

Divided into three parts – the people, the facts and the evidence – the novel was based on real life events following a failed attempt to restore Peronism to power in 1956. Skillfully balancing fact and fiction, it anticipated the flurry of testimonial writing that emerged elsewhere in the 1960s and 70s and preceded the likes of Truman Capote by almost ten years.

Defender of Free Journalism

Following the success of ‘Operación masacre’ Walsh travelled to post-revolution Cuba in 1959. There he joined the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez as one of the founders and earliest writers at Jorge Masetti’s Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina.

On his return to Argentina, he became involved in the newsletter of left wing union organisation the General Confederation of Labour of the Argentine (CGTA). Walsh took on a critical role in the production of the CGTA’s weekly from 1968-1972, as well as undertaking additional work for other Argentine weekly and daily publications.

By 1970 Walsh was associated with a branch of the Peronist Armed Forces, a leftist organisation that merged with Peronist guerrilla group the Montoneros three years later. From 1973 he worked for the Montoneros in areas of intelligence and press distribution but became discontent with the direction they were taking. In 1975 he expressed his disagreement with their leader’s decision to take the group underground, but would soon be forced to take his own reporting out from under the military’s radar.

Artist impression of Rodolfo Walsh's last moments (Artwork by Facundo)

Following the coup which gave way to Argentina’s infamous dictatorship in 1976, Walsh founded a clandestine Latin American news agency in response to recently imposed press censorship. That same year, several members of the Montoneros including Paco Urondo, Alberto Molina and Walsh’s own daughter Victoria took their own lives to avoid assassination by military leaders – events which Walsh relayed to the public through his letter ‘Carta a mis amigos’.

Walsh’s activism was reportedly not confined to literary means. Although not proven, some suggest he was the mastermind behind the bomb in the dining room of the federal police and that he was also responsible for the murder of Augusto Vandor, the union leader he blamed for the murder of Rosendo García in his 1969 book ‘Quién mató a Rosendo?’.

Shortly after posting the first copies of ‘Carta abierta de un escritor a la junta militar’ – an open letter addressed to the Argentine military junta – he was apprehended by members of the national security forces. He defended himself with a handgun but was assassinated on 25 March 1977 and became one of the many thousands of people who were “disappeared” during the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla.

Although he considered himself a revolutionary above a writer, Walsh will always be remembered for the consistent manner in which his literature sought to uncover and expose the truth. An exponent of new journalism, the founder of investigative journalism and a defender of the free press, he played a hugely influential part in Argentine writing and investigative journalism worldwide.

Several films have been based on his life and work, including ‘Operación masacre‘ in 1973 and the 1979 film ‘Las AAA son las tres armas’. The Rodolfo Walsh prize remains Argentina’s most prestigious press award.

For the return of Beyond Borges, Alejandra Pizarnik joins Alfonsina Storni and Silvina Ocampo as the third female to appear in the series and one of the most important and complex poets in Argentine writing.

In her 17 years of writing Pizarnik made a huge impact on Spanish language poetry, taking it down to its darkest depths and abandoning it there, leaving one of the most fascinating legacies in Argentine literature.

A Tormented Talent

Artist's portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Born in 1936, Pizarnik was a second generation immigrant of Jewish descent. She was raised in Avellaneda amidst a Jewish community and received education in both Spanish and Yiddish. In 1954 she began studying philosophy and letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) but later dropped out because she said it couldn’t give her what she sought.

Besides literature, she also studied painting under the surrealist painter Juan Batlle Planas but found herself either willingly or involuntarily tied to poetry.

“I would have preferred to sing the blues in some smoke-filled hangout than spend the nights of my life scrabbling through language like a madwoman” she once said. In a letter addressed to her good friend Rúben Vela, she described her poems as “brawling” inside herself and, though her relationship with her writing was a difficult one, she produced some of the most remarkable poetry of the 20th century.

A regular user of amphetamines and hallucinogenics (she reportedly once spent seven days holed up on hallucinogenics listening to Janis Joplin records) Pizarnik suffered throughout her life from periods of psychological instability and depression. These emotional states probably only served to make her writing more original and more interesting but undoubtedly caused her difficulties throughout her life.

Having never felt at home in Argentina, she travelled to Paris in 1960 where she lived for four years, endearing herself to the city’s creative circles and Argentine writers Arnaldo Calveyra and Julio Cortázar. Recognised as a great literary talent by many of those around her, she was also counted the influential Argentine poets Rúben Vela and Raúl Gustavo Aguirre, as well as Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Olga Orozco and Mexico’s Octavio Paz among her friends.

Besides receiving Buenos Aires’ First Municipal Poetry Prize, she was able to return to Paris a second time as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1968. Shortly afterwards Pizarnik was institutionalised following a suicide attempt in 1970, and eventually ended her life aged 36 by taking a sedative overdose.

Body of Work

Pizarnik published seven books of poetry and one book of prose during the years 1955 to 1972.

Her first book of poems, ‘La tierra más ajena’, was published when she was just 19 and still a student of philosophy and literature. She followed it with ‘La última inocencia‘ in 1956 and ‘Las aventuras perdidas’ in 1958, both written before her trip to Paris in 1960.

Portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Her 1962 collection ‘Árbol de Diana’, was written whilst she lived in Paris and is considered by many to be her best. Her most important work, however, would not arrive until 1968 when she was already grappling with her own mental illness.

‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ and the long prose poem of the same name, are regarded as a pinnacle of the author’s expressive abilities. Both the poem and its containing collection demonstrate a darkness not seen before in Argentine writing and rarely found afterwards.

As the title suggests, the book contains the most elaborate of Pizarnik’s meditations on the subject of madness – a theme carried across her entire body of work along with themes of entrapment and her almost hypnotic attraction to death.

Her books, in fact, come wrought with intertextual borrowing and overlapping symbolism; often mentioning forbidden gardens, cracks and voices in walls and night time (symbolic of both madness and death).

Obsessed with the idea of madness, fear of madness and the containment of madness, Pizarnik’s specialty was to drag the reader down into a chaotic, nightmarish world where they would be subjected to the same doubts, despairs, schizophrenic voices, claustrophobia, and fears as her.

Linguistically, her use of repetition, contradiction and words with ambiguous or changeable meanings lent her poems obvious overtones of paranoia. Her poems often transitioned radically between the first person, and a second third-person voice, which may have been forcibly created, or may, more likely, have emerged as second nature given her emotional and mental state.

If the character of Juan Pablo Castel in Ernesto Sabato’s existentialist novel ‘El Túnel’ had been an impressive product of the author’s imagination, then the ‘I’ in Pizarnik’s poetry was too close for comfort. One critic described the relationship between the two as a “death grip” – something which Pizarnik sought to distinguish herself from towards the end of her writing career.

Pizarnik’s Personal Legacy

From 1968 onwards Pizarnik set out to untether herself from “poetic language” and write with different “voices”. Around this time she turned to the writing of Cortázar in an effort to free herself from what she described as “creative prisons”.

Interestingly, though the “I” in her poems was something Pizarnik deliberated a great deal over, many poets have returned to use the first person singular without any of the same concerns.

The vocabulary and sometimes playful structuring of Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrate her mistrust for language. Her writing often freely condemned its failures and inadequacies whilst also revealing feelings of being powerlessness towards it. Torn between her dissatisfaction with language and her dependence on it as a poet, she would occasionally write poems omitting all punctuation marks bar parenthesis, and included lines of only one word causing intentional ambiguity.

A Spanish language edition of 'La Condesa Sangrienta' (April 2012)

An inability to write prose fiction was one of Pizarnik’s biggest grievances with herself as a writer, and she considered her only prose book, ‘La condesa sangrieta’, to be one of her greatest achievements.

The book, published in 1971, is in fact more of an elegant essay about a 16th century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed as many as 600 girls before finally ending her life walled up alone. Pizarnik ends the book with the resonating line “the absolute freedom of a human being is terrible” – a concept which she personally grappled with often.

Her last work, ‘El infierno musical’ was also written in 1971, one year before her death. It included the poem ‘El deseo de la palabra’, often considered to be her poetic suicide note.

Although it would perhaps be wrong to read the poem in this light, it does appear there was a literary suicide some time before Pizarnik’s real suicide took place. The poet and her poetry are at times so intertwined and bound up in each other that it almost seems her destiny was written out for her, by her.

Estranged, helpless and anguished, Pizarnik’s haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina’s most important female poet.

As we approach the first anniversary of his death, the Beyond Borges series arrives at the Argentine essayist and existentialist author Ernesto Sabato.

Ernesto Sabato, the essayist and novelist known for bringing Existentialism to Argentina

As revered at the time of his passing as Jorge Luis Borges, Sabato is widely-known for his role in bringing about justice for the crimes committed by the nation’s military leaders during Argentina’s most infamous dictatorship.

Having received a great deal of critical acclaim for his novels ‘El túnel’ and ‘Sobre héroes y tombas’ he was awarded the 1984 Miguel de Cervantes prize and is commonly regarded one of South America’s most influential writers.

Scientific Beginnings

Born in 1911 in Riojas, a small town in Buenos Aires province, Sabato was the tenth of 11 sons born to Italian immigrant parents. Whilst studying physics and mathematics at the University of La Plata he joined a movement of student activists calling for university reform and independence. By 1933 he had set up a campaign group of communist ideals and, during the same year, was appointed general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation.

Recognising Sabato’s waning belief in Stalin’s methods a year later, the Communist Party of Argentina ordered him to attend the International Lenin School (ILS) for two years. En-route to Moscow he travelled first to Belgium as a delegate of the party and onto Paris, where he is said to have drafted his first unpublished novel, ‘La fuente muda’.

On his return to Argentina he married Matilde Kusminsky Richter, a woman he’d met at a Marxist lecture in Belgium three years earlier, and in 1938 gained his PhD in physics from the University of La Plata aged 27.

Sabato's signature (Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Nobel laureate Bernardo Houssay helped to secure Sabato a research fellowship at the prestigious Institut Curie in Paris, which placed him among surrealist writers in an environment that would only draw out his creativity.

“During that time of antagonisms, I buried myself with electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning, and spent the nights in bars with the delirious surrealists. At the Dôme and in the Deux Magots, inebriated with those heralds of chaos and excess, we used to spend many hours creating exquisite cadavers,” he said.

In 1939 he transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and returned to Argentina one year later, intent on leaving science behind. Disillusioned with what he called the dehumanising effects of science, Sabato turned to literature, where he found the unexplained aspects of the human personality relayed in German romanticism and existentialism.

Whilst he became almost immediately active in Argentina’s literary circles he continued juggling his writing and teaching careers until 1943, when he eventually made a more permanent transition to writing.

Echoes of Existentialism

Sabato published essays on a variety of scientific and literary topics, but famously burned many of his manuscripts. A surviving trio of novels includes the existentialist classic ‘El túnel’ (1948), ‘Sobre héroes y tumbas’ (1961), and the lesser known ‘Abaddón el exterminador’ (1974). Though the second is generally considered his best work, it is his first novel which will likely remain the most known outside Argentina.

Originally published in Sur magazine in 1948, it received a great deal of attention from Nobel prize laureates Alfred Camus and Thomas Mann and was almost immediately picked up for translation by French publishing house Gallimard. The first English translation in 1950 was superseded by a 1988 translation and the release of ‘The tunnel’ as a Penguin Classic only two days before Sabato’s death last year will likely secure its place for some time as the most-widely read of all his novels.

The opening lines from 'El Túnel' displayed outside Casa Museo Ernesto Sabato (Photo: Kate Bowen)

Covering little more than 100 pages, ‘El túnel’ takes us on a discomforting journey into the mind of a convicted killer – the painter Juan Pablo Castel. Imprisoned for the murder of his lover Maria Iribarne, the novel begins with his confession and continues by explaining the circumstances of his crime.

Narrated entirely in the first person, the scene is set entirely within Castel’s conscience. Never stepping for a moment outside of his self absorbed and over-analytical mind, we are carried down every dark hallway of his paranoid imagination, charting the growth of every obsessive thought.

Whilst some praise Sabato’s approach for accurately presenting the complexities of a crazed mind, others have criticised him for painting his protagonist with too broad a stroke. Nonetheless, the novel succeeds in raising questions about logical understanding and rationality – is our killer insane, or quite the opposite?

Though the reader may never be intended to achieve empathy, he does achieve, in some terrifying way, an understanding of his subject. Throughout the novel he is asked to continually shift his stance until it rests somewhere between sympathy and abhorrence.

Since the opening lines of the novel grab the readers attention so firmly, Sabato sets himself the challenge of continuing a novel where the outcome is already known and the element of intrigue is lacking. While this does demand a certain tolerance from the reader, Sabato steers clear of tedium with an energy and a darkness that could only have been maintained successfully in such a short novel.

Opinion remains divided, however. Some argue that Sabato’s stab at the existentialist genre amounts to nothing more than an un-engaging retrospective that fails to reveal much about the human condition. For others, it is a novel well deserving of its place among the likes of Camus’ ‘The stranger’, Franz Kafka’s ‘The trial’ and George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ on a shelf of existentialist classics.

Many crime novels have since offered slices of insight into their killer’s minds but, at the time, Sabato’s edgy existentialism followed a genuinely innovative European wave and represented the height of originality in Argentine writing.

Political Poles

Though Sabato may always be remembered as a tireless campaigner for justice and human rights he has also come under occasional fire for his changing political positions. Where the likes of Leopoldo Lugones and Leopoldo Marechal made themselves unpopular with their political views, Borges and Sabato managed to swing their political stances relatively easily and relatively unnoticed.

Journalist Osvaldo Bayer, however, accused him of forming part of the “Argentine hypocrisy” in light of his actions and apparently contradictory statements made during the Argentine dictatorship of 1976- 1983.

Sabato was characterised by his thick framed glasses, bald head and moustache

Critical of the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Sabato originally appeared welcoming of the military dictatorship that began in 1976 and lasted until 1983. In the same year, both he and Borges attended a dinner held by the military leader Jorge Rafael Videla, after which Sabato was recorded as commenting that Videla was a “cultured” man. Several years later he explained to a German magazine that the majority of Argentines had welcomed the military power because they’d been able to put an end to the leftist groups threatening the stability of the country.

At the end of the dictatorship, newly elected president Raúl Alfonsín appointed Sabato to preside over the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) – a newly created commission tasked with investigating the fate of tens of thousands of Argentines who disappeared at the hands of the military.

Sabato presented his findings to Alfonsín on the 20 September 1984. His 50,000 page report entitled ‘Nunca más’ was later used to prosecute nine members of the military establishment for crimes committed during the dictatorship years.

Despite whatever he may have said before, it is the undeniably good work he performed as president of CONADEP that has stayed in the memory of Argentines and resulted in Sabato’s non-literary legacy being shaped to appear as significant as his literary one.

Leopoldo Marechal is a second-time-around success story; an author acknowledged only retrospectively as one of the most significant names in Argentine writing.

Following on from Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, the Beyond Borges series looks at the prolific poet, occasional playwright, essayist and novelist whose unpopular political stance resulted in his most accomplished writing being deliberately overlooked for decades.

Rediscovered by later generations, his full-length novel ‘Adán Buenosayres’ was one of the first Spanish language texts to have be deeply indebted to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and is today considered one of the pioneering, must-read works in Argentine literature.

Leopoldo Marechal in Buenos Aires

Life and Early Work

Marechal was born in Buenos Aires in 1900; the eldest son in a family of French-Uruguayan and Basque-Argentine descent. He received a modest upbringing in a southern suburb of Buenos Aires and, from the age of ten, spent regular holidays with his uncle in Maipu. These early experiences provided an exposure to rural environments that would influence and specifically feature in much of his writing.

Having already begun the “dangerous habit” of counting syllables with his fingers, he wrote his first poems aged only 12. At 18, and only shortly after the death of his uncle, he suffered the loss of his father – an event that pushed him into a teaching career he would maintain for much of his life.

During the 1920s Marechal became actively involved in the avant-garde journals ‘Proa’ and ‘Martin Fierro’, along with the likes of Macedonio Fernández, Girondo and Borges. Amidst this climate of literary fervour he published his first collection of poetry in 1922.

‘Los aguiluchos’ bore echoes of earlier modernist influences while a second collection, ‘Días como flechas’, was published only four years later but adhered more closely to the avant-garde trends of the time. Though both titles revealed the same influence of nature and expression of passion, the latter demonstrated more of the finely tuned elements that framed it well within the reformist movements of the period.

In 1926 Marechal travelled to Europe where he wrote for several Spanish journals and surrounded himself with the artists and sculptors of the ‘Paris group’. He returned briefly to Argentina but, in 1929, returned to Paris where he completed his third book, ‘Odas para el hombre y la muter’. Marking something of a return to classical forms, the book received recognition in Argentina in the form of the prestigious Premio Municipal de Poesia.

An article by Marechal in the magazine Martin Fierro

As the 30s came around, the writers of the influential Florida group began moving away from the avant-garde, signifying an era of aesthetic conversion that witnessed many about-turns and relinquished ideals.

Marechal went on to publish several further books of poetry and won the Premio Municipal de Poesia a second time in 1940 for his book ‘Sonetos a Sophia’. By the end of the decade he seemed well on track to become one of Argentina’s most accomplished poets, had his political opinions not impinged so badly on his future literary success.

Adán Buenosayres

Despite being the author of three novels, almost 50 years of poetry and several plays and essays, ‘Adán Buenosayres’ is the single novel for which Marechal is now most known. Far longer than many of the celebrated Argentine novels before it, the 1948 edition covered 741 pages and was divided into seven books.

Purposefully named after Adam in a biblical sense, the Adam of Marechal’s novel also happens to be Argentine, and porteño, Parts one to five take place over three days and narrate the adventures of the principal character, while the sixth and seventh books make use of a more intimate first person; the sixth serving as Adán’s autobiography, and the seventh describing his symbolic descent into hell. Since the novel’s prologue informs us of his fate, Adán’s status as a mythical character is almost immediately secured from the offset.

As much poetry as it is prose, and as autobiographical as it is fictional, the mood of Marechal’s classic is one of its most noteworthy aspects. Its sarcastic and mocking spirit goes some way in tempering the melancholy sentiment of the story itself, and a linguistic richness accompanies its enormous flow of images and symbolism. Often compared to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ the novel aspired to do for Buenos Aires, and for the variations of the Spanish language, what Joyce’s novel had done for Dublin.

Marechal's urban novel aspired to do for Buenos Aires what Joyce's 'Ulysses' had done for Dublin (Photo: Kate Bowen)

Rejection and Rediscovery

Had Marechal published his novel ‘Adán Buenosayres’ shortly after he’d begun writing it in Paris in 1930, its success story might have looked different. As it was, by the time the novel was published in 1948, its reception was marred by a general reluctance to detach the work from the political position of its writer.

A century earlier, the controversial ideologies of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento had likely succeeded in garnering more public attention for his historical essay ‘Facundo’, but Marechal’s masterpiece paid dearly for its author’s political allegiances.

Having initially aligned himself with a generally accepted trend of catholic nationalism, the author later declared his allegiances to the government of Juan Domingo Perón – a move that resulted in his work being shunned by his contemporaries for almost two decades.

Although his writing was not directly political, from 1945 there was no going back. Marechal would become known as the Peronist of his generation and, as such, his work would be purposefully overlooked until new political winds took flight.

Besides the favourable opinion of a select few writers and the ardent admiration of  Julio Cortázar, the first publication of Adán Buenosayres slipped into oblivion. Its reissue, almost 20 years later, caught the attention of a younger generation whose historical interest in Argentine literature led to the novel’s resurgence and its current recognition as a pioneering work in Argentine writing.

The novel has since been translated to French in 1995, Italian in 2010 and is currently being translated into English for publication this year.

A collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges’ and the husband of poet and short-story writer Silvina Ocampo, the next author in our Beyond Borges series is recognised as one of the most innovative and imaginative names in Argentine writing.

Most known for his brief but resounding novel ‘La invención de Morel’, Adolfo Bioy Casares left an indelible impression on Latin American literature, reflected by the array of prestigious prizes and international honours he was awarded during his lifetime.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was honoured with international awards throughout his life

Born in Buenos Aires in 1914, Bioy received a privileged upbringing as the only child of an aristocratic family. His first work of fiction was published and personally financed by his father and, encouraged in his writing, he went on to become a regular contributor of the literary review, ‘Sur’.

It was through the magazine’s founding editor, Victoria Ocampo, that an 18-year old Bioy would be introduced to an already influential Borges. With 15 years between them, a friendship emerged that, over the course of their lifetimes, saw them collaborating on various screenplays and anthologies of gauchesque poetry, Argentine poetry and fantastic literature.

Interestingly, if Borges had shunned the influence of his older mentor Macedonio Fernández, he seemed content to share the spotlight with Bioy throughout his life, making efforts to secure for him the same recognition and acclaim he had garnered for himself.

In 1936 they founded their own short-lived review, ‘Destiempo’, and later, under the collective pseudonyms H. Bustos Domecqe, B. Lynch Davis, and B. Suárez Lynch, published a series of satirical sketches and detective stories.

But it was with his own name, and one short but impressive novel in particular, that Bioy would leave his lasting mark as an author.

The Invention of Morel

In his prologue to Bioy’s 1940 novella, ‘La invención de Morel’, Borges can be seen as campaigning on behalf of the 26-year old writer, foreseeing potential criticism of the work and setting out a watertight defence of both the novel and the genre before it had even begun. But, described by both Borges and the Mexican author Octavio Paz as “perfect”, it seems likely that the novel would have stood up alone.

The 1940 cover of 'La Invención de Morel'

Prioritising a well-developed plot over character, it tells the story of a fugitive surviving on a remote island in the Indian Ocean. When the narrator’s solitude is disturbed by the arrival of a group of visitors, he finds himself falling in love with a beautiful woman who he calls Faustine. Unfortunately, his attempts to win Faustine’s affections are fruitless, since she and the other visitors are merely projections of a holographic machine invented by Morel.

Seamlessly constructed, the novel reveals its author to be a meticulous stylist, and suffers from neither from the chaotic influence of surrealism or from the techniques of automatic writing that marred his early work. Characterised by concise sentences, it showcases Bioy’s less is more style that is said to have pushed Borges himself towards a leaner prose.

Introducing elements of mystery, science fiction, horror, and romance, ‘La invención de Morel’ emerges as an immaculate and accomplished text. Bioy himself considered it his first satisfactory work, saying: “I understand that something is wrong with my way of writing, and I tell myself it’s time to do something about it. For reasons of caution, in writing the new novel, I don’t strive to make a big hit, just to avoid errors.”

In doing so, he created a novel that required readers to patiently suspend their disbelief. Only at the end, does he reveal an explanation that not only expands the scope for interpreting the novel, but makes everything that came before appear essential and carefully planned.

With no superfluity in either plot or language, ‘La invención de Morel’ imports necessary references and subtle clues that can only be appreciated on a second read.

The Reinvention of Adventure

Stemming from the rigid logic that underlines their work, critics have drawn comparison between Bioy and the Czech master of literature, Franz Kafka. Though Kafka often favoured the third person narrative, Bioy heightened the reader’s sense of discovery by telling his stories through diary notes, letters and documents left behind by his protagonists.

Though he wrote and published consistently until his death in 1999, ‘La invención de Morel’ will always remain the most remarkable for its revitalisation of the adventure genre and the truly original concepts it introduced.

A video still from an art installation by Meredith James in 2010

Described by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño as “the first and the best fantastic novel in Latin America” it has inspired a steady stream of films, including Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, Argentine director Eliseo Subiela’s ‘Hombre mirando al sudeste’, and most recently, the story lines of the US television series ‘Lost’.

Although the former made efforts to deny its Latin influences, Subiela’s film was proud to affiliate itself the Argentine classic and featured a scene where a passage from the book was read. Producers of ‘Lost’ only hinted at the inspiration for their storyline by showing a principle character named Sawyer reading the book – a small gesture which had dramatic effect on the sales of the New York Review Book’s English language translation.

Widely acknowledged as an innovative and original writer and the author of an Argentine masterpiece, Adolfo Bioy Casares was awarded various literary honours inside Argentina abroad. Among others he received the Mondello Prize for best foreign writer in Italy in 1984, an international prize from the Latin American Institute of Rome in 1986, a Miguel de Cervantes prize in Spain in 1991, the Alfonso Reyes prize for Latin American letters in Mexico in 1991, and the Roger Caillois prize awarded to him in France in 1995.

Awaiting the author Luisa Valenzuela in her Belgrano home, I sip my coffee as a number of eccentric artists come and go, eager to discuss a host of wild and wonderful ideas.

Luisa Valenzuela self-portrait.

The raven-haired Valenzuela emerges twenty minutes later, summoning me into her haven-like study. The cerulean room is flanked by rows of books, and an impressive collection of masks, procured over years of extensive travelling.

Valenzuela grew up under the aegis of her mother, herself a prominent Argentine writer named Luisa Mercedes Levinson. The Levinson household served as a literary salon, frequented by some of the great literary names of the twentieth century including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar.

Despite publishing her first story, ‘Ese canto’ at the tender age of 21, Valenzuela was not initially drawn to a literary career. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when she took a post at La Nación under the direction of the eminent literary critic Ambrosio Vecino, that she discovered her own writerly vocation.

I’ve come to discuss Valenzuela’s most recent publication, ‘Cuidado con el tigre’, the latest novel in a prodigious collection. Originally written in the 1960s, the novel was withdrawn from publication due to Valenzuela’s concern that it would be misinterpreted as advocating a radical political agenda.

Having come full circle in her literary trajectory, Luisa now feels that her work would be incomplete without the ‘missing link’ of ‘Cuidado’ which, she says, lay the groundwork for her subsequent, more convoluted, explorations of the the use and abuse of power.

Set in the tail end of a decade marked by the fall of Che Guevara, ‘Cuidado’ traces the farcical ins and outs of an Argentine revolutionary cell. More ‘ideological’ than political, the group’s radical antics only lightly veil more complex power structures, played out through the sexual entanglements of its overly zealous members.

Alfredo Navoni, the tiger alluded to in the title, is a man of action committed to the cause. A recurrent figure in Valenzuela’s work – he will resurface again in her later novels, ‘Como en la guerra’ and ‘Cola de lagartija’.

Navoni has friends in high revolutionary places, most notably, the mysterious ‘migrator’, so-named for his relentless travels to border countries. Here we encounter him in the midst of coordinating a rainforest mission, accompanied by the contrary sisters, Emanuela and Amelia, as well as a host of other tangential characters.

As captain of the organisation and a commanding figure, Emanuela strives to direct the mission on a level playing field with her male counterparts, whilst Amelia seeks refuge in domesticity, pandering to the tiger’s every whim. As for Navoni, detached and phlegmatic as any revolutionary caricature, he spends his time hopping between the sisters’ beds.

Amidst this host of idealists, the underground writer Artigueta is the only affiliate able to reflect on the contradictions inherent in striving to advance a political ideal, uncontaminated by emotional ties.

Written before her narrative experiments of the 1970s, ‘Cuidado’ relies on intersecting narrative strands and an impersonal prose style, commensurate with the seemingly objective mission of its protagonists.

Where Valenzuela’s later work is allusive in structure, addressing the violence and paranoia that was endemic under the last dictatorship, this early work tackles political activism head on, albeit with a heavily ironic slant.

In the face of Borges’ ‘art for art’s sake’ mandate, which prevailed in Argentine literature for the most part of the twentieth century, Valenzuela feared her political farce would have been considered anathema to literary prestige. Four decades later, its political resonances have attenuated somewhat, lending it a historic, retrospective dimension.

In her afterword to the novel, she describes how the tiger was obscured by another, less contextual but more striking feline creation, ‘El gato eficaz’. The novel, a series of literary and erotic vignettes of New York, was published in 1972.

The prelude of a ten-year stint in the US, Luisa says it was the “brutal” streets of New York that unleashed an unexpected upsurge of creativity in her, leading her down literary avenues she had not previously contemplated. At the same time, the city served as a place of refuge in the face of the mounting political turmoil and censorship back home.

In 2000, New Yorks’ Whitney Museum exhibited Valenzuela’s short story collection, ‘Aquí pasan cosas raras’, as part of its century overview of the evolution of American arts. Alongside the likes of Susan Sontag, Valenzuela was hailed as a defining writer of the 1970s, and was the only Latin American author to be granted such a prestigious entitlement.

If Valenzuela has firmly carved out a niche for herself in the US arts scene, her work has always assumed a more ambivalent position in relation to Argentine literary tradition. While her prose continues to address national issues, stylistically she has a stronger claim to a more generic Latin American heritage. She accounts her linguistic playfulness and dark humour to the years she spent among contemporary Latin American writers at the universities of Columbia, NYU and Iowa in 1970s.

Although she still publishes articles in the international press, Valenzuela ultimately leans towards fiction. “Sticking to facts, however pertinent,” she says, “doesn’t allow you to delve into metaphor, to understand the deeper implications. Fiction knows better than we do.”

Our meeting comes to a premature close – Valenzuela has to pack her bags since she’s jetting off to a mask festival in Sardinia tomorrow morning. Though she assures me she won’t be turning her hand to new fiction in the near future, masks, both concrete and metaphorical, are to be the subject of her next literary undertaking.

Following on from Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentina Independent continues the Beyond Borges series with an author who, if Borges had not existed, would almost certainly have become a more widely known advocate of the Spanish American avant-garde. The Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo was, for many, the best Argentine poet of the 20th century and today remains one of the most treasured.

Portrait of Oliverio Girondo

A Rival for Borges

Born in 1890, both Girondo and his wife, the contemporary poet Norah Lange, mysteriously shifted their dates of birth back one year to 1891.

The son of wealthy parents, he experienced a privileged upbringing and a solid education was secured for him in prestigious schools in England and France. A deal struck between Girondo and his parents meant that even when he returned to Argentina to complete a law degree, he would still be able to return to Europe every year.

Like Borges, he encountered the exponents of the European avant-garde at an impressionable age. Both authors played an active part in introducing the first of the vanguardist movements to settle in Argentina, both became high profile writers competing for the literary crown of Buenos Aires, and both fell in love with the same woman.

The feud which ensued over Borges’ unrequited love for Girondo’s wife has somewhat stolen the spotlight away from Girondo’s writing. But, an irreverent and provocative author, a fierce observer of society, and a demonstrable deep understanding of what it means to be human reveal Girondo as a fit rival for Borges in many respects.

Advocating the Avant-Garde

Besides a brief attempt at theatre in 1915, and a unique narrative effort named ‘Interlunio’ 1937, Girondo remained first and foremost a poet. His three act play, ‘La Madrastra’ was an infectious melodrama, afterwhich he says he “tore papers”, discarding his writing in cities as far flung as Edinburgh, Seville, Bruges and Dakar, before eventually compiling new writings with those he had saved into his first collection of poetry.

Revealing the obvious influence of French writer Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Veinte poemas para ser leidos en el tranvia’ was published in France in 1922; the same year that Borges’ early poetry, ‘Fervor de Buenos Aires’, was published in Argentina.

Together, they are regarded as the major initiators of the avant-garde in Argentina, though rather than focusing on Argentine content, Girondo’s work was inspired by a frenzy of foreign cities and more international in its outlook. Having met with rave reviews in France and Spain, it received more critical attention on home soil following the publishing of its second edition.

Girondo's poetry on the cover of Proa Magazine

Back in Buenos Aires, Girondo became heavily involved in the avant-garde magazine ‘Martin Fierro’. Founded by Evar Méndez and named after José Hernández‘s influential gauchesque poem, the magazine brought Girondo into contact not only with Borges, but also with the great philosophical thinker Macedonio Fernandez and the gauchesque novelist Ricardo Güiraldes, with whom he would go on to found Sociedad Editorial Proa.

Méndez later described Girondo as the great animator of the movement, and it was he who had authored the ‘Manifesto de Martin Fierro’, published in the fourth edition of the magazine on 15th May 1924.

As an advocate of the avant-garde, Girondo travelled to the countries of Chile, Peru, Cuba, Mexico and the United States of America, returning to France and then to Spain, where he published his second volume of poetry, ‘Calcomanías’, inside the Madrid editorial ‘Calpe’, in 1925.

The book was well received on both sides of the Atlantic and reviewed by Borges, who described Girondo as “a violent man who looks at something for a time and then suddenly slaps it in the face, crumples it up and holds on to it for safekeeping”.

Regardless, Girondo returned to Argentina with an increased presence. Appearing on radio broadcasts alongside Güiraldes and other exponents of the vanguardist movement, he concentrated his efforts on a major overhaul of Martin Fierro, ensuring the success of the magazine for almost another 25 years.

A Man of Words

Having travelled once again to Paris, Italy, Egypt and the Basque region, Girondo returned to Buenos Aires for the launch of this third book in 1932.

Probably the most talked about of Girondo’s six poetry collections, ‘Espantapájaros’ is both provocative and memorable. Opening with a formal tribute to Apollinaire, the book of around two dozen poems revels in refreshing humour. Launched in Buenos Aires alongside a bizarre and unprecedented publicity campaign, its first edition of 5,000 copies sold out in only 15 days.

Described as so “spectacularly original that even with advanced warning you are still going to be more surprised by it than by anything else you have ever read in your life”, ‘Espantapájaros’ comes packed with expressions of double meaning where innuendo runs rife.

The poem 'Yo No Se Nada' arranged in the shape of a man

In Girondo’s hands, words acquire new and unexpected meanings so that reading him rarely leaves you as you found him, leading to several of his works being labelled untranslatable.

Like Borges, he also moved away from ultraist trends to explore more elaborate metaphoric language. He was increasingly described as a humourist poet and, where his earlier poetry had tended to center on the image, the writing that followed began to reveal a love of linguistic experimentation that bordered on dangerous.

With a title that already hints at its maturity, ‘Persuasíon de los días’, published in 1942, is considered his most important work. Including as many as 54 poems it is also his most extensive, and reveals the playful sarcasm of ‘Espantapájaros’ to have been left far behind.

In a final irreducible gesture, ‘En la masmédula’ was unleashed like a carefully planned whirlwind in 1954. A dark summation of his work and a showcase of revolutionary syntax, it included poems such as ‘La Mezcla’ and ‘Mi Lumía’, a poem that inspired authors such as Julio Cortázar.

Described by his protege, Enrique Molina, as “one of the most daring adventures of modern poetry”, Girondo’s final book of 16 poems left readers and critics so stunned that the publishing house, Losada, chose to extend the volume on two separate occasions. ‘En la masmédula’ was republished once in 1956 with 26 poems, and again in 1963 as a collection of 37.

A lifelong poet and truly revolutionary man of words, Oliverio Girondo renewed and revived Argentine poetry over a period of 40 years. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, as well as the Argentine poet Leopoldo Marechal have composed poems in his name, and musicians such as Fito Páez have also dedicated songs to him; a testament not only to his own importance in Argentine writing but also to his lasting influence.

Having begun with the poet Esteban Echeverría and journeyed through such influential authors as José Hernández, Leopoldo Lugones and Roberto Arlt, The Argentina Independent’s Beyond Borges series arrives at its namesake.

Born in the city of Buenos Aires in 1899, poet, short story author, essayist, translator and critic Jorge Luis Borges went on to become not only the most recognisable name, but also the most recognisable face, in Argentine writing.

Widely acknowledged during his lifetime as a master of 20th century literature, a large proportion of local literary pride can be attributed to Borges’ extensive back catalogue. His impact on literature is remarkable, not only in terms of his contribution to Argentine writing but also his far-reaching and profound influence on literature worldwide.

Arguably Argentina’s finest export and commonly held up as a poster boy of its national literature; the relationship between the country and its most famous author seems, in true Borges fashion, to be both reciprocal and eternal.

Jorge Luis Borges, commonly used as a poster boy for national literature

Early Influences

Raised in a middle class family home, Borges grew up surrounded by the dizzying heights of his father’s multi-lingual library. Harbouring literary aspirations of his own, Jorge Guillermo Borges had never succeeded in becoming an author, but his young son seemed destined to become a prolific figure.

With English as his first language, Borges had made an active decision to embark on a literary career from a young age. His translation of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ was printed in an Argentine newspaper when he was only nine years old.

In 1914, his family moved from Argentina to Europe and settled in Switzerland until the end of the war. Home-schooled until age 11, this period of stability afforded Borges an opportunity to complete an institutional education. Following his graduation from the College of Geneva in 1918, the family lived in several European countries, spending time in the Spanish cities of Barcelona, Seville and Madrid.

It was in Spain that Borges fell in with ultraism- an avant-garde movement that had grown up in response to the modernism that dominated Spanish poetry. Having already published book reviews for newspapers in Geneva, he became a regular contributor to Spain’s literary press. In 1921, he returned to Buenos Aires, bringing with him the fresh ideas of ultraism.

The Face of Argentine Literature

Borges’ first poetry collection, ‘Fervour de Buenos Aires’, was published only two years after his return to the city, but it was his page presence in local reviews and journals that really launched his literary career in Argentina.

Already established as a central figure in a circle of vanguard authors, Borges became a regular contributor to the avant-garde magazine ‘Martin Fierro’ and a cofounder of several others, including ‘Proa’ and a broadsheet journal named ‘Prism’. Though he would later denounce both the avant-garde and ultraism, his involvement in these publications provided a valuable platform for his work and played an important part in increasing his public profile.

Graphic design inspired by Borges (Courtesy of Gregory Peterson)

Much of the writing collected under the 1936 title ‘Historia universal de la infamia’ had been previously published inside the literary supplement of Crítica, where Borges had assumed an editorial role in 1933.

In addition, several of the short stories contained the 1941 novel ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’, had also appeared inside Victoria Ocampo’s ‘Sur’ magazine as early as 1931. It was with this collection of stories that Borges arguably invented the concept of a hypertext novel, preceding both Julio Cortázar and Macedonio Fernández.

In his earlier writing he had experimented with using fictional techniques to tell what were essentially true stories and became the first author to create elaborate reviews of imaginary works. This playful approach extended to publishing, where collaborations under pseudonyms and frequent experimentations with literary forgery resulted in occasional false accreditations.

In basing much of his writing in his home city of Buenos Aires, Borges was adopted as a figurehead of criollismo, a Latin American movement that had its counterpart in North America’s regionalism.

But whilst he had built up a huge body of work based on Argentine culture and history, his themes were generally more universal. During the 1930s he began exploring existentialist ideas in line with increasing public interest, but it was following his father’s death and a near fatal accident of his own, that Borges’ imagination grew progressively fertile.

Argentina’s Finest Export

Among Borges’ best-known works are ‘Ficciones’ in 1944 and ‘The Aleph’ in 1949; two short story collections famed for their complex philosophical concepts. Interconnected by themes of infinity and time, dreams, mirrors, labyrinths, and religion, the stories play on a mix of fantasy and reality and are credited with marking the beginnings of magic realism.

Reacting against the realism of 19th century literature, magic realism gained popularity during the 1960s, when Latin American literature experienced a worldwide “boom”. Until this time, Borges remained little known outside Argentina and, although he preceded Cortázar and the other authors of the boom period, he undoubtedly benefitted from the exposure it provided.

Already a public figure in Argentina, Borges was appointed president of the Argentine Society of Writers, professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture and was, for some time, director of the National Library.

Argentina's most famous author continues to inspire international discussion (Photo courtesy of Casa de América)

Receipt of the International Prize in 1961, awarded jointly to Borges and Samuel Beckett, projected him into an international arena and spurred overseas interest in his work for the first time.

His elevated profile enabled him to embark on a prolific lecturing career whereby he lectured extensively on the art of translation. Having himself translated the work of Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling and William Faulkner, his stance was both new and controversial, declaring translations that contradicted or improved the original to be “equally valid”.

A succession of esteemed literary awards honoured Borges’ work both retrospectively and continuously. Having received the Jerusalem Prize in 1971, the Cervantes Prize in 1979, a Balzan Prize in 1980, and a French Legion of Honour awarded only three years before his death, some say he was systematically overlooked for the Nobel Prize in literature. “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,” he said. “Since I was born they have not been granting it to me.”

Still, the impact of Jorge Luis Borges on Argentine literature and literature in general cannot be underestimated. Often described as the most important Spanish language writer since Cervantes, he has been credited as an author who renovated Argentine fiction, paving the way for a remarkable generation of Spanish language writers and turning ‘Borges’ into a household name.

One in a collection of under-appreciated Argentine authors known as “los escritores malditos”, the name Macedonio Fernández remains surprisingly unknown outside Argentina.

For many, however, the mention of his unusual first name is enough to conjure up images of an iconoclastic author who was at once Argentina’s first metaphysician, an authentic philosopher, and a legendary mentor for a generation of avant-garde writers, including Jorge Luis Borges.

The Argentina Independent continues its Beyond Borges series with a look at the innovative author and influential thinker who made up one half of the most pivotal friendship in 20th century Argentine writing.

Macedonio Fernández (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Unravelling the Man from the Myth

Born in Buenos Aires in 1874, Macedonio’s life comes coloured with elaborate rumours and exaggerated eccentricities: a deathly fear of tramcars and dogs, a failed attempt to establish a socialist colony in Paraguay, and two assaults on the Argentine presidency through such unorthodox campaign methods as leaving only his first name written inside folded pieces of paper on café tables throughout the city.

As his son, Adolfo de Obieta, once said: “More will always be unknown than known,” but what we do know is that the early part of Macedonio’s life is almost unrecognisable from the perpetual myth that descriptions, such as those penned by Borges himself, have helped to create.

Although he learned to read in French, German, Spanish and English, Macedonio’s primary academic pursuit was law, which he studied alongside Borges’ father before being admitted to the bar in 1889.

Whilst his interests in psychology and philosophy were evident in a thesis entitled ‘Sobre las personas’, he maintained both the lifestyle and appearance of a professional family man until 1920, when the sudden death of his wife caused him to abandon his career and withdraw from public life. Retreating to live in boarding houses, he pored over philosophy and metaphysics in an effort to either understand or deny his loss.

That same year, wrapped up in unconventional ideas and burgeoning idiosyncrasies, he would be waiting on the dock to welcome the Borges’ family on their return from Europe and embarked upon a friendship that continues to be the subject of great debate.

A Museum of Possible Literatures

More of a great thinker than a great writer, Macedonio wrote unconcerned by the notion of publishing. Besides a compendium of speculative philosophy ‘No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos’ in 1928, a collection of humorous writing ‘Papeles de recienvenido’ in 1929, and a brief meta-novel ‘Una novela que comienza’, published in 1941, the majority of his writing has been published posthumously.

His best-known work, ‘Museo de la novela de la Eterna’, was published for the first time 25 years after his death, and despite having been laboured over for a period of 27 years, remains famously open ended.

Cover of 'The museum of Eterna's novel' published by Open Letter Books in 2010

Wrestling earnestly with the question, “How can we commit ourselves to love whilst facing the certainty of death?” the novel concerns itself with the idea of non-existence. A collection of characters, including the president, the gentleman who does not exist, the lover, and the author, gather at an estancia called ‘La novela’ where they are to be instructed in the art of non-being.

Subtitled ‘The first good novel’ and unabashedly described by the author as “the best novel since both it and the world began”, ‘Museo de la novela de la Eterna’ was written alongside a collection of intentionally bad writing titled ‘Adriana Buenos Aires’ and subtitled ‘The last bad novel’.

Together the two novels represent an extended experiment in writing, a museum of possible literatures, and secured Macedonio’s reputation as a writers’ writer.

Rejecting the concept of either a beginning or an end, Macedonio’s attempt at redefining the novel challenges in terms of both content and form. Containing as many as 57 prologues to its 20 chapters, ‘Museo de la novela de la Eterna’ describes the perfect execution of a novel wrought with paradoxical humour, whilst ironically and deliberately failing to execute it.

Never intended to be easily followed, Macedonio’s artistic intent was to create a fragmented and disjointed narrative that brought about sufficient confusion and frustration to shake the reader from their passive reading tendencies.

Acknowledged today for anticipating many of the ideas that emerged during the famous “boom” in Latin American literature, Macedonio’s novel preceded Julio Cortázar’s ‘Rayuela’ in the construction of an anti-novel. Though it was published several years earlier, ‘Rayuela’ directly honoured Macedonio by featuring him in the novel as the character of Morelli- the literary hero of the book’s protagonists.

An Accidental Icon

Described as someone “who would rather scatter his ideas in conversation than define them on a page”, Macedonio became an important source of inspiration for a generation of avant-garde writers known as the ‘martinfierristas‘.

Making infrequent but invaluable contributions to the group’s all night gatherings, Borges recalled how Macedonio would speak only four or five times a night, but admitted that never had someone who said so little impressed upon anyone so much.

Modest and courteous, and often crediting his thoughts to someone else, Macedonio’s writing, like his thinking, was often only a sketch of an undeveloped idea, thrown out for completion by someone else.

This technique, of leaving things unfinished, heralded in a new phase in experimental writing that led younger generations to regard Macedonio as the most authentic forerunner to the Argentine avant-garde and a prototype of postmodernism.

Jorge Luis Borges: A Product of Macedonio?

Adopted as a mentor by young writers looking to construct literature in direct opposition to the modernism of the previous generation, Macedonio is controversially described as “the man who made Borges”.

Whilst Borges himself acknowledged Macedonio as a mentor as early as 1921, later confessing that a failure to imitate his metaphysical canon would have represented an “incredible negligence”, he later downplayed the extent of Macedonio’s influence, famously denouncing both the avant-garde and ultraism in 1926.

Whether Borges was a product of Macedonio, or whether the relationship was one of more mutual and reciprocal influence, remains undecided, and the relationship that is regarded by some as hugely instrumental continues to be rejected by others as largely coincidental.

Even with both authors calling on a common handful of themes, it’s not possible to determine whether these sprang from Macedonio’s idea bank, and if they did, Borges’ flawless execution of them remains unparalleled, whilst Macedonio’s comes a little rougher around the edges.

However, many readers arrive to Macedonio’s writing having come in search of an author who makes Borges’ appearance more explanatory. And with Borges as Macedonio’s main source of encouragement as a writer, some argue that “Macedonio the literary man” was as much a product of Borges’ invention, as “Borges the metaphysician” was Macedonio’s.

Regardless of who made whom, Macedonio remains an obscure but fondly remembered writer, long admired for his ingenuity and his original approach to literature. His radical aesthetic and heady influence exploded the mould of modernist writing, forever altering the course of Argentine literature.