One hundred years after the debut of the writer Jorge Luis Borges, who in 1923 published his book of poetry “Fervor de Buenos Aires”, this collection of poems will be put into circulation again, to which a special cycle will also be dedicated at the next Book Fair with national and international guests who will give new meaning to this valuable piece that prefigures the writing of the author of “Fictions”.
“Fervor de Buenos Aires” will occupy a central place during this year’s Book Fair, according to the writer Alejandro Vaccaro, a specialist in Borges and president of Fundación El Libro, who specified: “We are going to show all the youth poetry of Borges and even some unpublished poems, which could be called the precursor poetry of ‘Fervor de Buenos Aires’”.
At this stand, where the organizers of the Fair and staff of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) work, they will show the first poem published by Borges in the Grecia magazine of Spain, printed on December 31, 1919, whose title is “Hymn from sea”.
In his first book, Borges is in charge of photographing in verses “La Recoleta” or “La Plaza San Martín”
“We are going to hold talks and conferences, fundamentally alluding to the fact that when we talk about the centenary of ‘Fervor…’ we are talking about Borges’ ‘youth poetry’, it is symptomatic that his first book was made up of poems, since it somehow marks that great universally consecrated narrator as a poet who always existed from his first texts”, explains Vaccaro.
In turn, the Sudamericana publishing house, reports Roberto Montes, the person in charge of the editions of the author of “Ficciones”, will publish this year not only “Fervor de Buenos Aires” but also all the first poetry of the writer, “Luna de infrente” ( 1925) and “Notebook of San Martín” (1929).
The editor explains that the idea is to finish publishing Borges’ work as it came out at the time in individual books. “There are already more than twenty-five titles published in Sudamericana, to which will be added poetry and books in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares,” specifies Montes.
TRIBUTES
With different activities that recreate the universe of the author of “El Aleph”, the tributes to Borges began last Tuesday, World Poetry Day, and will continue throughout April with days in which debate tables, writing workshops and artistic programming.
In the first edition of the book published in 1923, Borges included 46 poems that describe the streets, the suburbs, the neighborhoods of Recoleta and Villa Urquiza, and spaces such as the Botanical Garden, Plaza San Martín, and the Recoleta Cemetery, among others. .
On the 100th anniversary of his work, the CABA Ministry of Culture will carry out “Fervor, poetry festival”, which started this week and will have a second date on Saturday, April 1 from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., where they will participate, among others, Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Bernatek.
In parallel, creative writing workshops will be held in the library classroom by Carolina Esses, Marina Mariasch and Flavia Calise. On the other hand, in the amphitheater there will be artistic programming with “Astrology in Borges and Xul Solar”, by Gael P. Rossi; poetry reading by Olivia Milberg, Tomás Litta, Inés Ripari, Marico Carmona, Natalia Romero and Magalí Etchebarne; “Love, philosophy and poetry”, talk by Vir Cano, and as a closing a musical show by Lucy Patané.
THE BOOK
At the age of 23, Borges printed his first book. The writer who was born in Buenos Aires, on August 24, 1899, was a man of the 19th century for many critics who wanted to dispel the eclipsing centrality of him in the 20th century. Although it is true that from those nineteenth-century men, the Argentine poet and storyteller had inherited the image of the walker, the flâneur: walking aimlessly through the streets of a city.
Borges in “Fervor de Buenos Aires” is in charge of photographing in verses: “Las Calles”, “La Recoleta”, “El sur”, “La Plaza San Martín” where “The hallways were already clogged with shadows” and “Below / the port yearns for distant latitudes / and the deep square equalizing souls / opens up like death, like sleep”.
In the 1969 prologue, the author explains that the book has “baroque excesses and vagueness”
The publication story is no stranger to any young poet who has self-published his first book. Borges himself recounts in an autobiographical essay from 1970: “I wrote the poems between 1921 and 1923 and the book appeared at the beginning of 1923. The volume was printed in five days; I had to hurry because we had to go back to Europe (my father wanted to consult his Genevan eye doctor again). He had negotiated a sixty-four page book, but the book turned out to be too long and five poems had to be mercilessly suppressed at the last moment; I don’t remember anything about them at all.” This is how “the first ultraist book published in Argentina” was born, a slogan that was used to sell the few printed books that were not given away.
The circulation had only 300 copies. “Fervor de Buenos Aires” was printed in July 1923, before returning to Europe, a trip she embarked on on July 21 of that year. The “Serantes Printing” was in charge of printing them. A business known for having spread from 1907 a pornographic magazine called “Mimí”. Located at some point at 450 Belgrano Street and later at 173 Balcarce Street, Serantes, in addition to pornography and books, also printed magazines and cultural weeklies.
The specimen that can be seen at the 2023 Fair is a very valuable piece despite its small size. The volume is 19 x 14 centimeters on the cover of which there is an avant-garde engraving (without signature) by the writer’s sister, Norah: “a corner of low houses, decorated with columns, balustrades, bars and checkered tiles; above and in the background, a low sun, which does not seem to cast any shadow, except for a small corner on the right margin”, describes Carlos García Hamburg, in a rigorous documented work on this princeps edition. The book lacks pagination, index, colophon and circulation justification, as Borges would point out years later.
In the 1969 prologue to “Fervor de Buenos Aires”, Borges explains that this book has baroque excesses, harshness, sentimentality and vagueness; However, the writer feels “that the boy who wrote it in 1923 was already essentially, what does essentially mean? – the man who now resigns or corrects himself. We are the same; we both disbelieve in failure and success, in literary schools and their dogmas; we are both from Schopenhauer, from Stevenson and from Whitman. For me, ‘Fervor de Buenos Aires’ prefigures everything I would do later”.
The tributes to Borges started last Tuesday, World Poetry Day
And to maintain this idea that the young and the old are the same person, the author of “El Aleph” writes “Borges and I” which has the famous ending: “I don’t know which of the two writes this page” and “El another” where it reads: “The event occurred in the month of February 1969, north of Boston, in Cambridge”, an event in which the young writer meets the old man. That is the importance of the first edition of his first book, since it explains in one and many ways how Borges begins to build himself in Borges. In the two Borges.
That Borges of 1923, the author himself tells us, wanted to “sing a Buenos Aires of low houses and, to the west or south, of farmhouses with gates” and also: “At that time, I was looking for sunsets, the suburbs and the misery; now, the mornings, the center and the serenity ”, he explains in the prologue of 1969.
From dawn twilight to sunset twilight, from the Bajo to the South, from the streets “uncomfortable with turf and hustle and bustle” to the “reluctant neighborhood”, Borges goes through the corners of the city that captivates him.
And to understand the importance and validity of this book, in dialogue with today, a poem by “Fervor de Buenos Aires” to the “tyrant” Rosas, whose verses read: “God will have already forgotten it / and it is less of an insult What a mercy” is this present in which his last wife, executor and caretaker of his work María Kodama, in collaboration with Claudia Farías Gómez, in “La visa punzó”, a book published by Sudamericana, does not want to forget and vindicates the character historically, that in “Fervor…” Borges remembers, without much affection, as: “Famously infamous / his name was desolation of the houses, / idolatrous love in the gauchaje / and horror of the cut in the throat”.
