See the bottom of the article for a list of all the authors and books mentioned in the speech.

There were no prominent Argentine women writers in the 19th Century, for approximately the same reasons Virginia Woolf gives, in A Room of One’s Own, for their absence in the English 18th. The first generation of Argentine women writers are more or less contemporaries of Borges and belong to the same aristocratic milieu: Victoria Ocampo, the great lady of Argentine letters, was the founder of Sur magazine and an ardent advocate for the constant updating of invigorating foreign influences: as a publishing house Sur was responsible for the first translations of Faulkner’s Light in August, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and Nabokov’s Lolita. Her sister Silvina, lifelong wife of Bioy Casares, is one of our best short story writers and specially apt in the difficult art of portraying the world view of children—Cortázar’s predecessor and only rival in this respect. In the words of her elder sister, her work is remarkable for “an atmosphere of its own, where the most incongruous and unlikely things are close to each other and walk hand in hand, as in dreams”. Women novelists include the remarkable Sara Gallardo; Beatriz Guido, whose claims to fame lie more in the scripts she wrote for her husband Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, the greatest of Argentine film directors so far (his are the film versions of such classics as Martín Fierro, Los siete locos, Boquitas pintadas and Borges’ “Emma Zunz”) than for her schmaltzy novels; and the angry and opinionated Silvina Bullrich, who unselfishly devoted her life to the heroic task of creating the Argentine best seller. If in the mainstream narrative genres the position of women is somewhat subsidiary, they occupy a very prominent position in poetry—with names such as Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik—in drama—Griselda Gambaro—and in generic narrative such as Science Fiction—Angélica Gorodischer. Argentine women writers have, as a whole, had to deal with a particular monster of their own—the as yet not fully challenged predominance of male writers and a masculine oriented tradition in Argentine mainstream narrative, of which this lecture might be, unfortunately, another example.

A word should be said, at this point, about the Argentine fantastic story tradition, because many foreign readers see it the local tradition as such. It has practically no roots in the 19th Century, which was, as we have seen, on the whole realistic (differing in this from both the U.S. and European traditions), and it is more urban than rural (differing in this from the Magic realism of the 60s which it influenced). Its beginnings can be found in the stories of Leopoldo Lugones (Las fuerzas extrañas) and Horacio Quiroga (Más allá), its culmination most certainly in the period spanning the mid-30s to the mid-60s, which includes the best work of “The Fantastic Four”: Silvina Ocampo, Borges, Bioy Casares and Cortázar. What they all share, perhaps, is the atmosphere of doubt and uncanniness, rather than the portrayal of outright horrors; the feeling of borders being blurred, of incompatible planes of existence merging or coalescing; and a sense of unidentified menace which harks back, in Borges at least, to the world of H. P. Lovecraft. All of these writers are related, through birth or affinity, to the Sur magazine tradition and to the endangered aristocracy, and in a reading like the one I offer, which has a strong local, historical and political bias, it is unavoidable to notice that the core of this thirty-year period is constituted by the Perón decade (1945-1955). Seen in this sense, perhaps the most ‘transparent’ story of the lot is Cortázar’s “Casa tomada”, which can be read both as a story on undefined menace (some ghostly beings slowly and inexorably take over an old family house) and as the indirect and allusive twin brother of Beatriz Guido’s El incendio y las vísperas, which deals very openly with the Peronists’ takeover of a large estancia and their burning of the Jockey Club and its invaluable art collection.

The generation of Borges’ grandchildren (writers born around 1930) include some of our best, many of which would still be alive had it not been for the zeal of the last military government in hunting them down. Three are the great names.

Internationally, the best known is Manuel Puig. His early novels take place in the provincial town of Coronel Vallejos: La traición de Rita Hayworth (written in a succession of Faulknerian interior monologues) and Boquitas pintadas (which masterfully blends a pop sensibility for Hollywood glamour, a pastiche of feminine styles in the manner of the Gerty McDowell chapter of Ulysses, and the portrayal of provincial banality in the manner of Flaubert or Chéjov). The influence of Joyce is strongest in The Buenos Aires Affair, written in a variety of techniques and styles, while the elaboration of the conflict between modern (or class-oriented) radicalism and the posmodern radicalism of gay or feminist culture has seldom, if ever, been as convincingly dramatized as in his masterful El beso de la mujer araña, which in passing also manages to tear to shreds the 70s presumption that the validity of art is based on its progressive political content.

Rodolfo Walsh is best known for Operación masacre, Argentine Literature’s claim to the invention of the non-fiction novel before Capote’s In Cold Blood. This book, written and published clandestinely in times of military dictatorship, deals with the illegal shooting of Perón sympathizers after a botched pro-peronist coup in 1956. Walsh’s fame rests on this and other works of political journalism, on his commitment to revolutionary politics—which led to his assasination by the military in 1977 – and on his superb journalism. But his literary genius is evinced mostly in his short stories, some of which—“Fotos”, “Cartas”, “Nota al pie”, “Esa mujer” are among the most perfectly written and finely crafted in all our literature. “Esa mujer” has been recently voted the best Argentinian short story ever, and while the claim is preposterous for a literature that includes stories like Borges’ “El Aleph” and “El inmortal”, it is the first and so far most succesful treatment of the Eva Perón theme—as is shown by the implicit and explicit homage payed to it by Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita. Walsh was working on his first novel when he was killed—he and its drafts remain disappeared.

Faulkner has been the single greatest influence on the Latin American literary boom of the 60s. Apart from the enormous force of his work, and the fact that he writes about a neo-feudal world much closer to Latin America than to the rest of the U.S., he provides the basic formula for the Latin American boom: the blending of the themes and contents of regional literature (usually traditional and conservative in form) with the styles and devices of the Modernist avant garde (mainly, Joyce). García Márquez, Onetti, Vargas Llosa are unconceivable without this formula, as is Juan José Saer, born near the city of Santa Fe, which he has turned into his literary territory, in the manner of Faulkner’s Yoknapathawpa or Onetti’s Santa María. Saer’s variation on the Faulkner formula was to replace the Modernists of the 20s with the French avant garde of the 50s, mainly Robbe-Grillet’s objectivism. Saer’s best novel, Cicatrices, is written in four long chapters that combine the powerful surge of the faulknerian monologue with the painstaking and neurotic attention to detail of the objectivist description. The result is truly awesome. Saer is not content with describing Santa Fe’s present, and his novel El entenado is set in the early days of the Spanish conquest. It might be, together with Herzog’s movie Aguirre, on of the few contemporary versions to capture the hallucinatory flavour of the conquest of America. Glosa, finally, takes some of Saer’s favourite characters (who recur from work to work) through the hell fires of the last military dictatorship.

Contemporaries or near contemporaries of these three include Haroldo Conti, also murdered by the military juntas, author of Sudeste, the novel that gave the Tigre delta its literary entity. Sudeste is a novel wholly devoted to the minutiae of physical action, in the manner of Hemingways’ “Big Two-hearted river”—the acts of fishing, cooking, mending clothes, rowing and dying. Conti’s foray into the revolutionary magic realism of the 70s, Mascaró, is not as wholly succesful.

Antonio Di Benedetto, who survived imprisonment and torture but died years later of the consequences, wrote the impeccable Zama, set in the days of the Spanish colonization, a novel that can claim its place among the literature of hopeless waiting together with Kafka’s The Castle, Beckett’s Godot, Dino Buzatti’s The Desert of the Tartars and García Márquez El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. The ending, with a wanted criminal forming part of the posse persecuting him, is worthy of Chesterton or Philip K. Dick.

Raúl Damonte, better known as Copi, wrote mostly in French, demented novels that seem quite alien to our tradition—unless we are willing to incorporate, as some have, Witold Gombrowicz into it. Copi’s plays are arguably our best after—or together with—Arlt’s. Copi is also, together with the poet, essayist and short story writer Néstor Perlongher, one of the icons of our gay tradition. Perlongher’s claim to originality in Argentine literature also rests in his incopororation of the Gongorean Neobaroque tropicalism of Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, and others—before him the influence of the Spanish Baroque on Argentine literature, mainly through Borges, came more from the comparatively ascetic language and conceptual games of Cervantes and Quevedo than from the decorative proliferation of Góngora and his school. Eva Perón reappears in the work of these two writers: her theatrical or Hollywoodesque excess in Copi’s play Eva Perón, her protean capacity for transformation in Perlongher’s “Evita vive”, where she is at once whore, junkie and dead. Gay writers, Eloy Martínez claims, have understood her figure better than anybody in our literature. The trilogy of Argentine eccentrics is completed by Osvaldo Lamborghini. His story “El pibe Barulo” offers a rather perverse twist on the Greek topic of fate: a young boy inexorably doomed to be raped because of his fat ass provides a hilarious and very politically incorrect examination of the homoerotic roots of Argentine machismo, advanced in Gombrowicz’s Transatlantic and developed in Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña. Lamborghini is also quite good at rendering the perspective of children, but he differs from Silvina Ocampo and Cortázar in that all his children are little monsters.

At this stage, having come to the end of this inevitably personal overview, I can expand on our starting point. Argentine literature is not so much haunted by demons as stalked by monsters. Sarmiento’s dichotomy places the menace outside culture and the psyche: in the civilization/barbarity dichotomy, danger for literature comes from without. For us writing is not so much exorcism as combat. It’s not so much one’s own demons that must be cast out, but the demons of others that must be kept at bay.

And thus we reach te close of our talk. I will say nothing of the individual writers of my generation, as you will probably be meeting them yourselves and I don’t want to influence your better judgement. But there is one thing I would like to say about us, taken as a group. If what I said at the beginning is not entirely untrue, then the writers of my age have the greatest challenge to face, as no monsters in Argentine history can compare to those that carried out the greatest campaign of terror this country has ever known. Ricardo Piglia, one of the leading critics and writers of today, argues in his stimulating first novel, Respiración artificial, that we cannot say anything about the world of Auschwitz—a world beyond language. Auschwitz, of course, was his way of naming the last military dictatorship while it was still on, at the time when his novel was written and published. Literature—not to mention its writers – feels impotent before the magnitude of this task. We will do our best, and hopefully what little we can achieve may be taken up and continued by others following in our steps.

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Argentine authors and works mentioned in the course of this essay:

• Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851): La cautiva; “El matadero”

• José Mármol (1818-1871): Amalia

• Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888): Facundo: civilización y barbarie; El Chacho, último caudillo de la montonera en los llanos de la Rioja

• José Hernández (1834-1886): El gaucho Martín Fierro (la ida); La vuelta de Martín Fierro

• William Henry Hudson (1841-1922): “Marta Riquelme”

• Ricardo Rojas (1882-1957): Historia de la literatura argentina

• Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938): El payador; Las fuerzas extrañas

• Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1926): Don Segundo Sombra

• Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937): “La gallina degollada”; “El almohadón de plumas”; “La miel silvestre”; Cuentos de la selva; Más Allá

• Roberto Arlt (1900-1942): El juguete rabioso; Los siete locos; Los lanzallamas; Saverio el cruel; Trescientos millones

• Luisa Valenzuela: Cola de lagartija

• Leopoldo Marechal (1900-1970): Adán Buenosayres

• Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986): “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”; “Poema conjetural”; “Nuestro pobre individualismo”; “El indigno”; Evaristo Carriego; “El fin”; “El muerto”; “El evangelio según Marcos”; “Hombre de la esquina rosada”; “Historia de Rosendo Juárez”; “El sur”; “El escritor argentino y la tradición”; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; “La biblioteca de Babel”; “El inmortal”; “El Aleph”

• H. Bustos Domecq (Borges + Bioy Casares): “La fiesta del monstruo”

• Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969): �հ��������ٱ�á�Գپ�����

• Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999): El sueño de los héroes; La invención de Morel

• Victoria Ocampo (1891-1979)

• Silvina Ocampo (1906-1994)

• Sara Gallardo (1931-1988)

• Beatriz Guido (1924-1988): El incendio y las vísperas

• Silvina Bullrich (1915-1990)

• Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938)

• Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972)

• Griselda Gambaro (b. 1928)

• Angélica Gorodischer (b. 1928)

• Julio Cortázar (1914-1984): Rayuela; “Casa tomada.”

• Ernesto Sábato (b. 1911): Sobre héroes y tumbas

• Manuel Puig (1932-1990): La traición de Rita Hayworth; Boquitas pintadas; The Buenos Aires Affair; El beso de la mujer araña

• Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977): Operación masacre; “Fotos”; “Cartas”; “Nota al pie”; “Esa mujer”

• Juan José Saer (1937-2007): Cicatrices; El entenado; Glosa

• Haroldo Conti (1925-1976?): Sudeste; Mascaró

• Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986): Zama

• Copi (Raúl Damonte) (1939-1987): Eva Perón

• Néstor Perlongher (1949-1992): “Evita vive”

• Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940-1985): “El pibe Barulo”

• Ricardo Piglia (b. 1940): Respiración artificial

Argentina was similar in that respect. The portenos we met with over the past week were truly passionate about their country’s literature. Despite the fact that a lot of books (any imported from Spain, the U.S., elsewhere) are quite expensive, the people of Argentina love to read.

One interesting example of this was the that we visited on Friday. This was an opportunity to get out of the city, visit the pampas, and eat tons and tons of the best meat I’ve ever had. It was an incredibly relaxing and enjoyable time (if I haven’t mentioned this enough times yet, everyone on the trip was incredibly wonderful—smart, funny, kind, interesting), and we had a chance to see Jorge Furt’s library.

Here’s a description from Lugares Magazine:

A second house, dating from 1860, holds original opalines that hang from the high ceilings, daguerreotypes, an old piano and delicate porcelain. A library with 40 thousand volumes; a collection of historic letters: 7,200 sent to Juan Bautista Alberdi between 1824 and 1884, bought by Jorge Furt back in 1946, having to mortgage a farm for this purpose, to prevent the documents from leaving the country; 22 written by Mitre; 4.3 by Sarmiento; and 106 by Máximo Terrero, Manuelita Rosas’ husband; the complete collection of Nosotros Magazine; and a variety of Argentine, French, Cennan, Greek and Latin authors; apart from the first hook of Alcalá de Henares, dated 1502; three long corridors, ten metres long each, filled from floor to ceiling.

It was really incredible, but we weren’t allowed to take any pictures, otherwise I’d post some here.

Following this day in the pampas, we went to a milonga, which was also pretty amazing. I could write paragraph upon paragraph about the tango—everyone I’ve talked to since I got back has had to suffer through this already.

The tango is quite beautiful, and insanely complicated. Each couple functions as it they’re in their own little universe, somehow linked together, knowing exactly when to start dancing, where to step next, how to shift and circle in a way that they avoid all of the other dancers also operating in their own world. (It reminded me of the scene in Crying of Lot 49 with the blind—or deaf?—people waltzing and somehow avoiding one another.)

Beyond the dancing though was the mysterious process of how a man picked up the woman he was going to dance with. It was all done with a glance—the only time a couple conversed was when the woman was denying her suitor—but so subtly and quietly that it was almost impossible to fathom.

Patrizia and I were obsessed with a gorgeous woman in a trenchcoat, who seemed either pissed that no one was approaching her, or incredibly selective. We were sitting pretty close to her table, so we were able to keep tabs on her for quite some time, trying to figure out her story, while watching a couple of guys prowl in a sharklike fashion around the outside of the dancefloor. A guy we hadn’t even noticed walked up behind her, and as he approached her side she suddenly she stood up, flung off her coat, and they went off to dance without hardly exchanging a glance. . . . This made it clear to me that I would never fully understand the tango, and that I would’ve had a hell of a time picking up a girl in Argentina . . .

(It was interested to contrast the sort of restrained elegance and sensuality of the tango with the sort of exuberant sexuality and fervor of a club in the U.S.)

Tangoing aside, this was one of the best editors trips I’ve ever been on. The people on the trip, the people we met with, the people who organized it were all absolutely wonderful. And the rich literary history sure didn’t hurt.

One thing that Nick Caistor and I talked about a bit that was a bit disturbing was the proliferation of authors who sounded like imitations of the neo-realistic, “language of the common person” novels prevalent in American and England these days. It’s always struck me as weird when foreign publishers promote one of their authors as being the Ian McEwan of Spain, or the Jonathan Franzen of Italy. It’s as if they believe that since these particular authors sell really well, than imitations of these authors will also sell very well. Which is rarely ever true. And who wants an imitation of an author if you can have the real thing? And even if you’re all for this neo-realist sort of aesthetic (and I’m not), it still should seem a bit disturbing that authors from a country like Argentina are abandoning the lengthy tradition of writers like Borges and Cortazar and Saer and Piglia (all of who experimented with language in form in ways that advanced the possibility of what a short story/novel could be and do) to imitate mediocre, yet popular foreign authors. As if English writers are colonizing the world’s literature. This is the bad side of globalization . . .

And that’s why I think the story of the Guadalajara attendees is so fitting. One of the best things about publishing literature in translation is providing access to the unique aspects of another culture. I hope that all of the people who were able to go on this trip find interesting, unique authors to translate and promote in their countries—I’m sure that I did.

The quality of Argentine literature has always depended on the quality of its monsters. This might help explain why Argentine literature was off to a good start and a bad start almost simultaneously, and both at the hands of the same writer: Esteban Echeverría.

In La cautiva, a long narrative poem published in 1837, the enemies are the native inhabitants, “the indian” as they were invariably called, and the heroine, a white woman abducted by them—a topic later to recur in William Henry Hudson’s “Marta Riquelme” and in Borges’ “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”. Echeverría’s poem is wordy, bathetic, unsufferably Romantic, and one would be tempted to set it forth as an example that a justification—however oblique—of genocide can never aspire to aesthetic greatness, if the second part of Martín Fierro, as we will see, would later offer much of the same fare but this time in powerful and authentic verse.

El matadero, on the other hand, is perhaps—even by today’s standards—one of the best pieces Argentine short prose has to show. The setting is as Argentinian as can be: a slaughterhosue for cattle in our first period of bloody tyranny, that of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the country from 1829 to 1852. The slaughter of the animals metaphorically stands (as later in Eisenstein’s Strike!) for that of political dissenters, one of which, a young unitario, is eventually dragged to the slaughterhouse and publicly tortured, and is only spared from further humiliation (rape, if not mentioned, is implied) by what seems to be a timely heart attack.

Why is La cautiva so bad and El matadero, written more or less at the same time, so good? In part because “the indian”, seen as a terrible menace by the white men of the time, was really a victim, and a doomed victim at that. Rosas and his gangs of killers, known as the Mazorca, were on the other hand a formidable and terrifying enemy—and for twenty years writing was the only effective weapon to be mobilized against them. For his opposers, Rosas’ dictatorship represented the triumph of the primitive, barbaric and rural America of the past over the modern and cosmopolitan civilization they heralded. For this reason, artists and intellectuals were, as a block, united against him. One could say that Rosas scared the Argentine intelligentsia into art, thus inaugurating two lasting traditions: that of turning to literature when politics offers no outlet, and that of the artist-or-intellectual-in-exile. Rosas also supplied our cultural unconscious with one of its first icons of horror: that of the severed heads of the opposers lined upon the cart of a melon vendor—throat-cutting and beheading were emblematic of Rosas’ reign of terror just as ‘the disappeared’ have been emblematic of that of the recent military juntas. The anti-Rosas sentiment fuelled the birth of the Argentine novel (Amalia, by José Mármol) and, more significantly (since Amalia, as a novel, is rather bad), of a mixed genre we could term the narrative essay, noticeably in the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.

His Facundo: civilización y barbarie is a biographical interpretation of the figure of the rural caudillo (a semi-feudal type of warlord) Facundo Quiroga. In Sarmiento’s view there were two Argentinas: one represented by cities and written culture, which was modern, civilized, cosmopolitan; the other represented by the rural hinterland: backward, savage, cruel. All the enemies of civilization—Rosas, the gaucho and the indian – are conflated by Sarmiento into one (notwithstanding the fact that Rosas conducted the first large-scale campaign against the natives, and the gauchos were its executors). In Sarmiento’s view the two Argentinas cannot be united or reconciled: one must triumph over the other and absorb it. This helps to understand why the civil war that raged before, during and after Rosas’ rule was basically a war between Buenos Aires and the provinces.

The conflict described by Sarmiento became a crux for discussions about identity and nationalism. For later nationalists, Sarmiento’s Argentina was enlightened but inauthentic, and even a writer as free of any vestige of nationalism as Borges will have the bookish Laprida, hero of his “Poema conjetural” say, while hunted down and killed by the brutal gauchos, “an inexplicable joy /swells divine in my breast / at last I am meeting, face to face /my South American destiny.”

The writers of Rosas’ time saw themselves as victims, and we all know that believing you are the victim is, once you’ve reached power, one of the best alibis for committing atrocities without feeling any guilt. Very soon, after Rosas’ overthrow, they turned from persecuted to persecutors and forgot all about writing (historically, if not individually, losers often make better writers than winners). The gaucho became the enemy of progress, the symbol of what should be overcome. In their collective mode, the montoneras, they were persecuted and exterminated, noticeably by Sarmiento himself, who conducted the campaign against the last great rural leader of the montoneras, Chacho Peñaloza. Sarmiento, extending his gift for irony from prose into fact, had him beheaded after defeating him in 1863, a practical joke he rounded off three years later by publishing a life of Chacho (El Chacho, último caudillo de la montonera en los llanos de La Rioja) he himself wrote.

But if the gauchos couldn’t be upheld in the collective mode, as a group, the gaucho as individual, the loner, now become the victim of economic exploitation and the more or less unwilling executor of the genocide of the natives, was ripe for defense.

José Hernández wrote El gaucho Martín Fierro in 1872 as a pamphlet denouncing the misery and oppression of the rural population, forced into a semi-nomadic existence by the impossibility of owning land, wholly in the hand of the large estancieros or landowners, and forced into serving in the fortines or forts separating the areas occupied by white men from the realms of the indomitable indios. For the first time, but certainly not for the last, the monster of Argentine literature was the modern state, the legal system, the army, the police—what not so long ago Sarmiento had grouped under the pole of “civilization.” In a memorable page titled “Nuestro pobre individualismo” Borges names the most famous night in Argentine literature, that in which police sergeant Cruz turns against his own men and joins the persecuted gaucho Martín Fierro. We Argentinians, Borges explains, see ourselves as individuals, never as citizens: we cannot conceive of any abstract relationship, and for us personal friendship will always be more important than duty to state and country. At the close of Martín Fierro the hero and his newly found friend cross the border and “go over to the indians”—another twist in our time-honoured topic of exile, whether political, as in the distant and not so distant past, or economic, as today.

Seven years later Hernández publishes the second part (La vuelta de Martín Fierro), in which, as Thomas Pynchon in a memorable chapter of Gravity’s Rainbow, put it, “even the freest of Gauchos end up selling out”. The indians that offered a safe haven are now monsters unfit to live, and the gaucho preaches obedience and respect for authority. What has changed? A lot. The long civil war has come to its close, its last, residual battle fought in 1880: The Argentine bourgeoisie, urban and rural, has formed a united front against the common enemy, the indian, still holding more than half of the richest arable land in the world. The Return of Martín Fierro is published in the same year in which a modern and well planned military campaign sweeps the pampas from Buenos Aires to Patagonia and not only defeats the natives but expels them from those rich territories forever.

Martín Fierro, its few predecessors and a veritable deluge of successors configure the first wholly Argentine literary genre, the gauchesca. A feature singles out the gauchesca from much of the rural literature of Latin America: its complete disregard for superstition, the fantastic, the supernatural: closer in this to their authors than to their real life models, the gauchos of the gauchesca are wholly secular and live in a wasteland of unbelief. Thus magic realism could never achieve a strong foothold in Argentine literature, except, perhaps, in the feverish imagination of pseudo-Argentine novelists such as Lawrence Thornton, author of Imagining Argentina.

From 1880 to around 1910 (the Centennial) our literature is written by aristocratic gentlemen. Argentina is an oligarchy, as the first truly democratic elections would be held only in 1914. A veritable flood of European immigrants (only comparable to that which at the same time was pouring into the U.S.) was seemingly making Sarmiento’s dream of a modern and civilized Argentina finally come true. But the immigrants weren’t all as docile as these gentlemen expected. Many of them were highly cultured, and thus not dazzled by the local celebrities. Many were Anarchists or Socialists, and the Argentine ruling classes saw with horror the first organized labour movements and the first mass strikes. Their writers saw this menace in terms of a threat to Argentine values and way of life: our identity was about to be swamped in a deluge of foreigness. Argentine identity had to be invented before it was too late, and the intellectuals took the first ready-made model thay had at hand: the gaucho. The Centennial saw the canonization of the gaucho as an archetype of national identity, the formerly disregarded gauchesca as the quintessentially Argentinian literary genre, and Martín Fierro as our national epic. Ricardo Rojas in his History of Argentine Literature, and specially the Modernist poet Leopoldo Lugones (“Modernist” in the Latin American sense of the school led by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío) in a series of lectures titled El payador, furthered this view. The ferocity of this defense of the gaucho and his spent socio-economical force can only be explained as a reaction against the new monster: the radical politics and the radical ideas of the European immigrants. Ricardo Güiraldes’ novel Don Segundo Sombra is perhaps the last great work of the gauchesca: a novel combining the topics of gaucho literature with the poetics of French Symbolism, it is a long goodbye to the genre.

Because this revival of the gaucho spirit was essentially a Romantic and nostalgic gesture that only proved the inevitability of change. Argentine society at the turn of the century had become cosmopolitan, with its population composed of almost 35% foreigners, mostly of European origin (which in the decisive province of Buenos Aires reached 55%). Writers and writing also changed. The first generation of the 20th Century saw the emergence of the professional writers—that is, those who didn’t posses large personal or family fortunes, didn’t pursue writing as an adjunct to political activity and made, or at least attempted to make, a living through their pens, and who belonged in the main to the middle classes, many of immigrant descent. The most representative is undoubtedly Roberto Arlt, the father of the Argentine novel as we know it. Arlt came from the lower middle class, had a very basic education and was monolingual (in one of his prologues he frets and fumes against those who could read Joyce’s Ulysses, as yet untranslated). Arlt’s first novel, El juguete rabioso, is a semi-autobiographical picaresque: its hero, Silvio Astier, has access to culture through the books he steals. Towards the end he is tempted into joining a gang of professional thieves whom he, reversing Cruz’s magnificent gesture in Martín Fierro, betrays to the police. A similar gesture of betrayal is effected by the protagonist of “El indigno,” Borges’ unacknowledged homage to Arlt. Arlt’s masterpiece is the saga composed by the two novels Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas, which follow its hero Remo Erdosain from embezzlement, through a failed career as inventor and revolutionary conspirator, into suicide. The plot centers on a revolutionary organization in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Demons: a loose amalgam of Lenin’s bolshevism, Italian fascism and the Ku-Klux Klan, led by an astrologist and financed by a chain of brothels. (Those who smile at the possibility might remember the last days of Perón’s goverment, wholly managed by our local Rasputin, the infamous López Rega, who was said to control presidents Juan and Isabel Perón through Brazilian umbanda rites practiced on the embalmed mummy of Eva Perón—as fictionally depicted in Luis Valenzuela’s Cola de lagartija). The two novels were published in 1929 and 1931, immediately before and after the first of a long series of military coups, and one of undoubtedly fascist inspiration at that. Arlt captured the whole gamut of social and political phantasmagoria of the Argentine 20th Century: all the phantoms brewing in the paranoid minds of the military and the ruling classes, all the high ideals and not-so-high methods of conspirators meet in his hallucinated world. His influence on essential writers like Rodolfo Walsh, Juan José Saer and the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti is unmistakable, and Arlt’s novels are still the most powerful our literature has to offer. In his latter years (he lived to be 42) he switched to the theatre, with works like Saverio el Cruel (where a travelling salesman is asked to play the part of a dictator) and Trescientos millones (which takes place in the vengeful dream-world of a molested house-maid) both of which anticipate in spirit and tone Jean Genet’s plays The Balcony or The Maids. One of Arlt’s most appealing features is his unsentimental portrayal of the failed and the impoverished: all his “poor people” are mean and evil, their souls warped by envy, jealousy and frustration. In this he is miles apart from the critical but ultimately benevolent realism of those contemporaries he is sometimes yoked together with, the “social” writers of the Boedo Tradition.

A contemporary of Arlt, and another great novelist, is Leopoldo Marechal, whose Adán Buenosayres inaugurates in Argentina the time-honored tradition of rewriting Joyce’s Ulysses in a local format (as Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz in Germany or Martin-Santos’ Tiempo de silencio in Spain)—Argentine literature has shown itself very porous to the influence of Joyce, perhaps because Joyce offered a formula for standing neo-colonial impotence on its head, showing how political and economic submission could be inverted in the realm of culture. In this regard I should mention that the first—and in my opinion still the best—translation of Ulysses into Spanish was published in Buenos Aires in 1945. Marechal’s massive novel is marred by its last 2 (out of a total of 7), parts by the rather pedestrian application of Dante’s method of taking revenge on friends and foes by placing them in the circles of hell. Adán Buenosayres was published in 1948, during the first government of Perón, of whom the author was a confessed supporter. As the Argentine writers and intellectuals rallied against Perón (and were antagonized by him) with the same zest their predecessors had rallied against Rosas (Borges, as many of them, always spoke of Perón’s government as “The Second Tyranny”) Marechal’s novel was either ridiculed or ignored – its first edition took 17 years to sell. Only a young and unknown reviewer hailed it as a major landmark in Argentine literature: his name was Julio Cortázar.

If Dostoevsky (read in the awful style of the Spanish translations of his day) was the formative inflence on Arlt’s powerful but rather messy style, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe were the shaping force behind those of Horacio Quiroga, born in Uruguay but living and writing mostly in Argentina, and on Argentine topics. Argentine narrative has always been stronger on the short story than on the novel form, which makes it very puzzling when Argentine editors, today, systematically answer the authors’ submissions with “no short stories please.” Horacio Quiroga is the master of the Argentine horror story: whether of a pampered little girl slaughtered by her four idiotic brothers (imagine Caddy Compson murdered by four Benjys, and you get the picture), as in “La gallina degollada” or a bedridden bride sucked dry by a monstrous louse lurking in her feather pillow, as in “El almohadón de plumas,” or a young man paralized by wild honey and eaten alive by jungle ants in “La miel silvestre”. Quiroga eventually moved to the jungles of Misiones, where he led the life of a pioneer. The jungle operated on him as Tahiti on Gaugin and Tangiers on Paul Bowles, and his stories set in this wild frontier are arguably his best, recovering the old 19th Century angst over the horrors of unbridled nature. His stories for children, collected in the book Cuentos de la selva, are still the most popular in our literature.

But of course, if we say that Argentine Literature is based on the short story, it is because this was the form favoured by Jorge Luis Borges, without any doubt the greatest Argentine writer of all times. It would be preposterous to try and sum up Borges’ significance in the few paragraphs I can devote to him: the most I can attempt is to place him in the context of a literature he contains and transcends. Two main lines can be traced in Borges’ literature: the maternal line is derived from his personal family history, linked by blood ties to all the great names of our national history: these texts have an oral slant in language and syntax and deal mostly with local topics and settings. These include his first books of poetry, the biographical essay Evaristo Carriego and all the stories set in the pampas of the gaucho (“El fin”, which gives an ending to Martín Fierro, “La intrusa”, perhaps the finest analysis of machismo, “El muerto”, a rewriting of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday set in the wild frontier of Uruguay and Brazil, and “El evangelio según Marcos”, which relocates the crucifixion in the pampas). It also includes the stories of manliness and courage set in the suburbs of Palermo, where Borges lived as a child: the world of the tango and the orillero, where the only men who mattered were the brave, and courage was always proved at knife-point: “Hombre de la esquina rosada”, “Historia de Rosendo Juárez” and a host of others emphasizing an ethics of courage—their focus placed on the pole of barbarity Echeverría and Sarmiento had deplored. The other main line in Borges’ writing, the “civilized” line, derives mostly from his father’s side, particularly from his library full of English books. Because of it Borges was often accused of being foreign or European in his subjects and concerns. Of course he was, and that is why Borges’ work is the summa of Argentine literature: if his roots run deep into our rural 19th century past, the Spanish and criollo culture, his education takes place in the period in which European immigration changed our racial, cultural and linguistic identity for good. Many of his stories dramatize this conflicting sense of identity: in “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva” he gives us the twin stories of a barbarian who changed sides and defended the Roman empire, and of an Englishwoman who turned indian and rejected civilization, and argues that both made basically the same choice; in “El sur” a bookish reader of gauchesca lays dying in a hospital and is given the chance (whether by God or by his own delirium, the story, modeled on James’ The Turn of the Screw, won’t say) of dying in the open air, in an authentic gaucho duel. This duality also helps explain Borges’ fascination with Anglo-Saxon Literature: The Anglo-Saxons are the barbarians of English culture, which for Borges and many of his group epitomized civilization, and through them the opposition of civilization and barbarity is subverted and confused. The ethics of courage in a macho-centric feudal or neo-feudal context equates in a way the worlds of Beowulf and Martín Fierro. (Borges probably learned the trick from one of his favourie novels, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where we are reminded that the most civilized nation on earth, the British, were once the savage Britons who drove the civilized Romans to despair and madness in the swamps and jungles of the Thames.)

In terms of Argentine, or perhaps Latin American literature, Borges is unique for two main reasons. One is linguistic: he is undoubtedly the best writer in the Spanish language after Cervantes and his contemporaries, and with him the norm of Literature in Spanish decidedly shifts from Spain to the Americas. Just as the Irish like Yeats, Joyce and Beckett taught English writers how to write in English; Borges, García Márquez, Cabrera Infante and a host of others have saved Spanish Literature from itself, or as Borges himself would have it, from “the vain symmetries of the Spanish style.”

Borges is also unique in terms of his influence on the mainstream writers of the Western canon. Poe was perhaps the first writer from the Americas to influence and shape European Literature (I am thinking, of course, of Baudelaire and French Symbolism), but Borges is undoubtedly the first writer from a Latin American country to alter the local traditions of strong literatures: he has changed the way North Americans read Hawthorne or Whitman, the way the English read the Anglo-Saxons or Stevenson, the way Italians read Dante or Spaniards read Cervantes. In his famous essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” he defended not only our right to consider all Western Literature as our own, but predicted we had a greater capacity to change it than its true possesors—as we were, like the Jews and the Irish, both inside and outside this tradition. The prediction was true, of course, at least when applied to Borges himself—a good example of a self-fulfilled prophecy.

So as from the 50s our literature has had to deal with two types of monsters. One was, as in the past, political. Perón, who is elected president in 1945, was seen by the conservative writers of the aristocracy as a second Rosas, and by the progressive or left wing writers as a Fascist; and his followers, mostly inner migrants from the backward rural areas, were seen as the new violent rabble invading the cities. Given this vast coincidence, it is noticeable that anti-peronist literature didn’t produce any memorable pages—the reason probably was that Peronism, its intolerance towards dissenters and high culture excepted, was progressive in terms of economic and social justice. The best example of anti-peronist literature is Borges’ and Bioy Casares’ short story “La fiesta del monstruo”, a rigorous reenactment of Echeverria’s El matadero with the peronist rabble playing the part of the Mazorca and a book-carrying Jewish intellectual that of the young unitario, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the battering of the middle aged reader in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. This story is written in an artificial popular dialect strongly favoured by Borges’ and Bioy Casares’ third mind (I am borrowing the term from William Burroughs and Brion Gysin), also known as Bustos Domecq. A style, incidentally, both of which avoided when writing on their own.

What Borges couldn’t see at the time was that the real danger for Argentine literature, its new monster, didn’t come from politics but from literature itself. And the name of the monster was none other than Jorge Luis Borges. Argentine literature after Borges has been one long and desperate attempt to get away from what Tomás Eloy Martínez has aptly termed, paraphrasing the beginning of Sarmiento’s Facundo, “la sombra terrible de Borges”—Borges’ terrible shadow.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was fingered for doom. Being Borges’ personal friend, writing in collaboration, belonging very much to the same aristocratic milieu, only meant he could never extricate himself from his elder’s crushing influence. One of his best novels, El sueño de los héroes, is an expanded version of Borges’ “El sur”; and his science fiction classic, La invención de Morel, explores the ontological themes of Borges’ fiction such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (in which Bioy himself is, incidentally, a character) and others. The measure of this melancholy fate can be gauged in the many interviews in which Bioy was always questioned more on Borges than on himself.

Luckier was Julio Cortázar. Writing at a time when Borges was still unpopular and little understood, shifting to the French language and Literature as models (Borges’ language and literature, needless to say, are modeled on the English), embracing the avant-garde with the same zest Borges had rejected it, inaugurating a lifelong voluntary exile, and eventually deepening his left-wing sympathies as Borges aired his right-wing ones, he managed to put some distance between himself and his monstrous predecessor. Cortazar’s short stories became popular while Borges’ were still considered difficult or abstruse—and reading Cortázar helped train the common reader in the skills necessary for reading Borges. Cortázar became famous worldwide for his novel Rayuela, where all the devices of the French literary avant-garde, from Surrealism to Oulipo, seem to converge, but it is already clear that he will be remembered for his short stories, which envelop us in a sense of undefined uncanniness as no other in the language. Cortázar also had a natual genius for writing from the perspective of children—a trick Borges never mastered: all his children sound middle-aged.

Ernesto Sábato, the only surviving great figure of the generation of Cortázar and Bioy, has a mixed reputation. Revered as “the master” by the common reader and official culture (presidents, wether local or visiting, for some reason love to be photographed with him), he does not awaken the same enthusiasm among literary critics—specially academic. Of his meager production of three novels, Sobre héroes y tumbas is undoubtedly the best, and a great favourite with teenagers. Will Sábato remain a star in the canon of Argentine literature? Only time will tell. But if we consider his influence on the actual writing of other writers coming after him—his prospects don’t seem too good. Perhaps Sábato’s main drawback is that he saw himself not as a disciple but as a rival of Borges. In this novel he has a character dismiss Borges’ “philosophical” stories—has him say for example that “La biblioteca de Babel” results from confusing the notions of indefiniteness and infinity, and suggests that the best of Borges can be found in his poems on the streets and parks of Buenos Aires. All of this is fatal. A post-borgesian Argentine writer cannot choose to ignore Borges; one must grapple with him, doing one’s best, knowing one will lose. Underestimating Borges offers the easiest shortcut into literary weakness.

Anyway, the past two days have been incredibly interesting. I’ve learned more about contemporary Argentine writing in the past few days than I thought was possible. On Tuesday, we had a series of publishers (Norma, Adriana Hidalgo, Interzona, Sudamericana, Planeta, and Aflaguara) come and present us with information about their titles.

This may come out wrong, but of all the various editors trips I’ve been on, this group of presenters was by far the best at judging their audience, making the presentations exciting and relevant, and providing the editors with solid recommendations that may really lead to publication. (One of the things that’s really cool about being on such an international trip is the fact that all of us could conceivably publish the same book . . . Aside from the two German and Italian publishers, no one is in “competition” with each other.)

was probably my favorite. Very cool publisher doing a lot of young, experimental writers including Luis Chitarroni, whose Peripecias del no: Diario de una novela inconclusa sounds like a Pessoa-esque novel that’s “untranslatable.” Interzona also does a few Fogwill books (like En otro orden de cosas), which sound fascinating as well.

Norma was also really good. Their books look almost exactly like Archipelago’s, and are very high quality. Carlos Gamerro—whose essay on the history of Argentine lit I’ll post tomorrow—is published by Norma, and his book Las Islas sounds wild and amazing. According to the publisher, this is a book that contains “everything big and small.” It’s about the Malvinas war, and about how the war is actually still going on ten years later . . . It’s long, ambitious, and contains several different styles.

Oliverio Coelho is another author that came up several times of the past few days, along with Iosi Havilio, whose Opendoor I think we should publish just for the symmetry of names. (Actually, a lot of people I’ve come to trust recommended this book. It’s a first novel published by ) In terms of older authors, Juan Jose de Soiza Reilly was apparently Roberto Arlt’s teacher, and has a few novels that sound really amazing. And speaking of influences, we managed to sign on Macedonio Fernandez’s Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (Primera novela buena) today. Macedonio was Borges’s mentor and led a fucking incredible life. (He ran for president of Argentina—twice—with his entire campaign consisting of going around leaving slips of paper with “Macedonio” written on them at various cafes and bars. That way his name would infiltrate the consciousness of voters . . . ) I’ll be writing a lot more about this in the near future, but seriously, this is a book that fans of Flann O’Brien, Roberto Bolano, and Borges will absolutely love.

On the cultural front, my Spanish is improving in leaps and bounds. (Which is making it a bitch to write in English, actually.) I did have two odd encounters in the taxi last night though . . . I went out to San Telmo to meet Scott Esposito and his girlfriend Beth (oddly enough, this was the first time we ever met in person) for dinner and drinks. On the way, I was all bad-ass chatting with the taxi driver in Spanish about New York, publishing, etc. At some point he mentioned the beautiful women of Buenos Aires. I replied —in Spanish—by agreeing that the women of Buenos Aires sure are beautiful. (They totally are.) And he replied by asking if I want “sexo” . . . Which seemed like an odd response. What was even stranger was that the exact same thing happened during the taxi ride back to my hotel. I’m starting to suspect that all the time I spent during my Spanish classes figuring out how to swear has led me astray . . .

There’s a lot more to write about—like about one publisher I met who was a German who moved here in 1948 and now publishes kids books and erotica—but I think I’ll end here for now. Supposedly “the smoke” is supposed to be back tomorrow, which totally terrifies me . . . I guess some island is burning and when the wind shifts, it infiltrates Buenos Aires and smells fricking horrible. (There was a bit of it today, but last Saturday the city was apparently hazy with “the smoke.”)

Things started pleasant enough—we got a walking tour of literary Buenos Aires. We wandered some of the “labyrinths” off the main street (and saw beautiful buildings for sale) and the “mirror” street that Borges wrote about, where both sides are identical to one another (and beautiful buildings were for sale) and visited a café that was in some way connected to Juan Carlos Onetti . . . although it was, um, too noisy for me to pick up what this connection actually was. (Seriously, there was a lot of extraneous noise, but at some point early on—possibly when I was asking the German translator for the third time to fill me in, while insisting that I “understand” Spanish, I realized that I should keep coming up with new excuses for my failings.)

Anyway, it was an interesting tour that included readings of short pieces by Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, and Juan Carlos Onetti—a pretty awesome triumvirate of writers. (And we saw an insane watch shop that reminded me of a Cortazar story about how the worst gift you can give/get is a watch . . . )

In the afternoon, we visited Victoria Ocampo’s house and heard three speeches on Argentine literature. (And in case you’re wondering, Victoria Ocampo was the publisher of Sur which was the first magazine to publish translations of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. And she was sister to Silvinia, one of the best Argentine short story writers and wife of Bioy Casares.) Author Carlos Gamerro gave the first overview of essentially modernist Argentine writing (we’ll publish the entire speech sometime in the near future) hitting on some of the highlights: Jose Hernandez’s Martin Fierros (which is name checked in Gravity’s Rainbow), Horacio Quiroga, Roberto Arlt (one of the first real Argentine writers to make a living at it), Leopoldo Marcechal (who wrote the Argentine Ulysses), Jorge Luis Borges (Gamerro had a great Borges bit—he said that Argentine writers, to this day, are trying to escape from Borges’s shadow, and that whenever he writes a essay, he does an uncensored draft followed by one in which he cuts out all of the Borges quotes . . .), Julio Cortazar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvinia Ocampo, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ernesto Sabato, Manuel Puig, Rudolfo Walsh, Juan Jose Saer, Haroldo Conti, Copi, Nestor Perlongher, Osvaldo Lamborhini, and Ricardo Piglia (who is obsessed with Macedonio, who is ironically missing from this list).

The speech was really interesting—using the two Argentine trends of writing literature when politics is impossible, and exile as the organizing ideas—but rather than comment, I’ll just post the whole thing as soon as possible.

Then we had two talks about contemporary Argentine writing. By this time, my grasp of Spanish had devolved into nonsense. Both speakers were eloquent, but, you know, it was too dark in the room to really focus, so I missed a lot. (Honestly, they spoke really fast. Really fast.) One of the speakers is sending me her speech, so hopefully I’ll post that soon as well. The other had a fascinating bit about control and taste, arguing the critics and academics (one and the same in Argentina) essentially tell everyone what’s good, what’s bad, and the viewpoint of authors themselves is often overlooked. He recommended a few writers (full list of names to come), including Juan Forn.

Afterwards, there was a nice reception where Fundacion TyPA announced the winner(s) of the translation subsidy. This subsidy was supposed to go to pay for the translation of one title published by one of the editors who had been on this Semana de Editores viejo. In a positive twist, the government gave the Fundacion extra money and they ended up giving out three awards instead of one. I don’t remember the last two (I believe one was for a German publisher, the other, maybe Brazilian?), but the first winner announced was Chris Andrews for his translation of Aira’s Las Fantomas which is published by New Directions. (Barbara Epler attended last year.)

One of the fun things about trips of this sort are the great people you meet. I could go on and on about Claudia Stein from Buchergilde (Germany), Cristiane Costa from Nova Fronteira (Brazil), Marco Cassini from Minimum Fax (Italy), and Patrizia van Daalen from Shanghai 99 (China, but who is half German and Italian, and in addition to those two languages speaks English, Spanish, and Chinese—my god), and I probably will, but one of my favorite stories so far is from Antje Kunstmann of Kunstmann Verlag (Germany), who is the German publisher of Bolano. She said that when they brought him to Germany for a reading tour, he didn’t want to talk with the critics or answer any of their questions—instead all he wanted to do was watch and talk about Big Brother. Perfect.

Thankfully, tomorrow I’ll have a British girl interpreting for me, so hopefully my notes will be more comprehensive . . .

Buenos Aires is a pretty amazing city. Reminds me a bit of Barcelona—although not nearly as gentrified. And Palermo Viejo is sort of like Brooklyn—although not nearly as crowded. The wine is very good, the beef even better, and it’s one of the only places left on earth where the dollar is still worth something. (Which is very unfortunate for portenos, but good for tourists. Especially for me, since I’m planning on buying a new suit while I’m here . . . If anyone out there knows of any shops I should visit, please e-mail me. It’s all a bit overwhelming.)

The Fundacion TyPa (which stands for “Teoria y Practica de Las Artes”) people are rather amazing. We had our first “get to know each other” meeting and dinner tonight, which was very interesting and very pleasant. This is, by far, the most international editors’ trip I’ve ever been on. I went to Poland a few years ago with a few other Americans (Lorin Stein, Jill Schoolman, Laurie Callahan) and a few Brits. I’m the only American on this trip, and translator Nick Caistor the only Brit. The other eight people hail from Germany (2 of the participants), Brazil, China, France, Israel, and Italy (2).

And, as I was warned in advance, everything is conducted in Spanish. Which is a bit of a struggle. I can understand about 70% of what’s going on, but I’m terrified to try and speak. This may well turn into the quietest week of my life . . .

Our schedule is packed—starting tomorrow morning at 9:30, we have meetings from 10am till 7pm (or later) every day of the week. And no scheduled tango dancing—all literary meetings. I can already tell that in addition to the great experience of learning about Argentine literature, this trip will result in publishing contacts that will last for years.

Since I got in at 8am, I had plenty of time to wander the city taking pictures and hanging out in the 80 degree weather, rereading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. (It’s been probably 12 years since I first read this, and there’s no better place that the Plazoleta Cortazar—which is at the end of Jorge Luis Borges street, but, to be honest, is a bit disappointing for a Plazoleta—to reread one of the greatest novels ever written.) I have lots of pictures to post, but no USB cord . . .

One of the best places I stumbled upon was the Jardin Botanico Carlos Thays, which was an extremely pleasant botanical garden, where people could hang out and read (seems like everyone here is always reading) and pet the tons of essentially domesticated cats that hang out there. The cat thing was really sort of amazing to see. They just wander around, chilling in the sun, not at all afraid of people stooping down to pet them. Very calming and natural . . .

Of course the first place I went was Ateneo Grand Splendid, which is every bit as awesome as the picture we uncovered a few months back. It is grand, almost overblown with its four floors, balconies, and restaurant on the old stage. The Argentine literature section was pretty fantastic—complete works of a number of authors who have yet to find an English audience, such as Roberto Arlt and Silvina Ocampo.

I’m really looking forward to gleaning as much as I can from tomorrow’s lectures on literary Buenos Aires, the history of Argentine literature, and contemporary Argentine lit.