Argentine writer Alejandro Vaccaro (Buenos Aires, 72 years old) owns a valuable collection of 30,000 pieces related to Jorge Luis Borges. In the 1970s he is remembered as “a voracious reader who read untidyly whatever he could get his hands on”. In this coming and going of books came El informe de Brodie, one of Borges’ books of short stories. “I was fascinated. I was struck by how differently he addressed things that others did not, and I began to read him, to delve into his writings, to attend the conferences he gave, impressed by such a special personality and this serious and… compact literature. It was love at first sight,” he says in an interview with EL PAÍS, conducted in his apartment in Buenos Aires.
The entrance of the house is a temple dedicated to the Borgean cult. It is dominated by a shelf with thousands of books by the famous Argentine writer – covered with special eco-botanical paper for their preservation – and around a large bust of the author there are also portraits, dolls and photographs. In the next room there are more libraries packed with first edition books on Argentine and Latin American literature.
Five decades after the initial enthusiasm, Vaccaro is considered one of the great Borges biographers and collectors. Also director of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) and the El Libro Foundation, organizer of the Buenos Aires Book Fair, days ago presented Borges, Life and Literature, his sixth published essay on the author of El Aleph (1949). He claims he doesn’t know what will happen to Borges’ work after the willless death of his widow and executor, María Kodama, but he wants it to be controlled by a group of international figures who will decide how it is edited and published.
Alejandro Vaccaro, at his home in La Recoleta neighborhood.
“Borges is a writer who has transformed his work through successive editions of his books. The fervor of Buenos Aires from 1923, which we are celebrating these days, is very different from the last one, one could almost say it is a different book. The original version has 45 poems and the current version has 32. Which “fervor” should be read, the one from 1923 or the one from 1969? What is lacking is a meaningful examination of the modifications Borges made to his work and all these processes of change,” reflects Vaccaro.
This first collection of poems, which dates back a hundred years, was published at a local printer thanks to the encouragement of Borges’ father, Jorge Guillermo, another lover of letters. “The engraving on the cover was done by his sister Norah, so it was quite a family thing,” he says. Only 300 copies were printed and distributed to the writer’s friends and relatives.
Borges wrote it two years after returning to Buenos Aires and enthralled after a seven-year family sojourn in Europe – Switzerland, France, Spain and Portugal. “My hometown had grown and was now vast, a nearly endless population stretching west to the pampas,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If I had never lived abroad, I doubt I would have been able to see it with the power and magnificence I saw it then,” he adds.
Unlike Fervor, Borges was opposed to re-publishing some of his early work, which was only re-published after his death in 1986. “When he was working at the National Library in the San Telmo neighborhood, readers came to sign books for them. He couldn’t see anything anymore, he was almost blind. And then I would ask, “What’s the name of this book?” For example, if you told him “The Size of My Hope” (1926), he would reply, “Oh no, no, I’m not signing that book because I didn’t write it “He denied paternity of these books, although I think that was more out of literary flirtation and modesty,” says Vaccaro.
Vaccaro during the interview with EL PAÍS.
Questions. Were you surprised Kodama didn’t leave a will?
Answer. It seems to me an oversight, a big oversight. Now I think that deep down we all believe that we are a bit immortal and that causes us not to make certain choices, especially in her case who didn’t have forced heirs, i.e. children.
P. How do you think the Borges legacy should be managed?
R. Economic matters, property rights and copyrights are the responsibility of the heirs. The only thing that worries me is what will happen to Borges’ work, how it will be published. In my opinion it is very poorly edited. I am in favor of an international group of eminent personalities deciding how Borges’ work should be made known.
P. Kodama indicated that he was considering placing Borges’ work in the hands of a university in the United States or Japan, due to distrust of national universities. Do you think there are enough institutions in Argentina that can take responsibility?
R. Borges is the Argentine artist of greatest international importance, spanning all eras and all artistic disciplines. He dedicated his life to literature and turned everything into literature. There was a lot of work to bring back manuscripts that were in the hands of foreigners and we prevented many things from leaving the country. I believe that there are Argentine institutions that are able to fulfill this task and take care of the material accordingly.
Vaccaro in his home library.
P. From 1986 to the present, Kodama has exercised great control over everything published related to Borges, suing authors such as Pablo Katchadjian for El Aleph engordado. Do you think that will change?
R. I think the problem wasn’t control of the work, because that’s ultimately the job of the rights. But I did countless rehearsals and she always fought against everything. I always said the widow’s suit was too big for her. She had the attitude that she believed she was the owner of Borges and it seems to me that Borges has no owner. Ultimately it belongs to all Argentines or to the universe itself. This year the Borges to Bengali translator comes to the fair because there are Borges readers in the streets of Bangladesh, he has readers in distant places. I’m not only talking about the western world, but also about India, China, Korea, Japan.
P. In his Borges biography he comes back several times to the importance of friendship for him and also for the Argentines. What do letters and books like Borges de Bioy reveal about this most intimate facet of the writer?
R. This book is exceptional to me because it portrays the real Borges. Does he like being literary? With Bioy he talked literature all day and hooked up [Silvina] Ocampo, the wife of Bioy. They were polyglots, speaking and reading several languages. For me, Borges is the most important reader in human history. In other words, as a writer he is undoubtedly one of the greatest, but as a reader he is second to none.
P. Kodama told in several interviews that he accidentally bumped into Borges when bumping into him on the street, but in his biography he gives a different version. How did you meet?
R. i never hear it She was a Borges student at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and suggested to a group of students, including Kodama, that they study Anglo-Saxon and ancient languages outside of the faculty. There are testimonials from people who belonged to this group. Everything else seems like fantastic literature to me.
Vaccaro holds a bust of Jorge Luis Borges in his home in Buenos Aires.
P. Why did Borges’ first marriage to Elsa Astete fail?
R. Because he was terribly bored with Elsa. It seems that Elsa and her son talked about the bus stops and the routes over dinner. And a writer like Borges felt overwhelmed by this situation. They weren’t compatible at all. It was a marriage that Borges’ mother organized when, at the age of 91, 92, she worried who would take care of him when she died because her mother bought her clothes and took care of food. They bought them an apartment on Avenida Belgrano and when Borges saw them he only asked that they have separate rooms.
P. One hundred years of passion are celebrated. What connection did Borges have with this city?
R. He was a being from Buenos Aires. More from Buenos Aires than Argentina because our country has a bit of Spain, being Basque is not the same as being Catalan, Galician or Andalusian. Here the same thing happens with a person from Jujuy, Tierra del Fuego or Mendoza. This is evident in his literary work, as over the years he has expressed his love for Buenos Aires and stayed true to Buenos Aires and the language.
P. What were Borges’ habits as a reader?
R. Borges wrote that between a quarter to three and nine he planned to read the 480 pages of María by Jorge Isaacs. In other words, the guy sat down at 2:45 p.m. and read until 9 p.m. I don’t know anyone else. Despite technological changes, reading times remain the same as in the Middle Ages and reading is proportional to the time spent on it. He once said, “Let others boast of the pages they have written, I am proud of the ones I have read.” He was an exceptional reader of time and quality. Borges said that reading is a hedonistic thing, that it must be enjoyable and cannot be imposed. It would be like saying that you have to be happy out of obligation. That will not do.
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