IPS-English ARGENTINA: Borges' Literary Legacy Looking for a Home
 
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:44:46 -0700

 
Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 14   (IPS)  - It's all ready and waiting. Some 
20,000 items of legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges 
(1899-1986), including original manuscripts, photographs, 
personal letters, portraits and out-of-print books, are 
classified and packaged. The only thing missing is the museum 
site promised by the Culture Secretariat to house them.

”He's one of the greatest writers of universal literature, and 21 
years after his death Buenos Aires still lacks a museum to 
preserve and exhibit the full extent of the work he left us,” 
Alejandro Vaccaro, author of ”Borges: Vida y Literatura” and one 
of the people behind the project, told IPS.

Vaccaro is president of the Buenos Aires Borges Association, 
members of which are experts on the work of the author of ”El 
Aleph”. The association owns the collection that will grace the 
museum, and plans to open a research and documentation centre, a 
classroom to teach courses on Borges' work, and also a publishing 
fund, he said.

The collection has already been exhibited by the association in 
the Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, in mid-2006, marking the 
20th anniversary of the death of Borges, who won the 1980 Miguel 
de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award in 
Spanish-language literature.

”The museum is a debt that Argentina owes to Borges,” Vaccaro 
said. ”Hundreds of tourists from the Argentine provinces or 
abroad come to Buenos Aires, avidly hunting for somewhere to 
satisfy the curiosity the writer awakens, and they tour the sites 
that are symbols of his writings.”

There are several tours in the Argentine capital that take 
visitors to places frequented by Borges. The streets he walked 
along, the places that inspired his work, the houses he lived in, 
the bars and libraries where he spent his time, are cult objects 
for his readers from all over the world.

In 1995, the Borges Cultural Centre opened in the Galerías 
Pacifico, a 19th century building in the city centre. But it is 
actually an exhibition space for visual arts, music, dance, film, 
theatre and videos, not necessarily linked to the writer.

The future museum will include a room recreating Borges' austere 
study in his downtown apartment on Maipú street, where he lived 
for most of his life with his mother, Leonor Acevedo, and their 
housekeeper, Epifania Uveda de Robledo, Vaccaro said. 

Photographs and portraits of the writer by renowned artists will 
also be displayed. 

Translations of his books into over 25 languages, letters from 
his mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1975 at the age 
of 99, and from his sister, Norah, will be on view, as well as 
personal documents like his passport and his certificate of 
marriage to his first wife Elsa Astete, to whom he was married 
from 1967 to 1970.

But for connoisseurs of his work, the most revealing documents 
will no doubt be the manuscripts in which the author's 
crossings-out and corrections to his poems and short stories can 
be seen, or the copies of now unobtainable books which Borges 
himself refused to have reprinted, such as ”Inquisiciones” and 
”El tamaño de mi esperanza”.

The National Secretariat of Culture supported the effort that 
went into the collection, and offered to house it in a building 
constructed in 1746 by the Catholic Church's Jesuit order. 
Located in San Telmo, in the historic centre of Buenos Aires, it 
is one of the oldest buildings in the city.

The building was in turn the Jesuits' residence, a hospital, a 
nursing home, a tannery and a women's prison. In 1978 the prison 
was transferred outside the city limits, and the Higher Academy 
for Penitentiary Studies and the Prison Museum were opened in its 
place. But now, their removal to alternative accommodation is 
experiencing delays.    

The curator of the Prison Museum, Horacio Benegas, told IPS he 
”loves” Borges but is ”pained” by the plans to site the 
collection on the premises. He admitted he does not know for sure 
whether it will take up the space now occupied by his museum, or 
that of the academy, but said that in his view the writer ”has 
nothing in common with this place.”

Benegas said the building does have important historical value, 
and because of its location it receives an average of 350 
visitors on Sundays. The ideal solution, in his opinion, would be 
to house the Borges Museum in the space occupied by the academy, 
without moving the federal Prison Museum.   

”The place is perfect, and the idea of handing it over to the 
Borges Museum was Culture Secretary José Nun's,” said Vaccaro. 
Nun also promised to speed up procedures within the Organismo 
Nacional de Administración de Bienes del Estado, which 
administers state assets and has the final word on the matter.    

Vaccaro does not think that Borges' widow, María Kodama, will 
raise any objections to the museum.

Kodama was the writer's secretary from 1975 onwards, and they 
were married in 1986, one month before he died in Geneva. ”She 
inherited the copyrights to his work, but we aren't planning to 
publish his books,” he said.

Kodama and Vaccaro do not get on well. Vaccaro was much closer to 
Uveda, nicknamed ”Fanny,” the Borges family's housekeeper. 

He wrote the writer's biography ”El Señor Borges” based mainly on 
his conversations with Fanny.

The book says that shortly before he died, Borges changed his 
original will, which bequeathed half of his assets to Fanny, to 
make Kodama the beneficiary of his entire estate. The housekeeper 
was sacked and sued by Borges' widow for allegedly taking kitchen 
utensils and a photo of her employer from the apartment without 
permission.


***** + BOOKS-ARGENTINA: Señor Borges and the Maid - 2004 
(http://ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=23686) + 
Bibliotheca Alexandrina - Borges Exhibition 
(http://www.bibalex.org/English/Calendar/ShowEventDetails.aspx?EventID=2499&Date=06/14/2006)


(END/IPS/LA CR AE/TRASP-VD-SW/MV/DM/07)


 
= 09141613 ORP008 NNNN