99-year-old young woman: Ida Vitale. The Uruguayan poet swept through the Argentine capital like a whirlwind these days, leaving a trail of astonishment at her clarity and sense of humor. “I’m on vacation,” he said with a knowing smile to say he’s no longer writing. Instead, he reads whatever he can get his hands on and listens to even more music. “When I was young I spent everything to go to concerts, music is up there, even poetry,” he replied during a public lecture at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.
Awarded the Cervantes Prize and the Guadalajara FIL, Vitale (Montevideo, 1923) is the sole survivor of the Uruguayan generation of ’45, which also included Mario Benedetti, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Maggi, María Inés Silva Vila and Ángel Rama, among others .
“Ida is the last representative of this generation, of that scene that was so important in Uruguay. There is a great nostalgia for those cafés where they gather to read and criticize each other, and it somehow represents all of that,” describes documentary filmmaker María Inés Arrillaga, granddaughter of Maggi and Silva Vila and part of Vitale’s extended family the great friendship between the two families. Arrillaga traveled to Buenos Aires this week to present her documentary Ida Vitale, which will be screened at the Malba on Wednesday in the presence of both. “They are precious in Argentina these days. Ida has a way of poeticizing reality and making appear what wasn’t there before she named it, which makes you see everything differently,” she adds.
In the first scenes of the film, Vitale hums a song. She is also lying on a hotel bed and passionately listens to Schubert’s Winterreise. This song reminds him of another one he’s looking for on his phone. “Reality consists of two moments, the moment you live it and the infinite moment you remember it,” he reflects on camera while looking at photos taken in different countries. As in Léxico de affinidades, Vitale’s work built around the alphabet, the documentary also uses it to describe the poet. The flowers, the birds, the poems, the music and the journeys appear on screen to provide clues to his intense life. Vitale was also an essayist, translator and journalist. She divorced and remarried to a man 18 years her junior.
A few months after the coup in Uruguay in 1973, Vitale and her second husband, also a writer Enrique Fierro, went into exile in Mexico. They lived there for eleven years. They briefly returned to the South American country after democracy was restored, before relocating to Austin, which was their home for three decades until Fierro’s death in 2016. His final return to Uruguay coincided with belated recognition through awards and the reprinting of his volumes of poetry.
“One has the illusion that the country is a kind of house that protects us. But sometimes there is a wind and the windows slam and you stay outside. It’s not bad either. I was lucky enough to go to Mexico,” Vitale said in Malba as he spoke about his years in exile, reflected in Shakespeare’s palace. “It was a book of gratitude rather than memory,” he said of the latter Autobiography that bears the affectionate nickname given by the Uruguayan couple to their first home in the host country.
The documentary captures the poet’s great curiosity and attentive look at everything that surrounds her, especially nature. He is fascinated by the threads that a spider has woven in the garden, describes the exhausting flight of hummingbirds, says goodbye to the sea after a boat trip and carefully disassembles a received bouquet of flowers to give it a new form. “I think we are small in nature. In general, we find ourselves in cities where nature is a tree, a bird. Suddenly you are writing in the illusion that you hope not to find nature, but to take care of it,” he emphasized in Malba.
She is the author of titles such as The light of this memory (1949), Word given (1953), Each one in his night (1960), Oidor andante (1972), Silica garden (1980), Pavo Kingdom (1984), Procurement of the Impossibles (1998), Plants and Animals (2003) and The ABCs of Byobu (2004). He owes his passion for plants, embodied in his literature, to a botanical aunt. “I had a grandmother who had many children, one of whom was a botanist’s daughter. It meant for me an eternal respect for all that is natural: plants, animals… well, animals that aren’t too invasive. For example, I’ve never had anything to do with rhinos,” he said ironically in front of the book fair audience.
Vitale also got listeners laughing as he recounted how he met Jorge Luis Borges outside a shop window in Montevideo and tried to help him when he thought he was lost. “Borges was what I always envy Argentina for. I learned from him what I could never be,” he said. “Borges’ poetry taught me to admire and to look and to be discreet, not to copy,” he added of the great Argentine writer.
From envy of Borges to friendship with the poet and singer-songwriter María Elena Walsh, with whom she had a great friendship. “She was charming, funny, good people and it was your turn,” he said. “To me she was poetry, the most lovable.”
Accompanied from side to side by her daughter Amparo Rama, Vitale had time for hugs, selfies and book signings at every act. Then he scurried away, his nomadic words in tow.
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