Julio Cortázar was 37 years old, had a lonely life as a provincial professor and published three books with little success in Buenos Aires when he finally moved to Paris. It was November 1951. Juan Domingo Perón had just won elections in Argentina and Bestiario, the first book the author signed with his real name, had barely sold a copy. It was two years before he married his executor, Aurora Bernárdez, at least five years before he became interested in the Cuban Revolution, and more than a decade before the publication of Hopscotch and the Latin American Boom. But Cortázar wrote the part of his work that made him famous. Having already settled in France in 1952, he wrote in a letter to a friend from Argentina: “Some new bugs called Cronopios have been born to me.”
A decade later, Cortázar published stories about cronopios and celebrities. A collection of short essays about daily life, playful instructions for crying, attending a funeral or climbing stairs, including the very short stories with the Cronopios, those idealistic, sensitive and disorderly creatures that became its most iconic characters. My dears. New brothers have been added to these texts this week. In the house of a Uruguayan collector who died in 2019, his son found a typed first edition of the book: 46 short stories typed by Cortazar to be sent to a friend in Buenos Aires. Of these, 35 had already appeared in the official edition of 1962 with almost no variants, and another four appeared in magazines of the time. Seven remained unreleased, buried between crates. After a year of analysis by experts, the typescript will be auctioned on October 12 in Montevideo as part of an alliance between the auction houses Zorrilla from that city and Hilario from Buenos Aires.
The owner has asked to remain anonymous – according to auction houses, his father was an unknown collector – and of the unpublished texts only the titles are known. They will likely go through a long negotiation process with the heirs of Aurora Bernárdez, Cortázar’s final executor, if the next owner intends to see them published. Meanwhile, the lyrics “Inventory,” “Letter from One Glory to Another,” “Automatic Butterflies,” “Travels and Dreams,” “Little Unicorn,” “Spiegelwut,” and “King of the Seas” continue to remain unknown, least of all to those closest to them Owner. The binder, containing 60 single-sided sheets, sells for a base price of $12,000.
The storage box of the typescript produced for the auction in Montevideo. Zorrilla Auctions
“They are texts in poetic prose, with a philosophical background, like sociological etchings, always with humor and a certain tenderness.” “The texts, which were edited in all subsequent editions, follow the same line,” describes the antiquarian bookseller and researcher Lucio Aquilanti, Bibliographer of Cortázar and one of the greatest experts on his work, in conversation with EL PAÍS. Aquilanti is one of the few people who had access to the unpublished texts. Almost a year ago, the family of the late collector contacted him to confirm the possibility that the folder of old papers they were about to throw away had been typed by one of the Río de La Plata’s most important authors. Aquilanti compared the typescript with others from his personal collection, located in the National Library of Argentina. The typographical and handwritten corrections match, as does the typewriter with which Cortazar wrote at the time. At least four letters sent to friends in Buenos Aires between June and December 1952 support the legitimacy of the papers.
“You already know my Cronopios. I copy stories of cronopios and celebrities and send them to you,” he wrote to the poet and painter Eduardo Jonquiéres on September 20 of the same year. Three months later, on December 19, in another letter to Jonquiéres, he complained about the silence of those who had received the typescript: “Didn’t Baudi happen to you? [el editor y escritor Luis María Baudizzone] my little cronopios, my fame and my hopes? I want you to read them because they are very charming, very sad and very touching. “I am very happy with these exercises, but I fear that Baudi found them terrible, considering his threatening silence.” The letters were published by Aquilanti in an article in which he describes his research and concludes: “ I can confirm without a doubt that it is a typewritten original by the author of exceptional importance.”
The year-long investigation traced the origins of the Royal typewriter that Cortázar used to at least 1966, when Aurora Bernárdez purchased an Olivetti Letera 32, but failed to uncover the mystery of how it ended up in the hands of a reserved Uruguayan Collector.
The 1952 typescript. Zorrilla Auctions
“The circulation of literature in the La Plata River has been uninterrupted since the Viceroyal period. For the authors themselves, for their exile, their affinities, their friendships or academic relationships. And also for collecting yourself,” says Roberto Vega, owner of the bookstore and auction house Hilario. “Somehow it stays in a family. “The man told them before his death that he had an important original without specifying the author,” says Vega. “They concluded it was from Borges, but he didn’t show up. The man had a lot of material distributed in libraries and boxes. And at the bottom of one of the boxes, one of the ones you think are going to be thrown in the trash or donated, was this folder. “It could have ended up in a container… but some Cronopio intervened so the owner’s son could find it.”
“It is quite common to find unpublished material from some authors, perhaps in quotations,” says Vega. “Not from Cortazar. It is a true literary discovery.” Both Vega and Aquilanti hope that the Argentine National Library or a national institution open to the public will have the flexibility to preserve the typescript. Aquilanti does not doubt the importance of the text’s return to the city where Cortázar was unable to resettle after his exile. “Although Borges wrote a lot about Buenos Aires and will always be our great literary reference of all time, this city is and remains a chronopia,” he says. “Here you read much more Cortázar than Borges. I have no doubt about that. In addition, it shows itself in sales in bookstores. I think we admire Borges more than we love him, and we love Cortazar as much as we admire him. Cortázar is in the monuments, in the graffiti, in the T-shirts of young and old.”
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