Julio Cortázar, on the Pont Neuf over the Seine, in Paris.Antonio Gálvez
Julio Cortázar’s unknown Cronopios now have an owner. The original book “Stories of Cronopios and Fames” found in Uruguay was auctioned this Thursday for $36,000. The buyer has not yet been announced. The 60-page booklet, typed by the Argentine writer in 1952, contains 46 texts: 35 that were included in the final version of the book, four that appeared in historical periodicals, and seven unpublished texts that have been hidden for years at the end of a book were boxes of old papers. As researchers have reconstructed, Cortázar had sent the typescript from Paris to Buenos Aires in mid-1952. He then published the classics End of the Game (1956) and Las Armas Secretas (1959) and began work on the novel Hopscotch (1963). ) and published the final version of the Cronopios in 1962. Nothing was known about these lost texts, which the son of a collector who died in Montevideo in 2019 found while rummaging through his father’s last boxes.
“It is a true literary discovery. It is quite common to find unpublished material from some authors, perhaps in quotations. Not Cortázar,” Roberto Vega, owner of the Hilario auction house in Buenos Aires, who prepared the auction together with the Zorrilla house in Montevideo, tells EL PAÍS. The discovery of the unpublished texts mobilized a small group of experts who spent a year following the clues in the typescript. Little is known about the family she has just left and wishes to remain anonymous. The owner was an unknown collector, originally from Montevideo, who had told the family before his death that he had some valuable originals in his collection. “They concluded it was from Borges, but he didn’t show up. The man had a lot of material distributed in libraries and boxes,” says Vega. No one knew when the man acquired it, but investigations were able to trace how the text ended up in the Río de La Plata.
“We do not know the exact month of this 1952 typescript, but Cortázar arrived in Paris in November 1951. “That means that these magical Cronopios were born there, in that mysterious city that Julio always longed for,” says antiquarian and bookseller researcher Lucio Aquilanti. , bibliographer of Cortázar and expert on his work, who was commissioned to determine the origin of the text at the request of the original owner. Aquilanti found the coincidences: from the typewriter Cortazar used at the time, a Royal that he used until his wife Aurora Bernárdez bought an Olivetti in 1966, to the hand-made corrections that he could compare with the originals in his collection. Employees who now guard the Argentine National Library. The rest was in the author’s personal letters.
The storage box of the typescript produced for the auction in Montevideo. Zorrilla Auctions
Julio Cortázar was 37 years old, living a life as a provincial professor and publishing three books with little success in Argentina when he moved to France. The writer arrived in Paris, to put it in Aquilanti’s words: “still single, lonely, disillusioned with the political reality of Buenos Aires at that time and after the publication of his third and great book, Bestiario.” Most likely he already suspects that who he would become.” Juan Domingo Perón had just won the elections in Argentina, Cortázar had not yet met Aurora Bernárdez, his wife and great executor of his will, he had no permanent job as a translator, and Bestiario had only sold 14 copies. But he wrote and wrote.
In at least four letters that he sent to friends in Buenos Aires between June and December 1952, Cortázar already spoke of these romantic, sensitive and disordered beings who, decades later, would become the most famous and translated part of his work. “They are very charming, very sad and very touching. I am very happy with these exercises, but I am afraid that Baudi [el editor y escritor Luis María Baudizzone] “They seemed terrible to you, judging by their ominous silence,” he said in a letter dated September 20 to the poet and painter Eduardo Jonquiéres.
Julio Cortázar, sitting in front of his typewriter, in an undated picture.
Stories of Cronopios and Fames was published as a collection in 1962, containing twenty anecdotes about these creatures in the fourth, final chapter. To editor Francisco Porrúa, the collection seemed, as Cortázar later said, “very short,” and the author found the other sections by searching his essays. “Although the sections or chapters that were eventually included in the 1962 edition differ significantly from each other in several aspects, they could all bear some attribution – even if through Cortázar’s personal touch – to the surrealistic environment of the juxtapositions, free, What they have in common are associations, “playing with humor and absurdity, evoking dreamlike environments, etc.,” writes the Uruguayan essayist Aldo Mazzuchelli, who collaborated with Aquilanti on the research, about the discovery. In his final analysis, published in the digital magazine of the antiquarian Hilario, Mazzuchelli concludes: “From a literary point of view, taking into account above all the period and context of the composition, the style, the author’s idiolect and the themes.” , no “There is no valid reason to believe that these sites are not authentic.”
Unpublished works titled Inventory, Letter from One Glory to Another, Automatic Butterflies, Travels and Dreams, Little Unicorn, Rage of the Mirror and King of the Sea include two poems, short stories, small essays that Cortázar was toying with at the time, and a text about the Cronopios’ counterparts, the Fames, which was omitted from the final edition. “They are texts in poetic prose, with a philosophical background, like sociological etchings, always with humor and a certain tenderness.” The texts, which were trimmed in all subsequent editions, follow this line,” Aquilanti summarizes them in an interview with this newspaper.
Auction houses had estimated the selling price at $15,000 to $21,000, but the final bid reached $36,000. The typescript now has an owner, although it is uncertain how long we will have to wait to read it: only a handful of posthumous texts are known from Cortázar, which Aurora Bernárdez had collected and edited before her death in 2014. The final word on These little cronopios will be responsible for his heirs.
The typescript found in Montevideo in 1952. Zorrilla Auctions