Buenos Aires / Culture – Starting off with the impassioned poem written by Vicente López y Planes for our national anthem, passing through Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Hernández, Leopoldo Lugones, Ricardo Güiraldes and Macedonio Fernández, among others, until reaching the sublime pages of Jorge Luis Borges, Leopoldo Marechal’s endearing literature or Olga Orozco’s verses —which seem to imitate the prairies of the pampa—, up to what is written today, very often literature pursues the harsh task of founding or “justifying” the homeland. This is both an audacious and a noble task, which we, in the West inherited from Homer, Virgil and Dante Alighieri. Manuel Mujica Laínez was well aware of this, and in the stories of his book Misteriosa Buenos Aires he made an effort to endow our city with legends. This city beside Eduardo Mallea’s “still river” is often the synonym of homeland, the same one of which Borges said: “It smacks of fiction that Buenos Aires was ever founded / I judge her to be as eternal as the sea and the wind”. That is why Marechal, in his masterpiece speaks of a first man, Adam, whose surname is Buenosayres. Everything was foundational, as if Pedro de Mendoza and Juan de Garay hadn’t been enough and the country awaited for those who had to praise it in song. In this sense, the poet’s vocation calls on him to intertwine earthly difficulties with heavenly destinations: only the religious dimension would seem to justify human history.

 

In times of the Revolution of May, which found in the Tucumán Congress the first expression of its form and destiny, the issues of debate were faithfulness to the deposed king in the peninsula which had been invaded by Napoleon’s troops; the ideas of Jesuit priest Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), who delegated the divine power onto the people; the contagious idealization of the French Revolution (1789); the U.S. war of independence (1775-1783) and even Manuel Belgrano’s original proposal of an Inca monarchy. Indeed, the country springs from a noisy combination of ideals and interests, at times contradictory yet necessarily complementary when looked at from a broader perspective.

 

Likewise, our literature cannot be read from an isolated perspective if we want to understand it and pursue in it. In order to understand the pampa (that landscape which, as Ernesto Sábato said, is almost meaningless to the eyes of foreigners), we need Martín Fierro, Facundo and Son Segundo Sombra. Picking one to insult the other is taking the wrong perspective. Marechal and Borges conveyed the same passion for the same circumstance, yet from different outlooks.

 

If “nobody is homeland, but everyone is the homeland”, Argentinean literature cannot do without the jester Baldomero Fernández Moreno, Oliverio Girondo —who drew an axis in the poetry of Buenos Aires—, the indescribable Alfonsina Storni —so admirably recalled in Félix Luna’s verses—; Juan L. Ortíz —a medley of French symbolist and Eastern wiseman—; and the suffering mystic Jacobo Fijman. We need the lyrics of Homero Manzi, and Juan Rodolfo Wilsock —the only Argentinean who rests in peace in the suggestive Non-catholic Cemetery of Rome—, Francisco Luis Bernárdez —who could well write “The homeland without Laura”— and the always recalled Francisco Madariaga and Juan José Saer.

 

Finally, to say it with Marechal: “The homeland is a yet unchristened pain”: “The homeland is a pain that doesn’t yet know its name”. “The homeland is a fear that has wakened up”. “The homeland is a flowering danger”. The homeland’s childhood will still be playing / beyond your death and the death of all / the blacksmiths that thunder by the river”.

 

HOMELAND

 

This land over my eyes, / this sticky fabric, black with impassive stars, / this permanent night, this distance. / I love you, my country thrown further down than the sea, like a fish with his belly upwards / poor shadow land, full of winds, / of monuments and exaggerations / of pointless pride, ready to be mugged, / drunken harmless spitting swearing and waving little flags / handing out rosettes in the rain, / drooling over football fields and ringsides with astonishment (Julio Cortázar).

 

ODE WRITTEN IN 1966

 

Nobody is the homeland. Not even the rider / who sits high up in a deserted square at dawn, / and rides a bronze steed through the ages, / nor the others who gaze through marble, / nor those who shed their ashes in wars / throughout the fields of America / or left a verse or a deed / or the memory of a life lived in full /in the fair passing of the days. / Nobody is the homeland. Not even the symbols.

 

Nobody is the homeland. Not even time / crowded with battles, swords and exodus / and the slow population of the regions / that border the dawn and the dusk, / and of faces which grow old / in steamed mirrors / and of anonymously suffered agonies / that last till dawn / and the spider web of the rain / over the dark gardens.

 

Our homeland, my friends, is a perpetual act / like the perpetual world (if the Eternal / Spectator would cease to dream us / for only one instant, he would strike us dead / with his white and sudden lightning, His oblivion). / Nobody is the homeland, but we must all be worthy / of the old pledge / made by those gentleman of yesteryear / to be what they ignored, Argentineans / to be what they had to be because they had made the pledge in that old house. / We are the future of those men, / the justification of those dead; / our duty is the glorious burden / that our shadow inherits from those shadows / which we must save.

 

Nobody is the homeland, but we are all the homeland. / May that mysterious, clear flame /burn forever in my bosom and in yours (Jorge Luis Borges).

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José María Poirier. Director of Criterio magazine. This article was published in Ciudad Nueva magazine, www.ciudadnueva.org.ar