My friend Roberto Baschetti, a scholar who works at the Biblioteca Nacional Argentina in Buenos Aires is a happy man who always smiles. We differ politically in a strange way.

While both of us lean towards the left he is a neo-Peronist. I have never understood how Peron’s fascist, populist dictarship produced and era of populist left-wing peronists.

Like his new wife (and my friend) the artist Nora Patrich, they both adore Eva Perón.

In my home as a child my  father, who was a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald would disappear for weeks in the late 40s and early 50s. My mother’s explanation was that, “Your father has written something that Perón did not like. He is in the Villa Devoto Jail.”

As you must imagine I try to have civil conversations with Baschetti and Patrich when I visit them. In April I stayed a week in their Bellavista home which is in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Baschetti understands that I have a growing obsession for Jorge Luís Borges. During Perón’s first government (it ended in 1955) Borges had been working at a government library. Perón’s minions fired him and sent him to inspect chickens, roosters and rabbits in country and city fairs. Of the Peronists Borges wrote:

“Los peronistas no son ni buenos, ni malos; son incorregibles”

“Peronists are neither good nor bad; they are incorrigible.”

The fact is that every 40 days or so I get a brown package with my name and address handwritten. In it I find all sorts of stuff on Borges that Baschetti finds for me. Included are strange newspaper clippings about young men who in wanting to rob a house got stuck in the chimney and died. In this last week’s package there was a clipping about Borges’s trip to Texas in 1975.

I thanked Baschetti but I told him that I did not understand how he would look for Borges material for me as since he is a Peronist he loathes the Borgesian political stance. His answer:

“querido amigo lo cortés no quita lo valiente y nunca dejé de reconocer la valía intelectual de Borges y su escritura....”

“dear friend being polite does not make you less brave I never stopped recognizing the value of Borges’s intellect and his writings…”

This time his package contained a most interesting slim book. Jorge Luís Borges – Argentinos en Las Letras por Isaac Wolberg.


 The book is a typical cheap Argentine book published in 1961. It is part of a series of brief biographies of Argentine writers of fame at that time. The book has beautiful but badly reproduced photographs of Borges as a baby, a young man and when he was 60.

It was around midnight on Friday night that I read a poem La Guitarra (Below in Spanish). I had never ever seen it before. Any poems by Borges in a book written in 1961 could only have poems from his first book Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) Luna de Enfrente (1925), Cuaderno San Martín (1929) and El Hacedor (1960).

I went through my two volumes of Borges’s complete poetic output. La Guitarra was not there. To make it worse I found three more poems that did not seem to exist anywhere.

A little bit of research finally gave me the answer. Fervor de Buenos Aires had 46 poems. By the time Borges re-published that book he would remove poems he did not like or modify ones he did. Both my complete poetic output had exactly 33 poems for Fervor de Buenos Aires.

Borges with his mother and sister Norah and a friend 1908 the quote underneath:  En La infancia yo ejercíi  con fervor la adoración del tigre or in my youth I adored tigers with fervour.

I looked up Fervor de Buenos Aires as a first edition (cheaply printed in what Argentines call “edición rústica”. An American bookseller listed one for $18,000.

I will have to go through other roots to locate the 13 missing poems not to mention the other books of poetry published before 1960.

Meanwhile I knew that I had the right photograph to illustrate the Borges poem.

Quite a few years ago (16 to be exact) Argentine artists Nora Patrich, her husband Juan Manuel Sánchez and I embarked on a project called Nostalgia where we painted, sketched and photographed a lovely Argentine woman, Linda Lorenzo, to express our nostalgia for Buenos Aires. In one of the sessions, Sánchez brought a guitar and insisted I photograph Lorenzo with it. I told him the idea was an awful cliché. Since Sanchez was and is 12 years older than I, I took the photographs. In a couple (the ones here) I incorporated a mirror which unknowingly makes the image that much more Borgesian as the writer was obsessed with mirrors.

This story has more to it. The writer of the Borges biography, Isaac Wolberg was a Capitán de Fragata (Lt Commander) of the Argentine Navy. He was a naval architect. When Perón fell in 1955 (Borges became the head of the Biblioteca Nacional) Wolberg had a poetry program on an Argentine radio station. He used the thinly disguised  pseudonym Acis Greblow. It was the military government that brought down Perón in what they called La Revolución Libertadora (Baschetti would object to that term) that brought Wolberg from retirement for the job. It is odd isn't it?