For reasons that I will explain in a further blog our last night in Buenos Aires was spent in the Hotel Lancaster on Córdoba corner with Reconquista. Rosemary asked for a room with a bathtub. There was no room available that night with one (17 young boys and girls from Pernambuco, Brazil perhaps had all asked for those rooms ) so we were given a lovely suite. When I moved the curtains to one side I saw a narrow bit of space between two dark buildings. There before my incredulous eyes was my first and only glimpse of the Río de La Plata in our two week trip to Buenos Aires.

Perhaps as an old man of 76 and a wife of a few years less, when we fly we pick aisle seats. In an almost 10,000 Km flight if we had been sitting by the window (coming back it was all in daylight) we might have seen the Amazon jungle the Orinoco and the River Plate which Jorge Luís Borges in the poem below calls “el río inmóvil” or river that is still.

Curiously I believe that there is a parallel between the very large Buenos Aires of my birth and the Vancouver that is my home now. From our former home in Kerrisdale or now in Kits I never have the impression that I am by the sea. In Buenos Aires one rarely remembers that the river is right there. Just like many who live in Surrey have never been to the Vancouver Art Gallery and vice versa, the Surrey Art Gallery, those who live in the greater part of metropolitan Buenos Aires never see the river.

To me that narrow view of the Río de La Plata was magical in that it brought a childhood nostalgia of fishing in it or seeing it from the train that took me from Coghlan, where I lived to the Retiro train station in town.

One of the first names for the river was mar dulce (the sweet river) as that is how in Spanish we describe water that is not sea water.

In the exquisite poem by Borges Juan López y John Ward (translated into English after the Spanish one, the author again makes reference to the Río de La Plata as the rio inmovil. Whoever translated the poem was innacurate in translating inmovil (does no move) to tawny. The poem is about two young men, one Argentine the other British who both fought and died on the Malvinas. Of them Borges writes:

each one of them was Cain, and each was Abel.

G. A. Bürger

No acabo de entender

por qué me afectan de este modo las cosas

que le sucedieron a Bürger

(sus dos fechas están en la enciclopedia)

en una de las ciudades de la llanura,

junto al río que tiene una sola margen

en la que crece la palmera, no el pino.

Al igual de todos los hombres,

dijo y oyó mentiras,

fue traicionado y fue traidor,

agonizó de amor muchas veces

y, tras la noche del insomnio,

vio los cristales grises del alba,

pero mereció la gran voz de Shakespeare

(en la que están las otras)

y la de Angelus Silesius de Breslau

y con falso descuido limó algún verso,

en el estilo de su época.

Sabía que el presente no es otra cosa

que una partícula fugaz del pasado

que estamos hechos de olvido:

sabiduría tan inútil

como los corolarios de Spinoza

o las magias del miedo.

En la ciudad junto al río inmóvil,

unos dos mil años después de la muerte de un dios

(la historia que refiero es antigua),

Bürger está solo y ahora,

precisamente ahora, lima unos versos.

Jorge Luís Borges

JUAN LÓPEZ Y JOHN WARD

Les tocó en suerte una época extraña.

El planeta había sido parcelado en distintos países, cada uno provisto de lealtades, de queridas memorias, de un pasado sin duda heroico, de derechos, de agravios, de una mitología peculiar, de próceres de bronce, de aniversarios, de demagogos y de símbolos. Esa división, cara a los cartógrafos, auspiciaba las guerras.

López había nacido en la ciudad junto al río inmóvil; Ward, en las afueras de la ciudad por la que caminó Father Brown. Había estudiado castellano para leer el Quijote.

El otro profesaba el amor de Conrad, que le había sido revelado en una aula de la calle Viamonte.

Hubieran sido amigos, pero se vieron una sola vez cara a cara, en unas islas demasiado famosas, y cada uno de los dos fue Caín, y cada uno, Abel.

Los enterraron juntos. La nieve y la corrupción los conocen.

El hecho que refiero pasó en un tiempo que no podemos entender.

Juan Lopez and John Ward

It was their luck to be born into a strange time.

The planet had been parceled out among various countries,

Each one provided with loyalties, cherished memories, with

a past undoubtedly heroic, with rights, with wrongs, with a

particular  mythology, with bronze forefathers, with

anniversaries, with demagogues and symbols.

This arbitrary division was favorable for wars.

Lopez was born in the city beside the tawny river;

Ward, on the outskirts of the city where Father

Brown walked. He had studied Spanish in order

to read Quijote.

The other one professed a love for Conrad, who

had been revealed to him in a classroom on

Viamonte Street. They might have been friends,

but they saw each other face to face only once,

on some overly famous islands, and each one of

them was Cain, and each was Abel.

They were buried together. Snow and corruption

know them.

The incident I mention occurred in a time that

 we cannot understand.

by Jorge Luis Borges

Argentina (1899-1986)