"Only in dreams, in poetry, in play - lighting a candle, walking with it down the hallway - we sometimes glimpse what we were before being this, who knows if we are," wrote Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) in his seminal "counter-novel" Hopscotch. A quote that encapsulates the keys to the original and masterful work of the Argentine writer: the dreamlike world - which so closely connects him to Borges, despite their differences; the radical idea of play, to which he always refers with the same seriousness as children do; and poetry, a genre he cultivated from a young age and was always essential to him, although his decision to hide it from public view for decades has made this production the least explored of his work.
"Despite his poetry being in the background, the truth is that Julio never stopped writing poems, and a poetry book, Presence, was the first thing he published," says the professor of Latin American Literature at the Universitá di Roma La Sapienza, Rosalba Campra, author of the prologue to Poetry and Poetics (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2005), the fourth volume of Cortázar's Complete Works directed by his friend Saúl Yurkievich and still a canonical reference to his lyricism. "We owe to Cortázar the constant vindication of amazement in the face of reality, his ability to find a story in everything we see and even to laugh, at times, at the most dramatic. In his poetry, the discovery of words as revealing elements of the essence of things stands out," emphasizes his compatriot, who recounts: "even as a child, he wrote verses, although it wasn't until adulthood that he truly embraced his poet's name."
The professor affirms that the appearance of unpublished works does not surprise her because "throughout his life, Julio left a trail of napkins and papers scattered with verses. His poetry does not escape the disorder that governs the rest of his work. He understood poetry as a disordering force of reality, a way to explain it differently, that's why, he thought, poetry cannot be confined to a book, to a space," she explains. "For him, the disordering force of poetry is comparable to the disordering force of love."
"Reading Cortázar's poetry undoubtedly offers a broader and richer view of his impressive narrative work," says the poet, translator, and literary critic Andreu Jaume, editor of this volume, explaining how the discovery of these unpublished poems was made by the professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Zaragoza, Jesús Rubio Jiménez while researching for his book Julio Cortázar and Daniel Devoto: History of a Friendship (2024), a story of the decades-long relationship between both writers.
"Consulting the Daniel Devoto and María Beatriz Valle-Inclán Foundation [wife of the writer and editor and daughter of the famous Spanish playwright], located at the Lázaro Galdiano Foundation in Madrid, Rubio Jiménez discovered a series of unpublished works and, most importantly, a complete book, Fable of Death, written in 1941 following the death of his friend Alfredo Enrique Mariscal, which has a vibration and sonority reminiscent of the Golden Age."
He gives an example, reciting: "Access the silence that envelops you / its roots of ice. Undress / death in my memory, eternalize you / with the grace that resolves in marble. // So, happy and jubilant, return / from a past that shares your light! / Guard you like this, carnation, sweetest art, / that your purest image returns to me. // Forever. With me your joy, / the leap, the blue gesture, the mischief, / time cries in vain at this door. // With me until the end, when a path / leads through the evening my density, / where your dead density lies." The poetry book is signed with the pseudonym Julio Denis, one of the many he used, and with which he also published his first poetry book, the sonnet collection Presence, three years earlier.
Between Classicism and Symbolism
According to Jaume, what these unpublished works reveal, some dated throughout the 50s and 60s, and especially the 10 poems from the mentioned book, are the influences and tastes of the writer, which evolved over time. "In Cortázar, the French influence is always very important, practically his second language. Echos of Verlaine and Rimbaud can be sensed, but also of classics like Ronsard and Du Bellay, who emphasized the importance of meter and rhyme. If his prose was completely unrelated to classicism, in poetry, he was very traditional, his preferred form was the sonnet and somewhat the hendecasyllable," he explains.
The Latin and Spanish tradition is also present in the writer, as the aforementioned Fable of Death opens with a quote from Garcilaso and Cortázar always declared himself a great reader of contemporaries like Salinas and Cernuda, to whom he dedicated enthusiastic comments. Regarding themes, "in addition to death, which permeated all his narrative, Cortázar was a poet of love, a poet who suddenly fell in love with a girl and wrote her a series of sonnets or poems. In that sense, he was a troubadour of old," Jaume jokes.
In addition to those mentioned, the verses of Patria -"Distant homeland, map, / map of never. / because yesterday is never / and tomorrow is tomorrow."-, which speaks of exile and is dated in Rome in 1954; reflective and more literary poems like The Poet's Hands and Last Night, or the symbolic and playful Travel Diary and Little Red Riding Hood -"Grandma's lycanthropy only she knew..."- stand out.
What the editor emphasizes, lamenting that Cortázar's poetic work is still overshadowed by his "remarkable narrative contributions," is the importance of this poetry, which he judges, "does not at all obey a capricious and sporadic impulse, but reveals a serious and arduous work with language. Rightly so, he considered himself above all a great craftsman of sound and said he had an enormous capacity to turn anything into sonnets, something reflected in these verses," he asserts.
On the other hand, Jaume believes that the writer "was not sure of his quality as a poet, perhaps due to his classicism, but in his later years, when he decided to publish those two poetry books, he already considered himself 'an old poet,' as he said, because he had been writing poetry since forever, since adolescence, although he had never published it considering it a minor and hidden part of his work and vocation."
However, in this regard, Jaume argues that today, "with time passed and Cortázar's work judged in all its perspective and richness, one discovers that this poetry, both the new unpublished works and all in general, has a more revealing importance than it might seem because thanks to it, one better understands where his narrative imagination and language come from," he insists.
And, therefore, he wishes his poetic work to be known as an essential part of his peculiar and influential literature. "Cortázar as a short story writer, as a narrator, has a very particular language, and poetry gives a hint of what his concerns and sources of inspiration were. That's why I believe that, even though he kept that other facet of his imagination secret for years, it is time to widely share it, as it illuminates, like a hidden fire, the richness of his well-known fictions".