"Hopscotch is not the best of Cortázar", surprised Vargas Llosa – 28/03/2019

The light is off and on stage, a man plays jazz and a voice, that voice, reads. What you read, of course, is Rayuela and the voice is unequivocal: Julio Cortázar. This is the presentation of the commemorative edition of the great work of the Argentine writer prepared by the Royal Academy of Spain, the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language and the Argentine Academy of Letters and published by Alfaguara. It's a party and it shows.

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And in the middle of the party Mario Vargas Llosa will throw the discordant note: "Is this the best job of Cortázar, Rayuela? I do not think so. " Cortázar of the future, he will say, will be that of the stories. "He was an exceptional storyteller, with few equivalents." An example: "The prosecutor This is one of the most extraordinary stories and not just in Spanish, "he says. Torito, another. Instead, "the big surprise that was Rayuela when it looks like it will go, I would not say disappear, but if it goes unnoticed, largely because of the imitations of the revolutionary experience that this novel meant. "

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However, this edition of Rayuela It's not just another: it's a luxury volume. The book includes, for the first time since 1983, the reproduction in facsimile of Logbook, the notebook in which Cortázar wrote ideas, scenes and characters from the novel during the writing process.

The volume also includes texts written by Gabriel García Márquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Carlos Fuentes and Vargas Llosa himself, as well as those of Sergio Ramírez, Julio Ortega, Andrés Amorós, Eduardo Romano and Graciela Montaldo, prepared for the event. opportunity

The first speaker, the Spanish accent in Córdoba, is precisely the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado. Account that Cortázar called "cemeteries" in dictionaries. Talk about Rayuela and so speaks of the coexistence of different forms of Spanish – something as relevant in this Congress -, the appearance of foreign words, divergent partitions. That's why Cortázar is Cortázar.

Continue – Buenos Aires Accent José Luis Moure, president of the Argentine Academy of Letters and coordinator of this edition. "In 1963, I was a second-year student at a prestigious Buenos Aires school," she explains. "A teacher explained to us in which situations the" your "was used: at that time it was common to treat you and it was used to reduce He then told us that an author used the voseo very well and that we could see him in a recent novel, The prices. I was surprised that there is not much in this novel. "

Moure also says that although his tastes are not those of Cortázar -jazz versus clbadical music- he was interested in Cortázar's work "the use of language". Because Cortázar "The language game is at the limit of comprehension, but the syntax is always taken into account".

So, although he's not a fanatic – yes his wife, he counted – he went to work. "I think we made a great edition," he says. Alberto Manguel, former director of the National Library, lent them the original of the Logbook, it was in the library. The inclusion of a facsimile edition of this book is one of the conclusions of this edition.

Applause and Spanish accent, Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute. "Forty years later, what can you tell me? Rayuelahe asks. "Rayuela it was a flag, it was an encyclopedia of rebellion. "It is, he says, almost nostalgically", consequence of a world that was to change of bus and history, as it says in the book "Por eso", justifies the great transformations of history. "But" the years have pbaded, some illusions have ended badly, should I read Rayuela? "And he reads a fragment, and yes, he concludes that yes, it's worth it.

More focus of the peninsula: Nuria Cabuti, from Alfaguara. "We believe that the great works of our language constitute a common heritage and a common heritage," he said. "We badume as a challenge to convert canonical works into authentic bestsellers"They did not behave badly with the previous editions, so it counts: the Quixote has sold more than three million copies and that of One hundred years of loneliness, more than a million.

The sound of words returns to Latin America: it is the turn of the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, magnificent writer who was vice-president of his country during Sandinism. "The 1960s were a decade of unprecedented challenges," he says. "The writing was not separate from the idea of ​​action, it was a single front of rebellion." Ramírez knows what he's talking about. And he will give details: "The rule was to accept no precept and not to put the world back without any scruples or concessions. The principles were alive and not, as today, relics to be exhumed"The spirit of Cortázar – said Ramírez -" floated in this atmosphere. The previous world did not work, it was exhausted. "But things have happened." The rebellion that gave life to the absolute ideal of freedom often results in sclerosis, "he says. Regulated utopias often become nightmares. "Julio, however," he said, "is a young man who does not grow old." Julio, he says, "rejuvenates, comes from" bouncing years on the road ".

Peru sounds: arrived Vargas Llosa. "When I studied the style, it was fashionable," he says. "A perspective to badyze the literary works that required to do without the biography of the author". Peru believes that it works sometimes, but not for Rayuela. And then? What secrets?

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"It would have been impossible to write without the personality of the author, his interests, his appetites," he says. And he tells how he met him: "In 58, he had gone at the end of the year in Paris, there was a very tall skinny boy with his wife, we were surprised by all the Originality, the sympathy of their conversations: they seemed to be repeated "The big boy," he says, "told me that he had published a storybook and that he was going to publish a second book ". He treated him as someone of the same age, but Cortázar "I was 22 years older than me." He had bought, it seemed, an eternal youth. Just after dinner, he knew he had spoken with Julio CortázarI had already read.

And the Nobel Prize speaks of the literary culture of Cortázar, of his intelligence, but especially of his "good heart". This surprised him "when he sat down at the typewriter, he did not know what would happen." I thought that "for a reader of Rayuela It is very hard to believe that there was no previous system. It had come naturally. "

This was not just literature, however. "Once, he invited me to a witch congress, soothsayers. He laughed and saw a depth that did not reach me. "In those years, Cortázar he was not interested in politics, he said Vargas Llosa. "Then he has changed a lot, I'm not surprised that he spends a lot of time as children playing." It says Vargas LlosaIt is the man who wrote Rayuela, a "novel of good people, devoid of evil". What is there, more than the structure, is "a mischievous and young spirit." It was the first novel in the history of the Spanish language that introduced the game as the essential element of the title. Rayuela It's a kid's game, we were all surprised. "

And still jazz: in the honor of Cortázar.

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