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The notebook sheet is an intense yellow. In this one you can see a small letter, barely noticeable and perfectly aligned on each line of the paper. And on this trembling writing, there are erasures, lines that erase with a certain fury a phrase, tiny aggregates and sprinkled with all the paper, and arrows and boxes that give a new order to the words. More than a manuscript, it looks like a labyrinthine scheme populated with encrypted messages. It is one of the autographs of the poem "Los desgraciados", and is part of a valuable publication that has just come to light under the title of poetic manuscripts by César Vallejo . This work dates back to the early seventies, when the researcher Enrique Ballón met and won the trust of Georgette Philippart, the widow of Vallejo, known for his snarling nature and for his strong defense of the memory of Santiago de Chuco. Then Ballón had made a university thesis on the poet and asked Philippart for permission to use poems and prose texts, which pleased the lonely old woman, who congratulated her on her decency. He told her that others, on the other hand, had taken Vallejo's works without his consent. Finally, she gave the young man of letters her personal treasure: the original autographs and the typeface of Prose Poems Human Poems and Spain take away this chalice.
This allowed Ballón to publish, almost half a century later, a very complete diplomatic edition of Vallejo's verses. That is to say, analyze these manuscripts with the fidelity of an entomologist to elucidate how Vallejo built his poetry, in months and years of work that breaks any chronological sequence. But beyond the literary research, this study is also a remarkable effort to preserve a seemingly perishable material: these sheets of paper with erasures, barred and amended, which over time may have disappeared. Now, fortunately, we can see them digitized in an edition also reproduced in digital format.1
As César Ballón explains, in this work of more than 600 pages, "the diplomatic edition is also included as "the archeology of the document" [que]] occupies manuscripts in their strictly physical aspect (manufacture, structure, binding) and also occupies the edition of the ancient manuscripts and codices, that is, collections of folios duly sewn and bound together ". [19659005] * * *
"The goal of conservation is to extend the life of bibliographic records so that they are accessible to future generations," says Emma Cortés, specialist in the field of the National Library of Peru. "The fundamental thing – he assures – is to control the temperature, the humidity and the cleanliness of the deposits, because what damages the most a material, it is its incorrect handling and the conditions under which it is deposited ".
the collections are affected by dust, fungi or insects, international standards establish the use of metal shelving and the maintenance of stable environmental conditions. "The paper is hydroscopic, absorbs and eliminates moisture," adds Cortés. Therefore, relative humidity below 50% and average temperature of 20ºC is recommended. "In the BNP, we have books from the fifteenth century, but, interestingly, those that pose the most problems are those that have been produced since the eighteenth century," says the specialist. The cause is the type of paper used. While old books were made of cotton paper, which is much more resistant to the passage of time, modern books were made from wood pulp paper, a much more fragile and perishable material.
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The techniques of digitization and digital photography have come to save many ancient documents, but they do not return them, as one might think, eternal. At BNP, for example, digital masters are used. That is, high resolution images of photographs and manuscripts are captured and digital models are created, from which copies are obtained in different formats for uploading or to the interested public. .
The digital archives are paradoxically technological progress. There is no guarantee that a manuscript scanned with current software can be read in the future with more modern equipment. This is why institutions such as NASA and digital repositories in countries as developed as Japan use a model called OAIS (Reference Model for an Open Archiving System) based on digital monitoring systems Sophisticated software that constantly updates documents, formats and software.
But the digitization of an incunable or a Vallejo manuscript – like that presented by Professor Ballón – does not condemn the physical document to oblivion. Its conservation is a priority, so before any technological disaster, we can always go back to the original. Beyond any fetish for the object, the book is, as Umberto Eco said, the best way to preserve an idea
1. https://bit.ly/2macgQ6
2. https://bit.ly/2zyDDwH
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