I

How was your encounter with Antonio Porchia?

One of the most passionate facets of the poetic life (not of the socio- literary one, which I detest) are the encounters, above all, the ones you do not look for. The human experience is so rich and brings about so many surprises. Like when it comes to love, the unplanned encounters are always the freshest ones. I did not look for Julio Cortázar, for example. It was a book that came to me and another that went away, some letters. The text with which Cortázar presents Tercera Poesía Vertical is a “Prologue-Letter.” He wrote it with these two purposes, of course, but even the title evidences that there was no conscious, immediate, personal relation. I do not remember that letter, I do not remember it by heart (I do not remember almost any of my own works by heart), but it seems to me that in it, Cortázar does not employ the “tu” [second person singular pronoun, informal register] but the “usted” [second person singular pronoun, formal register]. In spite of this correspondence, it didn’t bring us closer together.

And the same has happened to me with Borges. We did share a debating table some time, for example. There was also a coincidence that, for many years, we both lived in the same town called Androgué. It was a place of tree-lined streets, cruises in diagonals, little labyrinth (as you would like to name it). He depicts himself in Adrogué in this poem:

I used to observe him wandering around those streets. He was absorbed, barely paying attention to people or things. Yet, when he would find any piece of paper on the sidewalk, he would hurrily pick it up, thinking, perhaps, that there he would find the supreme cypher, the magicians’ key. Still, I never dealt with him personally. I avoid those opportunities that are not spontaneous. With spontaneity, plain things flow alone. And that attitude has almost always brought about the best results for me.

In one of the very few exceptions, I looked for a meeting with Antonio Porchia. This is a quite a moving story for me. I have a friend, a very talented man [Julián Polito], who was a teacher for a while and used to have a small school in an Argentine town called El Chaco. Some years before, Antonio Porchia, at the request of his friends, published his Voices in two author editions. (People detest this kind of editions. They should really pay attention to them. They imply an irreplaceable effort, a sacrifice, and a resistance. As Gaëtan Picon states, the most valuable pieces of art are always born against a resistance. This resistance is not only interior — the writer’s incapacity or his/her fight against the language — but also exterior.)

Caminito Street in La Boca

Porchia had worked in two or three humble crafts. He used to frequent a neighborhood of Buenos Aires named La Boca where there are a lot of artists. A group of painters used to get together under one of those socialist names of the end of the century: Asociación Impulso [“Impulse Association”]. They told Porchia he should publish what he had been writing, those unclassifiable voces [“voices”] he used to note down on modest sheets of paper. The results were, of course, two rustic editions, which are bibliographical jewels today. When receiving the packages from the printing house, he didn’t know where to keep them (his home was small and unprotected). Therefore, not knowing what to do with them, he asked permission to the “Impulso” artists to leave those books there for a while.

One, two, three months went by and the packages continued to be untouched, left and forgotten. There was a moment when the painters started to get upset and told him: “When are you going to take this out of here? We need that space.” Porchia, who was an incredible person, wondered where he could leave all that load. Then somebody told him about the existence of the Sociedad Protectora de Bibliotecas Populares [“Society for the Preservation of Public Libraries”] that coordinated a number of libraries spread around the country.

Consequently, he offered these copies to this organization and they were sent to each one of the modest libraries scattered all around Argentina. A curious beginning: Porchia is an unknown author but from his first attempt to publish his book, his literary work sleeps in all those libraries that cover the nation. And humble people, who read little but very well, usually go there. With the passing of the years, that first distribution completed a random figure.

My friend, the teacher in El Chaco santafecino, had a part of this configuration of chance. During the weekends, he used to feel completely bored, going to the bars and wandering around. Suddenly, he discovers that there is a library. He goes there with enthusiasm, he looks at and removes everything, and just by chance he is led to one of Porchia’s copies. The impact of his reading is such, that he borrows a typewriter, makes a copy of the book and sends it to me. I share his astonishment. When my friend came back to Buenos Aires on vacation, we agreed to find out where the writer lived. And that was what happened: we found him. It is a long and fascinating story.

Curiously enough, a similar encounter with Porchia’s literary work was told to me some years later in Paris. Through the same kind of mysterious and silent repercussions, Porchia’s book was published in France in a very refined and pleasant booklet from the G.L.M. series, edited and translated by Roger Caillois. I was doing some research work in Paris and one day, this G.L.M. booklet came to my mind. Caillois had been in Argentina during the Second World War, and now in Paris he held the position of Cultural Affairs Director of the UNESCO. I had been in Paris for six months, and the day I remembered the G.L.M. booklet I decided to send to Caillois a copy of my first book of poems. I wrote this dedication: A Roger Caillois, en la memoria unitiva de Antonio Porchia [“To Roger Caillois, in the uniting memory of Antonio Porchia”]. Caillois was surprised when he received my book, and the following day he called me to the small hotel in the Quartier Latin where I stayed. “When can I see you?”, he asked. “I will visit you”, I replied, “You are busier than I am.” We met at the UNESCO and Callois had not only been generous enough to translate part of my work (he showed me fifteen poems already translated) but also he immediately asked: “Have you met Antonio Porchia?” “Yes”, I said, “we were close friends.”

Then, Caillois made this confession: “I found Porchia’s literary work in Buenos Aires when I was part of the editorial staff of Sur [the most important literary magazine in Argentina during that time]. Once I was checking the books sent to Sur in order to be reviewed — they used to send so many copies that I examined them superficially to select those worth reviewing. All of a sudden I spot a very humble book, and I don’t know what force makes me stop and start reading it. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I couldn’t stop reading untill I finished it. Then, I tried to find out who the author was. Nobody knew him but I found him. And I told Porchia: ‘I would gladly change everything I have written for those lines of yours.’

The best figures are drawn by chance. In my case, after my friend’s discovery of the Voices and the surprise that Porchia’s work provoked in me, we looked for him. Porchia visited Caillois in a similar manner. In both cases it is all about the unexpected, the unforeseen. The state of mind which I call availability is playing and it triggers the connection as an encounter, in the discovery of a man.

II

Porchia used to walk around the streets completely alone. In the epilogue of the French edition of Voices (Voix, Fayard, Paris, 1979) Juarroz writes: “I recall some words he told me one afternoon while we were walking along a street in La Boca. That was his favorite neighborhood, one of the poorest in Buenos Aires, with its little and colorful houses, its atmosphere of immigrants, and its closeness to the river, the dark flow of water, the sirens of the ships, the old bars where the sailors or the port workers get together to forget or recall who knows what, drinking and listening to Tango music. He was coming back from a hospital from visiting a woman he had loved a lot and who was lying old, abandoned and ill. He repeated to me the phrase with which he had tried to cheer her up: Estar en compañía no estar con alguien, sino estar en alguien. [“Being accompanied is not to be with somebody, but in somebody.”] I suddenly felt, like in many other occasions by his side, that wisdom had not completely died. In that forgotten street of Buenos Aires, there was some of that hidden force that still supports the world.”

Did you go to the literary society the first time you were looking for him?

We went to one of the many magazines where some of his texts had appeared. Young people used to approach him and ask for some material. He always used to give them some; he was a man of a great generosity. And that is why one finds him in many marginal publications.

The first encounter with Porchia was as natural as if we had had a life of mutual knowledge. Among his many voices, one reads:

The brevity of this saying and its infinite transcendence are notable. Being, as he was, a human being that lives what he says, one can understand how things and meetings with him were. If I say that that first encounter could have been the last one, this is not a smart way out. I have thought a posteriori (although Porchia hasn’t said it in this way) that if nothing is repeated in the same way, then all things are also the first ones. Evidently, being with somebody that lives every moment as if it were the very first or the very last one, has nothing to do with the common definition of being there used by most persons in their drifting around the world.

Porchia was a very simple person in his appearance — he was a little less than medium-sized and he had an indescribable voice. That voice you just have to listen to. I still keep two or three long-play records he was once invited to make. There was another mysterious combination. A radio station from Buenos Aires used to close its transmission at midnight with the voice of a declaimer expressing certain thoughts about life; then, for some time, that station used Porchia’s records for that purpose. But what a difference in this case. In the same manner through which his first edition spread around Argentina like seeds, Porchia’s voice — slow, deep and resonant — followed the same itinerary opening an abyss at midnight for a couple of minutes: the possibility to listen to the profundity.

What did it meant to you that initial reading of Porchia’s work in the typewriting copy your friend sent you?

Many things, and I still believe it today because I have frequently read that copy. It has been a long time since that first meeting, and, being so human and fragile, one may suspect and wonder: “Was I wrong? Did I exaggerate?” Every time I come back to Porchia’s work, I see that old word (almost left unused) coming up forcefully: wisdom. Wisdom put down into a peculiar language that is not afraid of the apparent repetitions. Porchia believed that synonyms do not exist and that each word is different according to the position it has in the syntactic structure. This is a major example:

For that reason, grammarians, critics and formalists sometimes feel upset with a piece of writing like this one. In a way, it brings a crisis to their formulae and precepts.

Did Porchia use to talk about the origin of these voices? Did he ever said he “listened” to them while working in his little yard?

I don’t think I have ever heard him saying he “listened” those voices. He was neither a mystic in the traditional sense nor someone who suffers from hallucinations. He was a person that could have been in another universe, in the same way he was in this one. I don’t think I have had that feeling so vividly with any other person. In one of his voices he says:

He was a human being with the availability to think about what it seemingly does not need to be thought of. However, from this thought, he takes out the unprecedented, what we hadn’t seen. He lived his voices.

In order to get together, a kind of pilgrimage was necessary. Porchia’s house was in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the completely opposite side from where I live. Crossing the city from one extreme to the other implied to go on a pilgrimage, almost in a religious sense. His lifestyle was extremely humble. He used to go out with a little bag to buy his vegetables. Still, he was characterized by his generosity. I remember some unforgettable gestures such as when he would welcomed us at his place; he would always have some bread, wine, cheese and salami. We used to start our meetings around 8 or 9 p.m., and continue untill the next sunrise. Around 2 a.m., he used to carry out a ritual: to pick an apple, a single shining apple which he used to keep apart because he knew my wife [Laura Cerrato] liked apples. Neither my wife nor myself can forget Antonio Porchia’s sharp and shining eyes at the moment of offering Laura the tribute to friendship that he had prepared so arduously. He was like this in every aspect of his life.

Usually, in order to really talk to people, we need to have a kind of introduction. Otherwise, it seems a little forced and for that reason, it is necessary to pave the way to go into serious subjects in more depth. It is believed that those topics should be reserved for certain special occasions. Still, with certain persons those preambles are unnecessary — it is all about sitting together and starting to talk immediately about God, death, the infinite, poetry, with the fluency of that which is in its own place. It was always in that way with Porchia.

In the course of the conversation, he used to introduce his voices, in a humble manner: “Because I have thought of...”, “And this has come to my mind...”, exposing us to talk to him about it. Since he was so open, he was characterized by spontaneous eagerness. He used to talk as if he was afraid of talking, but he was always brilliant.

III.

“Porchia possessed the strange art of the unusual and increasing attention, of an attention that almost seemed like a physical entity”, Juarroz writes. “Those of us around him felt that, when talking to him, every word became deep for his unlimited attention. His way of listening seemed to create profundity in his fellows. And when he was speaking, we had the feeling that he already was in the “other side” – but that “other side” became infinitely close, much more closer than “this side”. While, without being noticed, the cold morning hours of Buenos Aires were passing by, his small eyes were like two spotlights more open and brilliant every minute. Perhaps it was there when I began to suspect that eternity could consist of being fixed in a great thought, thinking about it forever. And I also suspected that dying wouldn’t be more than the last effort of our attention, the abandonment of the other thoughts in order to concentrate on only one, the definitive. Maybe there it was born a sensation that I later included in some of my books: to think about a human being is like saving him”.

What are Porchia’s voices?

I believe that the voices are not strictly aphorisms, nor poetry or philosophy. They have something of this strange combination that, for instance, we find in the Pre-Socratics. I know somebody could say that the Pre-Socratics used to write aphorisms. Still, I think (together with Cortázar) that it is wrong to call them philosophers and it is wrong to call them poets, since those and other facets are gathered in a single personality, integrating them.

The voices are thoughts of an extreme naturalness from a person with a scarce “formal” cultural background (someone with no college or university education), somebody who didn’t use to read much, who lived more among painters than writers and who wrote down, like he used to say, “those little things that occur to me”. (That those “little things” were like eternity, is a nuance that his modesty hide with the diminutive.)

One was able to see Porchia’s thought, so to speak. (To see the thought, what an old dream!) I also believe I know a little of how his literary work was born, the way in which those “little things” were being created. Some of them emerged while we were together. I remember when his eyes began to sparkle — then he would start telling us something he was thinking about in that moment.

How can we call them? I don’t dare to call them in one way or another. He named them “voices” and, well, that is what they are. But they are not the voices of the external sounds — they are those voices that come from the inner depths. So, what name do they have in Literature? What Porchia did was not Literature. It is another thing that goes beyond, reaching the boundaries of humanity. In this sense, he did get closer to poetry. But when I say it is not poetry per se, I’m not referring to the fact that his voices haven’t the format of a poem — that is of secondary importance. What he did was a very peculiar deviation, with some elements one finds on very few occasions in life. Why does he repeat the same words so much in a short voice, in a short fragment? (I have spontaneously used a word that seduces me: fragment. Porchia’s voices are fragments of wisdom.)

I believe his work is an excellent example of one of the most interesting expressive phenomena of modern Literature. Certain art works break the boundaries of the genres. That is, they surpass that difficult zone and it is as if they reach an area of reality, an area of expression, where instances merge: it is as if they were arriving at an unique genre. I don’t know, for instance, where to place Samuel Beckett’s last pieces (whose premieres I have seen in London, directed by him). When one confronts those Beckett’s pieces, one almost feels like being in a religious ceremony. The level of density, of intensity, of depth, the level of reality that ceremony has, cannot be fitted into one genre or another. Something similar happens with Porchia. I have already said “fragments of wisdom”, but I think all those definitions are temporary. Maybe in a further step in human evolution, in a future stage of human intelligence, there will be a deep name, an better expression to understand certain pieces.

Perhaps in Porchia’s literary work there are even other manifestations of humanity for which we don’t have a name yet, and only time will be able to see them. Could those voices be equivalent to a total opening of human consciousness?

I think they are closer to that. The fictional divisions of what has been called “the different faculties of human beings” have always bothered me. This way of thinking separated will, intelligence, and emotion, and established reason in opposition to emotion. Those outlines seem extremely superficial to me. They are divisions that do not coincide with reality.

One of the major objectives of poetry is to assemble the divided parts of the whole. I feel that that happens with Porchia. Is there poetry in him? Yes, there is. Is there philosophy in Porchia? Yes, indeed. Is there sensitivity? There is also that. Is there anticipation? Of course. Still, none of this elements can explain him separately. What is the name of all this together? I don’t know.

If these voices project themselves into the future in such a powerful way, is it precisely because they are echoes of the great past, of the great voices?

I believe in the great cycles. But they do not start nor finish in a foreseen stage. The recovery of the origins happens at a different level and height. I write in a poem:

The origin has to be waiting for us tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.

IV.

The portrait creates itself, defeating for instants its own silence. “Humble friendship was his art”, Roberto Juarroz remembers. “He used to embrace friendship with immense attention and delicate tenderness, both as natural as grabbing a broom and sweeping his house or digging a hole for a plant in his yard. [...] Don Antonio, as we used to call him, was also a living evidence of the profundity of what is elemental, in the bright counterpoint of his deep words and his rarely clean gestures. [...] I don’t remember any person so humble and tidy at the same time. He almost never wore shirts. In the summer, he used to put on a pajama’s coat, and in the winter he used to wear a scarf under a thicker coat, fixed with a safety pin. […] In the middle of a conversation, he often used to recall some of his voices. It didn’t seem strange or artificial — we felt he continued living those voices. However, he once told me that he hadn’t been brave enough to say one of them in front of somebody who was undergoing a moment of anguish. That voice stated: Todo juguete tiene derecho a romperse. [“Every toy has the right to break down.”] While quoting it to me, he looked down as if he felt ashamed, but not of his silence but of the man.”

Did he ever accept the designation of “writer”?

With the word “writer”, we usually mean a person that conforms to certain formalities: having a typewriter, keeping all the pieces of paper in order, and having, at least, a worktable. Porchia had nothing to do with all that. More than anything else, he liked to work in his garden. There is a famous photograph in which he is right there — he used to do manual work, only having a sheet of paper by his side just in case he had something to write. (I have some of those originals he gave to me.)

As regards Porchia’s presence in the literary world, a kind of understandable phenomenon occurs. For the “writers” (those who are officially writers, sophisticated and orthodox) there is a distrust towards Porchia’s work since he doesn’t comply with the precepts, the tables of Literature’s laws. As I have already said, Porchia had not any kind of systematic preparation. Besides, he had a quite heterodox expression. And to top it all, he never attended the literary circles. He always lived out of all that except from, maybe, in his last years, but it was not him who went to look for listeners. People used to come to see him, mainly young people, who were his main readers.

There are anecdotes that depict him completely. Once an important magazine in Buenos Aires asked him for some texts, which he delivered immediately. Some time later, he, who was unable to claim for anything, goes to the magazine’s editorial office and asks if they are going to publish his work or not. “Yes”, they answer, “but there have been some problems. Well, things about grammar”. Those who make writing a more or less mechanic profession, can’t understand an expression that doesn’t fit those closed modules on which they base their work. The editors of that magazine saw “defects” in his unique texts and they corrected some. He listened without uttering a word. He didn’t complain, he didn’t argue. All he did was to ask for the originals and he left. He was a man of exemplary humility, but at the same time, he had that incontrovertible and unchangeable character, which makes us think about the central trees on which all the forest seems to rest.

His small house was full of paintings. In the same way that the poet gives his books, many of his painter friends (Petorutti, Victorica, Quinquela Martín, Castagnino, Soldi, Butler, Forner) had given him pieces of their art in a time when they weren’t famous — they were not yet considered to be, as they are now, the most important exponents of the Argentine painting of the twentieth century. One day I asked Porchia which one was his favorite painting in his collection. He answered with humility, with his habitual smoothness. (To describe how he talked, a very discredited word in our times comes to my mind: with supreme modesty. The ultimate discretion. One of his voices say: Hablo pensando que no debiera hablar: así hablo. [“I talk thinking that I shouldn’t talk: that is how I talk.”]) He replied: “Well, I like one that is there in the corner”. He took me to that place and showed it to me. It was a small oil painting by Fortunato Lacámera that represented a small tuft of grass in the solitary angle of a garden. The most modest painter and the most modest image — the almost non-existent. I think this reflects Porchia entirely. He had the most opulent paintings, pieces of art work by the most renowned painters. Still, he preferred that painting, a little tuft of grass lost in the universe.

During an economically difficult period (like any other for Antonio Porchia), some relatives and friends asked him why he didn’t sell, at least, some of those paintings worth a fortune (after his death, his heirs sold them, of course, with optimum results). And he answered: “No, I can’t sell anything that has been given to me.” He had written: No tienes nada y me darías un mundo. Te debo un mundo. [“You don’t have anything and still you would give me a world. I owe you a world.”] That was Porchia.

Did the literary circles requested him?

A curious thing happened. When the great edition of Voix was prepared in France by Fayard publishing house, the editors looked for Borges for no less than two years, to ask him to write the prologue. This request had many functions. First, he was a writer who had known Porchia (although they never got closer). Then, the name of Borges would mean a better spreading of the book. However, due to the delay, the editors end up being tired. The person in charge of the collection sends a letter asking me to write the prologue. He knows I have lived very closely to Porchia, and that I once wrote a text about him. I accept, write the prologue and send it to him. Just by coincidence, in that moment, one and a half pages from Borges arrive, when nobody was expecting that answer anymore. In Fayard they are very responsible and they tell me about the dilemma. I answer inviting them to act in the way they had initially foreseen, given the editorial reasons. Yet, they inform me that they wish to include Borges’ pages as the prologue and my text as the epilogue. And that is how the edition was finally made. I believe — and I say this with caution and even a little sadness — that the prologue is not among the best lines written by Borges.

The “writers” haven’t finished looking at Porchia and not even accepting him. There is a deep reason (not in the case of Borges, of course). They feel that a man who, according to the established canons, doesn’t come from the literary tracks, overwhelms them and goes beyond them. They perceive that in a time when they will be gloomy and forgotten, Porchia will be more vivid than ever. A very simple fact demonstrates this: without advertisement, without any publicity campaigns, everybody knows Porchia in my country at this moment.

His work has been so widely known that people repeated it without knowing the name of the author. The same happens to Antonio Machado in Spain — in a moment he asserts having heard his own popular stanzas, sung by the countrymen who, of course, didn’t know who they belonged to. This happened with Porchia’s work. However, the exceptional touch is that, in his case, they are not popular stanzas, that is, words with rhythmic pattern, that music which helps prople remember them through that mechanism which goes with the dancing and the singing. In Porchia’s case, it is about deep, difficult and very personal thoughts.

In one of the saddest moments in my country, a terrible combination occurs — two women in prison are threatened by the death penalty. Christmas Eve arrives, and one of them writes a missive to the other one, who is in isolation confinement. In this piece of writing, some supportive phrases come up: “Don’t loose your trust”, “There is always a possibility to get out of here, to save ourselves”, “I beg you to remember this and try to hold to your hope”. I have seen a facsimile reproduction of that letter. The unbelievable is placed at the top of the page: with the same handwriting and preceding the text, there is a phrase between quotation marks, without the name of the quoted author. The phrase, which I recall very well, is:

That is one of Porchia’s voices. I have told this in Buenos Aires (I have done that many times in Paris, for example) so that people finally get to understand one of the clues on which I have always insisted — poetry is the main reality. It is also the main possible realism. If it weren’t, it couldn’t be helping someone who is about to die.

V.

The human being’s figure is highlighted as his work shows its outline. Antonio Porchia wrote: Como me hice, no volvería a hacerme. Tal vez volvería a hacerme como me deshago. [“Like I made myself, I wouldn’t make me again. Maybe, I would make me again in the way I disintegrate.”] Roberto Juarroz remembers: “We always had the feeling of being in front of somebody chosen by loneliness. But the opposite was true in the same way: he had chosen loneliness. Convergence of fate, acceptance and devotion. Loneliness of his life and loneliness of his literary work, as the incorruptible base for his quality as a profound teacher and his difficult learning of himself: He sido para mí, discípulo y maestro. Y he sido un buen discípulo, pero un mal maestro. [“I have been for myself, disciple and teacher. And I have been a good disciple but a bad teacher.”] He loved and suffered his loneliness: Un hombre solo es mucho para un hombre solo. [“A lonely man is too much for a lonely man.”] He knew his risks: Quien se queda mucho consigo mismo, se envilece. [“He who stays with himself for a long time, degrades.”] He didn’t compensate his loneliness with Literature or with the company of other beings, but with his deep inner life. His loneliness allowed him to reach others fully as if he already knew them from the inside. And he was also the presence we used to go to, almost in a pilgrimage, maybe to cure or comfort us from such an exhibition of absences. With him we learnt how loneliness can be the opposite to confinement and the vertebral condition of a work of art”. That house on the banks of Buenos Aires was, for the poet, the evidence that nothing is on the banks. Antonio Porchia said it forever: Lo profundo de mí es todo. Pero es todo sin yo. Es que todo lo que es profundo solamente es todo. [“The deep in me is everything. But it is everything without me. Because everything that is deep, is only everything.”]

Does Porchia’s view of the world come up only in those written fragments?

Not a single conscious being can live without a view of the world, even though this view is reduced and ends up in the boundaries of a garden. Yet, Porchia’s was unlimited. In one of his first books he wrote:

It is the sense of unity: do not move even a finger, do not make any single movement that is not related to the universal whole.

Porchia’s thought cannot be joined to any particular belief or faith. However, he says in another part:

The beauty of his expression is also notable. I believe that in that short fragment, there is one of the cores of modern human being’s deepest feeling. That is, a kind of absence with which he is not satisfied, and that it is almost an absence’s presence. Porchia exclaims:

It is possible to talk about the presence of genius in Porchia?

With the word genius, humanity tries to reflect something that, instead of limiting to the conceived and preconceived structures, creates its own form. It applies to someone who has certain qualities, certain exceptional conditions. It is applicable in the case of Porchia. He is also one of the few people I have found to whom it can be legitimately assigned, with full determination, the idea of teacher in the Socratic sense, in the Greek sense (and not with the current meaning in which it proliferates illegitimately). If one makes a simple analysis and tries to employ that word in the horizon of the authors we know, one realizes that there are only a few who can receive it.

In the long run, genius has two inseparable poles. Porchia’s genius didn’t lie only on the writing but also on the living. Because the fundamental work, at last, has to be supported by a fundamental life. Some people believe that there are exceptions to this integral concept, meaning that there are some valuable pieces of Literature and yet, for the person who created them it would have been better to be invisible. In this last case, we are not talking about the ultimate creation, the one in its zenith. This one demands a symbiosis of life and craftsmanship. Porchia was precisely that.

When receiving the most humble or distinguished person, Porchia treated them in the same manner. That is one of the things we have to learn. In certain literary readings other participants sometimes ask me if I am nervous. That anxiety makes me laugh. Since very young I have thought that when one is talking to another, the only thing one needs is the interlocutor’s attention (and if the conditions are proper, his/her answer). We are all human beings, we all share the same mistakes, fragility, miseries, the same small greatness, the same small joys, we all die, we were all born, and nobody knows where we are going. Therefore, little will a president or prelate’s vestments impress me. They are human beings like anybody else. Porchia used to treat people that way.

Is Porchia’s look the last incarnation of innocence?

First, we have to define what is meant by “innocence”, and in order to do that, we have to start, at least, by accepting two types of innocence. One is the naive innocence — to put it in this way — previous to the suffering of life, of love, of the grievances, of cruelty. It is children’s innocence. I think that the main human problem, the creator’s main problem is to retrieve that innocence, but adding to it something else that is very difficult to precise. We can call this a second innocence. It is the look a posteriori, the innocence that is essential to gain. It makes the eyes see much more, even though they may be worn out and apparently blind. That innocence which makes of the eyes something new.

I don’t believe in ingenuity for its own sake, or in spontaneity itself. I believe in that looseness I have named availability and which Rilke (in one of his favorite terms) calls “openness”, the one that is open but requires almost a conversion. In my view, the poet that matters is a converted one: he has put life upside down, and with life itself he has created more life. That is also true for the great innocence and it was also in Porchia: that “something else”.

Could that second innocence be considered a coming back to the first one after a complete and vital odyssey?

I don’t think so. I believe it is of a different nature. What do we understand by innocence? It is to see things or face the world as if we didn’t know it. As if we didn’t know what there is in the world and as if we didn’t worry to understand what the world is. Innocence is related to knowledge. According to the legends, in the precise moment when human beings obtain knowledge, they lose their innocence. Then, everything results in two poles. Yes, there is innocence before knowledge but there is also another innocence after it. The last one is more than knowing, precisely because it occurs after knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge that cedes its place to something higher than it, to a more complete vision. We cannot go on calling this “knowledge”. For that reason we resort to words like wisdom.

VI.

Antonio Porchia tells us: Lo hondo, visto con hondura, es superficie. [“The deep, seen with depth, is surface.”] The human being chosen by loneliness choose to accept the challenge of that which is alone because it is deep. And that which is deep, is not alone. In the epilogue of the French edition of Voices, Roberto Juarroz draws Antonio Porchia’s way: “The profound life is the recognition and the essential appraisal of the existence or the non-existence of each thing. [...] The profound life also means the validity of the being above the doing, the search for consistency, and the proof of the deceitful myth of the action. Because only the being does; the other “doing” is a fake, a phantasmagoria, the disastrous confusion in which we are lost. That is why Porchia can state that el hacer no hace nada. [“The doing doesn’t do anything.”] And also: El no saber hacer supo hacer a Dios. [“The not knowing, knew how to do make God.”] Or, getting into the dimension of his most ineffable relativism: Lo que hice o no hice, creo que pasó. Y lo que haré o no haré creo que también pasó. [“What I did or didn’t do, I think it’s over now. And what I will or will not do, I think it’s also over.”] [...] It is always a reference to the infinite, but an infinite of which human being mysteriously participates: Eres un fantoche, pero en las manos de lo infinito, que tal vez son tus manos. [“You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which are perhaps your hands.”] Far from all dogma or orthodoxy, the necessity for transparency comes up in all its nudity, as something inseparable of deep thinking and poetry. More than faith or feeling about the sacred, it is a mystical insertion on the mystery that envelops us: Si pienso qué es la vida, creo que la vida es un milagro, y si pienso qué es un milagro, no creo en él. [“If I think about what life is, I believe life is a miracle. And if I think about what a miracle is, I don’t believe in it.”]

For some people, the voices as mere games of thought.

I would never talk about Porchia’s “games”. They are apparent games. His work is of such seriousness (in the best sense of the word) that does not simply admit the notion of game.

In my opinion, the fragment, the aphorism or the multiple forms of fragmentary Literature are some of the most tempting forms, because they are full of possibilities inside literary expression. Or, even better, inside human expression, since they allow to capture the very flow of life, the instantaneity, that which Gaston Bachelard would call “the duration”. However, maybe for that reason, I think those forms are the most difficult. That is why the majority of the aphorisms or fragments written are worthless: they are repetitions (knowingly or not), bad repetitions. We cannot even call the fragment or the aphorism a “genre”: they are beyond the habitual structures as they don’t admit flaws, insubstantial traits, or any game of words.

The temptation of the aphorism is strong, but the collapsing, the catastrophe, are very easy. What are the conditions of fragmentary Literature? In the first place, the elements of the aphorism have the categorical necessity of being irreplaceable. In the second place, because they are brief, they do not accept any stylization or decoration. In the third place, they demand an exceptional command of the language. And by “command” I do not mean that one of the specialists. The fragment requires what I have asked for poetry so many times; that is, a true contemplation of language. Contemplation in the transcendental sense.

The majority of aphorisms tend to turn into definitive and absolute phrases, as if the person saying them were an oracle. When that tendency is not limited and the aphorisms do not come from authentic humility, what is written is a mere simulation. And “humility” does not mean foolishness, flaccidity, easyness, but the deep recognition of what we are, where we are, and how far we can reach. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Do you identify with Porchia’s writing? Do you find any parallelism between your work and Porchia’s?

I say it in a poem I have dedicated to him after his death:

It is inevitable to be so close to somebody without the occurring of a transference (in the good sense, not in the psychoanalytical one) of visions, thoughts, perspectives of the world. I know it is impossible to talk about everything, but that is the feeling I treasure of the time we shared.

There is a key difference between our works: Porchia didn’t have the sense of configuration of the poem. On the other hand, he didn’t need it. He used to think in a different way. In that sense I have said that Porchia lived his voices. He used to grasp; he was complete availability.

What joins us together is mainly the dimension of profundity, of depth, that tendency towards. In this regard I recall some verses by T.S. Elliot:

If there was one single thing Porchia lacked, that was information. He didn’t even have, to an extent, “knowledge” in the traditional or academic sense. He was one of the most integral individuals I have known. His approximation to the world can only have a name: wisdom.

VII.

In 1975, Roberto Juarroz, while presenting Porchia’s Voices in Mexico, points out: “I couldn’t be by his side when he died. A short time before, he had suffered a fall and hit his head, something of which he probably didn’t get to recover. [...] He had rejected, due to his humility, the invitations made to visit Europe, but his human warmth led him to the exact point where he had to fall. Maybe he didn’t feel any surprise. He had written: Cuando yo muera, no me veré morir, por primera vez. [“When I die, I will not see myself dying, for the first time.”]

Juarroz adds: “He had loved a lot. Once, his extreme discretion didn’t stop him, and he confided to us the deep feeling that had joined him with a woman of the night he was ready to marry with. That is how we found out how she was threatened to finish that relationship by those exploiting her. And we also knew he stood apart, not because of his own security, about which he cared very little if not nothing at all, but because of hers. There lies the origin of one his voices: Hallé lo más bello de las flores en las flores caídas. [“I have found the most beautiful side of the flowers in the fallen flowers.”] The association between love and flowers represents, undoubtedly, one the clues to understand him: El amor, cuando cabe en una sola flor, es infinito. [“Love, when it fits inside a flower, it is infinite.”] [...] Only from him I have heard that remarkable phrase he always used to say goodbye to us: “Try to be fine”. It was almost a request, something like an endlessly delicate and tender petition, a call to our possibility of being, in spite of all. It was as if he was giving us a piece of advice: “Do that which is possible even if you are seeking for the impossible”. And sometimes, he used to add a moving exhortation summarizing his best wish and a remote nostalgia: “Stay together.”

In that text from 1975, Juarroz finishes with the following lines: “Have I talked about Porchia, or have I talked about myself? I believe profundity does not allow these differences. I have merely talked because, like him, I have been defeated by what I have said.”