2024-09-03 21:35:01
Yes ok Roberto Arlt was not born in Lanús, but in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores, and had strong ties to that town in the southern suburbs. At the end of the 1920s, after publishing his debut novel (The angry toy) and a member of the Boedo Group, the young writer, novelist and playwright had set up, together with the actor Pascual Nacaratti, a chemical laboratory in front of the Villa Obrera square, in garnet lands – then part of the south of Avellaneda – where he even showed off his own invention: unbreakable female stockings made of cloth and rubber. Those were the days when was crazily thinking the extraordinary Porteño etchingsfor Diary The Worldand the no less brilliant The Seven Madmenwhich 40 years later, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson would bring to the cinema.
There is a sense of belonging and relevance then that the publishing house of the National University of Lanús is publishing –just a few blocks from where that crazy Arlt laboratory operated- Complete etchings and other writings, an anthology of the writer divided into several volumes, and with a prologue by its rector Daniel Bozzani. The first one, which is already freely available to the public (doi.org/10.18294/rdi.2024.179630 or in Free and free download or in is populated by the journalistic articles that Arlt wrote –without a signature- for the newspaper The Worldbetween May 18, 1928, when he debuted with an article called “Old ladies are scared of dogs that look for shelter and food” -where he describes the difference between the types of jovial dogs that roam around Flores, Caballito and Palermo, and the brave or tame ones from other neighborhoods-, and Monday, August 13 of that year, when he wrote “Importance of a hen on Cuenca Street”, a short story that tells of a fight between a Russian and an Arab, which ends with the death of the former by two shots -at the request of the latter’s wife- over a stolen hen. “It would never have occurred to Nietzsche that the origin of the tragedy could be in a hen,” Arlt would write, with his streetwise wit, in that pearl of wisdom. The remaining chapters consist of all the notes that the man wrote as a journalist, not only for the aforementioned newspaper -that will be dealt with in chapters 2 and 3, soon to be published- but also for Don Goyo, Criticism y The Homeamong other graphic media of the time.
The result is overwhelming: This will be the first time that his etchings and journalistic notes are published in full. A little editorial luxury, of course, which even comes accompanied by those allusive illustrations by Luis Bello, which illustrated ninety percent of the Porteño Etchings. And for the newspaper surveys made by Daniel Scroggins for the book The Buenos Aires Etchings of Roberto Arlt (1981); and by The writer in the brick forest. A biography of Roberto Arltconcocted by the researcher Sylvia Saítta at the beginning of the millennium.
The idea was born to the graduate in Political Science and Government from UNLa Marcos Melewhen, looking for the essential first edition of The falsified history of Ernesto Palacio In a Buenos Aires bookstore, he came across a tempting title: Roberto Arlt. Buenos Aires etchings. Impressions. The book –used- was an edition of Editorial Victoria, and consisted of a selection of the best etchings, among the fifteen hundred that the novelist had published in the newspaper El Mundo. Among them, there were “Ventanas luminosas” and “La muerte de Jesús”, tremendous articles, which not only led Mele –author, also, of the book (Bolivarianism and anti-Mitrism. Rufino Blanco-Fombona and Francisco Silva against falsified history) to buy the book, but also to proceed with cultural justice: to compile and publish all of Arlt’s etchings and journalistic notes, many of which have never been republished.
The “loose” texts cover, therefore, all that cosmomundo of thugs, whores, anarchists, immigrants recently arrived from poor Europe, illusionists, alienated and a carcass of little importance, which the acid aesthete and inventor knew how to challenge during that convulsive Buenos Aires, in transition, until the very year 42, when he died of a heart attack. In the meantime he was able to marry Elisabeth Mary Shine in Uruguay, live in Chile, finish the play The desert enters the citypublish “The Henchmen of Venice” –his last story- and patent the stockings gummy which he had invented in the Lanús laboratory.