Foreword

To Leopoldo Lugones

Leaving behind the sounds of the plaza, I enter the library. At once, in an almost physical way, I feel the gravitation of the books, the quiet atmosphere of ordered things, the past rescued and magically restored. To left and right, rapt in lucid dream, the momentary profiles of the readers' faces are outlined - as in Milton's hypallage - by the light of their studious lamps. I recall having recalled this figure before, in this same place, and then that other epithet also defined by its surroundings, 'the arid camel' of your Lunario sentimental, and afterwards that hexameter from Virgil which employs the same device and goes beyond it:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram.

These reminiscences lead me to the door of your office. I enter. We exchange a few cordial, conventional words, and I hand you this book. If I am not mistaken, you were rather fond of me, Lugones, and it would have pleased you to be pleased by some work of mine. That never happened, but this time you turn the pages and read approvingly some line or other, maybe because you recognize your own voice in it, maybe because my faulty execution means less to you than the soundness of my aims.

At this point my dream dissolves - like water in water. The vast library all around me is in Mexico Street, not in Rodríguez Peña, and you, Lugones, committed suicide towards the beginning of 1938. My vanity and wistfulness have set an impossible scene. So be it, I tell myself, for tomorrow I too will be dead and our times will become one, and chronology will be lost in a world of meaningless symbols, and in some way it may be true to say that I once handed you this book and that you accepted it.

J.L.B.

Buenos Aires, 9 August 1960