Respuesta de Daniel Martino, enviada el 3 de julio:
The Times Literary Supplement,
Times House,
1 Pennington Street,
London E98 1BS
MIT BORGES ZU TISCH
Ref.: David GALLAGHER´s Review of Adolfo BIOY CASARES, Borges. Edited by Daniel MARTINO. Buenos Aires (sic): Destino, 2006 (TLS, June 29th).
Sir, -In the wilderness of Adolfo Bioy Casares criticism, David Gallagher’s contribution will be of lasting value. Working as curator for the 1990 Cervantes Prize, I was eager, and glad, to include his “The novels and short stories of ABC” (1975) in the companion volume, a necessarily slim critical anthology on that year’s recipient. It was with expectation that I found his name in your pages (June 29) as the reviewer of Borges. I hate to say that expectations went by, and some trepidation came in. My opinion is that the reviewer got wrong the nature of the book, an installment in the process of publication of Bioy Casares private papers, which began well in the writer’s lifetime with the miscellany ABC de Adolfo Bioy Casares that I edited in 1989.
Bioy appointed me editor of his papers in 1994. He saw in book form the epistolary travelogue En viaje (1996) and the commonplace book De jardines ajenos (1997), and only his untimely death in March 1999 prevented him from seeing between two covers the journal-sans-dates Descanso de caminantes (2001) and Borges (2006). As it is said in the Editorial Note to the latter, Bioy read and corrected the manuscript twice before publication. The correspondence between Bioy Casares and Borges, a slender volume since they met for dinner many times a week in half a century of friendship, is the next planned publication. Needless to say, they were not careless letter-writers.
As a diarist, Bioy was as prolific as a fiction writer. Even more. Some critics already prophesy, at their own risk, that this strain of his writings will outlast all the others. The sheer bulk of his output is impressive, and enticing. As the readers know from Descanso de caminantes, this diary is 20,000 pages long. Within this mass, as it is said in the Editorial Note, Borges was, since its inception, a separate project of Bioy’s.
The publication of the `personal´ diaries will follow. Once they are published, as was stated by a document Bioy signed in 1994, the diaries will be deposited at a higher learning institution. Mr Gallagher has nothing to worry about. These diaries will show Bioy as the gentleman he was. A rather ferocious gentleman, I have to say: I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody, as James Boswell put it.
On occasion, due to his surprise at what he perceives in Borges as Bioy´s self-effacement, Mr Gallagher enhances this stance. Some words of Bioy’s, concerning the supposedly bourgeois character of women (see Borges, p. 465), are attributed to Borges. Men exchange women as well as words, Claude Lévi-Strauss dixit, and thus Mr Gallagher labels María Kodama, Borges´ wife, as “Bioy´s final girlfriend”. In Gallagher’s economics, words go to Borges, women to Bioy.
Mr Gallagher is quite right about the Index. The publishing house (Destino is in Barcelona, not Buenos Aires as the review states) thought it a ballast in a first printing. The Analytical Index is duly completed; it has 90,000 words. It will be published soon.
DANIEL MARTINO |
