The Extraordinary Story of Antonio Porchia

He had brought with him a few of his books, among them Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. He spoke Italian correctly, even after many years, and he would recite Dante by heart. But his language was by then Spanish, and it was in Spanish that he annotated on scraps of paper those reflections, aphorisms and sentences that studded his conversation, and which he called “voices.” Some of his friends, especially Miguel Andres Camino and Jose Pugliese, convinced him, after much reticence on his part, to publish them. It was in 1943, and Porchia was 56 years old. He himself picked the title: Voices.

On the cover was the stamp of Impulso. Iinside, there was an introductory note that was very timid and colorless (as sharply and ironically described by the critic Raul Rossetti), and signed by his friend the poet and painter Alessandro Tomatis who “surely didn’t grasp the importance of what he was introducing.” One thousand copies were printed, at the author’s expense, but they passed unobserved and only a few copies were sold. All the others (today much sought after by collectors) remained for a long time piled up in the head offices of Impulso, until Porchia was asked to come and take them away because they had become an encumbrance. He decided to donate them to public libraries. With that quiet and disinterested gesture began the incredible story of the success of Voci. It resulted in the dissemination throughout the whole Argentine territory of the today-legendary edition of the book. Readers frantically sought it out, and many copied it by hand.

And then occurred another decisive event regarding the fortunes of Voci. The book ended up in the hands of the French critic Roger Caillois, one of the intellectuals who defined the European 20th century, who found himself in Argentina during WWII as a representative of UNESCO working for the prestigious magazine SUR (English: SOUTH), edited by Vittoria Ocampo.

He was enchanted, and wanted to know Porchia personally. Here is how he described him: “He had the face of a man around 50 years old, of respectable aspect, simple and timid. He did not seem studious nor did he dress elegantly; he seemed a man who worked as an artisan or carpenter.” He invited Porchia to publish some of his “voices” in his magazine in which some of the most important writers were also collaborating. Meanwhile Caillois returned to France, translated Voci, and included parts of it in the annual edition of Dits (Gallimard’s edition), and later in the magazine pages of Le Licorne. In 1948, Porchia’s friends convinced him to publish a second edition containing many more “voices” that he had been transcribing over the previous five years. The following year (1949) Caillois in Paris had Voci published in the series G.L.M. (Guy Levy Mano) under the title Voix.

The work aroused great interest and admiration among intellectuals and critics. In 1956, Raymond Queneau included Voci among the one hundred books in any ideal library. Henry Miller, in his article The Books of My Life (1957), affirmed the same thing. In 1950,Andre Breton for his part, in answer to the question regarding recent contributions in the Spanish language to intellectual life, answered (in Correo literario, Madrid, September 1950) “. . .Although I feel constrained to abstain from my opinion. . .according to what I am aware at the moment I would say that the Spanish language poet who touches me most is the Mexican Ottavio Paz and that the most ductile thinking is that of the Argentine Antonio Porchia who was brought to light in France by Roger Caillois who translated a volume of his Voices. I say this without prejudging that which has been printed in Spain for the last fifteen years. (A. Breton, Entretiens, Lucarini, Roma 1989, p. 233, ed. Gallimard Parigi 1952, Nouvelle èdition revue et corrigée en 1969).