Who at the end of 2025 take the job of choosing the most relevant books of the year, will surely include in their list “Do not understand. Memories of an intellectual “the autobiography of Beatriz Sarlo. And not only because it brings together the memories of who was one of the most exceptional personalities of the last century in Argentina, but also because it is an inclassifiable, honest and deep text, which travels to the past to track the traces of an ethic and a vocation.
Divided into 5 chapters, The two initials are dedicated to Sarlo’s childhood and in the way in which his personality highlighted the features that would later be who he was. His father, Saúl Sarlo Sabajanes and his uncle, Fernando del Río, were the most influential figures in the first years and who contributed the most to design their subsequent relationship with politics. There is also described the tension with the mandates that come from their mother and impose a “female” performance at the height of the time. The following two chapters report His training as an intellectualhis encounter with personalities that marked his gaze on literature, the beginnings of his work in journalism and the basis of his approach to culture in general. The last pages stop in the importance that architecture and music had in their cultural practices, in parallel to literature, the discipline in which it stood out worldwide. “I tried to preserve lightness and distance,” says the author in the introduction, “as if another person had suffered or imagined the situation, someone who sometimes was me and who, without getting it, tried to remember as if it were another.”
Behind the book. Sylvia Saítta is one of the people closest to Beatriz Sarloso much that she began to be her student at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and ended up occupying the same position as her 20 years later. Today is, how was Sarlo, head of the Argentine Literature Chair II. She is also a researcher at CONICET, a member of the EUDEBA Board of Directors and director of the Historical Archive of Argentine Magazines (AHIRA), a reference space for any research that involves written media.
In dialogue with News, Saítta gave details of the writing of “not understanding” and talked about the future of the archive and production of Beatriz Sarlo.
NEWS: How did “not understand” write?
Sylvia Saítta: It is a book that Beatriz took many years. He started it in 2017 or 2018 and then changed his mind. He left him and returned. In recent years he dedicated himself particularly to him. The last material was delivered around April 2024. He worked with Ana Galdeano, of the 21st century publishing house. Beatriz was hospitalized, at the end of last year, and continued to correct details and choose the lid. He died with the certainty that he left in February or March. It is an infinite sadness that has not come to see him published. He said it was going to be his last book. And he is the one who closes his work.
NEWS: In relation to His book “Travel”a very personal text, in this links and affections are mentioned, as if she had overcome certain fears of revealing too much.
Saítta: It was also very cautious. They are memories of childhood, adolescence and the formation of an intellectual who decided to be before knowing what that word meant. The most interesting thing about the book is that everything we already knew is left out. In it is not even the chair of Argentine literature, Not even the magazine “Point of View”neither the amount of books or texts published in national and international media, nor the universities he traveled, nor the awards he received. Public life is not in this book. There is the formation of who later knows that Beatriz Sarlo was.
NEWS: It is possible to imagine that what cost him most was to find a tone that was not too intimate, or too distant.
Saítta: I think that The challenge was to assume the first person entirely. What I like is that it seems to tell much less than what effectively counts, scenes in which he discovered that learning was through what he did not understand. For example, he does not tell us when he learned to write or read or play tennis. There are rather the moments that complicated access to knowledge. The areas in which we know Beatriz Sarlo in the field of the public; The great teacher of Argentine literature, literary criticism, cultural criticism, political analyst or journalist, are not those in the book. Instead there is a lot of music, a lot of art, a lot of architecture. Or that most initiatory moment of childhood and adolescence. Read now, in 2025, it is a book that goes almost a time when it seems that everything is very easy. In addition, it illuminates back many of the things we had already read, but in another genre. For example, all your notes on the marches. In the book we read that there is an childhood scene, in which he does not remember if he is three or five years old, and in which he is in a march by his uncle’s hand. Or intervening on the Peronist posters that their father used to start from the walls of the city. There is much more autobiography in everything we read so far about what we knew.
News: Who will be in charge of Beatriz Sarlo’s work from now on? It has been commented that you could be the chosen person.
Saítta: This happened very recently (Beatriz Sarlo died on December 17, 2024) and immediately the judicial fair began. I can’t say anything about legal issues. But your file is very important. And Beatriz was extremely aware of the value of an intellectual of the twentieth century, as defining. The file will be preserved, there is no doubt about that. But those who were close to it do not want to accelerate the times. I still don’t know how Beatriz is not.
A fragment of “not understanding”
“Not understanding was my first and definitive experience. I began not understanding and, almost immediately, I accepted that this was the passage point to everything that was worth it. Convinced that understanding was a job, I got used to this work being a pleasure. Neither the path of art nor that of thought are a straight line.
Some books prove it and some works that are believed to be understood show the mistake of those who trust their first look or listen. Art is negativity, not full statement. Even when he affirms, he does it by exhibiting a conflict. Art is not reconciled with art, except in the works, respectable, designed for the market. Not only does it happen with the avant -garde, but also with the classics, since it is impossible to understand the Sistine Chapel just by looking at it, without the support of a culture as much or more complicated than the images.
The look is cheated when the perceived is imposed only by the great or the picturesque, as the case may be. The look stops when he is unaware of what is perceived, by new or by distant. Who looks can disinterest due to incomprehensible remoteness. But that decision to get away will deprive him of the intensity of the experience. For that look that avoids the unknown, some boys eating fruits painted by Murillo are more attractive than the “Guernica” of Picasso. There are no doubt about that. But art not only offers how pleasant the memory of an image.
Something similar happens with literature. Mallarmé’s incomprehensible is a point of resistance that may never be overcome, but that remains there, as an offer and a pending debt. Of course, it can be forgotten, how too hard work is discarded and whose final product is distrusted. But the coup of oblivion can never abolish the moment it was decided to close the book precisely on that page.
Many would defend that it is not possible to watch a tennis game if the rules and skills of the game are ignored. But those who ask for a previous knowledge for tennis believe possible for not knowing for art (according to them, understanding Federer would be more difficult than appreciating Pollock). The massiveness of sports does not demonstrate the validity of this conclusion. It could be argued that being Federer is as difficult as being Pollock. And here the starting point for a discussion arises. Being Federer may be as unlikely as being Pollock. I am interested in knowing why there is that equal improbilities. But also where the difference between the forgiving of Pollock and Federer resides.
A sketch of “Guernica” is as shocking as the immense “Guernica”. This can be checked at the Reina Sofía Museum. Nobody would say that the volley of training is as impossible as that sudden response and the race, accurate and almost miraculous that occurs rarely in a game, but not a few in a century of sport. I choose this comparison because I am a tennis fan and because I would not allow me to do it with another sport whose difficulties I do not know.
I would like to demonstrate that the difficulty is one of the fundamental qualities of art. Not only of modern art, which turned the difficulty into aesthetic option and avant -garde challenge, but of the resistance of the past history before our contemporary perceptions. I do not know how a frieze or a stained glass is perceived in a Gothic church. In that not knowing is part of the fascination that produces me. I do not know those saints or I can interpret their gestures. Something I must do to see when I look. That something is the victory over the unknown. Not understanding is the first step, which implies recognizing the difficulty that Joyce’s “Ulysses” even raises the most cultured readers. In this sense, art demands an ethic of work.
Not understanding is the initial chapter of a trip. Accepting that I do not understand also implies that there is something there, in the text or in the object, that refuses my skills. I miss something to understand what I don’t understand. As for the works of the past, I lack, in the first place, the density of the historical time that separates them from the present from my gaze. How to read “As You Like It” (“How you like”) or Twelfth Night “(” Night of Kings “) outside a radically different sexual differences system from the twentieth and twenty -first centuries? When losing that sociological distance, at the same time, the transgression and comedy of Shakespeare are lost, and the works become more naive than bold, in all allowed games. Do not understand perhaps it is to restore a sexual system that our present became completely obsolete, tolerable, a allowed and disguise allowed object.
In this case, not understanding is better than understanding, because it forces a return in time. It is impossible to read the “Quijote” without that displacement through history. Without that temporal dynamic, the “Quijote” today is not understood, because the requirements are many. In spite of everything, we persist in reading it and we accept those conditions that impose to add other readings, look at very old images, imagine dialogues impossible for the fashion of realism that has been imposed, with all its variants, since the nineteenth century. Not understanding the “Quijote” is to get in a position to read it […]”
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