The offices occupied by Jorge Luis Borges during the period in which he was director of the National Library, are currently the object of intense recovery and enhancement tasks. The building of the Mexico street 564, in the San Telmo neighborhood, which began to function as the headquarters of this institution in 1901, was assigned to other functions from 1992, when the Library moved to the property where it is currently located. This meant the abandonment of the building and, along with it, structural deterioration and the wear and tear of objects and spaces of enormous historical value.
Past days, the Minister of Culture, Tristán Baueraccompanied by the current director of the institution, Juan Sasturain, and the Secretary of Cultural Heritage, Valeria González; she visited the place together with a group of journalists to show the progress of the work being carried out in conjunction with the Ministry of Public Works. Both portfolios allocated funds for $352,312,328, for the essential recovery of the old headquarters, beginning with the restoration of the facades, the sanitation of the pluvial systems and the recovery of all electrical and sanitary installations.
“When I took up my functions, I came to see the situation of the Library and I was surprised by its state,” Bauer recounted during the visit. I took a couple of photos and told the President, who told me to start working immediately. A few days later we came with the minister Gabriel Katopodis. The studies were carried out, a tender was called to carry out the structural work and we, from Culture and the Library, began to work in the Jorge Luis Borges space”.
The most famous address
The most famous director of the Library, without a doubt, was Jorge Luis Borgeswho held this position between 1955 and 1973, when the imminent advent of a new Peronist government decided him to step aside from his duties.
The physical space where Borges worked included the management and assistant management rooms and the respective secretaries, on the first floor. These rooms, once restored, will be open to the public and the Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies and Documentation of the National Library (Borges Center)a prestigious department of consultation and work on the documents and books that belonged to the writer. Germán Álvarez, the researcher who together with Laura Rosato is in front of this Center, explains to NEWS that this space was very dear to Borges, fascinated by the idea of occupying the same office as Paul Groussaca fundamental character for the institution, a blind writer like him, who directed it for almost half a century.
Professionals of all specialties are working today to enhance the value of the old offices: cabinetmakers, upholsterers, and experts in metals, textiles, papers, and paints. A team that together with those who restore the general structure, adds up to around 30 people.
A large number of original pieces of furniture are in the process of being recovered, including the famous horseshoe-shaped desk that Paul Groussac had built when he began to lose his sight and which remained forever in the director’s office. A series of photos taken by Sara Facio of Borges next to this piece of furniture, transformed it forever into the “Borges desk”. The grandfather clock, pattern of all those that functioned in the Library rooms, is also being restored.
Original ceilings, boiserie, period wallpaper, openings and floors are today subjected to a renovation process, which follows the standards in use in the restoration of heritage assets.
It is an essential work to recover the workplace of one of the most important writers in the world, fundamental within the literary tradition of Argentines.
The librarian
Few buildings, like the National Library, symbolize the passions that inspired Jorge Luis Borges. His “Poem of gifts” It is perhaps the most famous of his texts dedicated to this area that represented his “paradise”. He even entertained the idea of living in the building, as had other directors before him. The vice director of the institution, Joseph Edmund Clementemade him give up the idea, claiming that the building had many stairs and would be very uncomfortable for his mother.
“According to one of his nephews, Borges would get up at noon, take a bath, and take the subway to the Library,” he says. German Alvarez-. He surely came thinking of a poem along the way and dictated it to his secretaries. He had two, one of them bilingual. He worked in the room with them. The director’s office used it to give interviews, classes or courses. He was beginning to be a very famous writer and to put this Library on the world map”.
Borges was already blind when he took office, for this reason his signature can only be found on official documents of the institution. “But he would bring his books to work or take copies from the collection and those volumes, written in the margins by him, are very valuable today to understand his work as a reader,” says Álvarez.
At the Library, Borges reviewed his entire work, removed several books, and corrected many of those he had written. Also, he created texts like “The gold of the tigers” or “The maker”books of poems or short stories, much easier for him to compose because of his blindness. “The 1975 ‘Book of Sand’, is his great tribute to the Library, from which Borges withdrew with great sorrow. There the U-shaped desk appears, in a story, as a surgery table, and he even talks about a ‘monstrous book’ that he hides in the basement of a library, ”says Álvarez.
A political position like few others in the cultural world, the director of the National Library becomes, in the different governments, something like a representative of the ideological universe of power. Borges had come to the leadership with the Liberating Revolution and the weight of his prestige kept him in office for almost two decades. Even Peronism, through Arturo Jauretchewanted to make contact with him to keep him in office, in 1973, but he refused to meet.
From that year on, becoming a world celebrity, his life was an uninterrupted succession of trips, conferences, interviews and talks. The Borges Center is today, precisely, working on the compilation and analysis of those conferences from his last years.
“Borges was the metaphor of the library, as defined by José Edmundo Clemente. It is his figure that has made this institution a myth, ”concludes Álvarez.
That the “city of books” that the writer consecrated survives and is sustained, should be the will of all. It is to be hoped that the next cultural administrations, regardless of the party, will continue what has been done up to now. Hopefully the miseries of the crack do not deprive Argentines and foreigners of the indelible memory of Borges.
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