The University Library has recently received a special limited edition of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Presented to the University in 1991 by Patricio Aylwin Azócar, former President of Chile, this copy is no. 555 of 250 copies printed from 501 to 750 and features a dedication to the University of Cambridge by the Chilean president.
Front cover (RBM.19.a.2)
Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is best known for his poetry, most notably this work, which he wrote in 1924 when he was just nineteen years old. Neruda’s works are widely represented in the Cambridge Libraries collections, both in Spanish and in English translation (click here to view our holdings in iDiscover).
This particular edition of Twenty love poems and ‘A song of despair’ was printed by Ismael Espinosa in 1990 in Santiago de Chile.[i] It is presented in elephant folio, with a satin ribbon, illustrated with eight original glazes by Chilean magical realism painter Hernán Valdovinos. The volume is beautifully bound in peacock-feather decorated cloth, with gold paper-title-label insert on the front panel and marbled endpapers.[ii] The calligraphy is by María Angélica Seguel.
In this post we will introduce the last addition to our series of posts on Latin American handmade books. We have been developing Cambridge’s cartonera collection since 2013. Ten years, various blog posts and events, a research project collaboration, a book chapter contribution and 271 books later the collection offers a broad panorama of the production of unique books made by hand often in a context of material scarcity and always channelling voices outside of the mainstream.
The bulk of the collection is represented by cartonera books, categorised as items made with hand painted cardboard covers and part of the big publishing movement that originated from Eloisa Cartonera in Argentina in 2003 and which chiefly came to the Library through the AHRC funded project “Cartonera Publishing: Relations, Meaning and Community in Movement project”. It is however important to point out that, of course, cartonera were not the first ever handmade books produced in Latin America and it was always our intention to give context to this collection by also purchasing contextual material that would provide examples of those publishers that came before and after, as a way to depict the wide and rich picture of Latin American independent publishing. It is with that intention in mind that the collection includes examples of Taller Leñateros from Mexico and of Ediciones Vigía from Cuba, which started their activities in the 1970’s and 1980’s, respectively.
The last additions to the collection, and the focus of this blogpost, are 11 books published by Ediciones Arroyo, based in Arroyo Leyes, a village in the province of Santa Fe, in the heart of Argentina’s vast and intensively farmed lands. Ediciones Arroyo was funded by Alejandra Bosch in 2016 and she openly recognizes the influence the cartonera movement had in its creation. It does share many characteristics with cartonera books: they are handmade, they re-utilise otherwise wasted material and they publish mainly authors not known outside of the dominant media. However, Ediciones Arroyo follow their very own creative path: their covers are made by using cleaned milk cartons and sachets (inside-out), using a characteristic collage of coloured vinyl letters to add titles or authors’ names in their covers; they publish poetry written exclusively by authors from the provinces and they are all handmade and illustrated by Alejandra and her son, Julian Bosch, in their home in Arroyo Leyes, for zero profit. But to think that the publisher works in distant isolation would be a mistake. As well as publishing, Alejandra and Julian organise a yearly poetry festival in Arroyo Leyes in close and enthusiastic collaboration with local supporters (organisations that offer venues, businesses that cater for food, neighbours that offer free accommodation). The festival gathers poets from around the country, who in turn feed into the publishing selections, by writing poems and often contributing financially to the project and also by sending milk sachets and cartons by post to contribute to the material production of the chapbooks. These are donated by village neighbours too, as a single household milk consumption couldn’t possibly supply such a prolific publisher!
In a country where most of the cultural and political powers reside in the capital city of Buenos Aires, having a very active and creative independent publisher building strong artistic, social and affective networks from an “anonymous” village in a monotonously landscaped region otherwise dominated by the push to produce “high value goods” (Santa Fe province is Argentina’s major OGM soy exporter), is of major significance. In a very interesting article, Alejandra questions the idea of “being at the margins”:
“[…] I am not in a margin; I am at the centre. This is the political decision I have taken when it comes to manage [cultural activities]: to feel that I am at the centre of a territory that irradiates. If we place ourselves and accept that we work, write, publish and manage at the margins, then we are facilitating that conflict […] Arroyo Leyes is the centre of a world that many people have built together and that is being replicated in many other areas of the country.”
Our Library is the only library in the UK holding items by Ediciones Arroyo. We are extremely grateful to their creators and to our local bookseller, García Cambeiro, who facilitated their acquisition. Our selection aims to represent a small but hopefully faithful sample of the world they continue to create; we have chosen poets from different Argentine provinces:
Fernando Callero (Entre Ríos)
Francisco Bitar and Larisa Cumin (Santa Fe)
Aníbal Costilla (Santiago del Estero)
Micaela Godoy (La Rioja)
Dafne Pidemunt, Tamara Pradon and Fernando Noy (Río Negro)
Walter Lezcano and Gustavo Tisocco (Corrientes)
They are available to consult in the Rare Books reading room. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: hispanic@lib.cam.ac.uk.
In their article Latin American politics underground: Networks, rhizomes and resistance in cartonera publishing1, Lucy Bell and Patrick O’Hare (two of the researchers leading the two-year AHRC funded cartonera project ) use Deleuze’s, Guattari’s and (one of the Argentinian cartonera precursors) Javier Barilaro’s theories on rhizomes to explain the course by which, since their beginning in the early 2000s, cartonera publishing networks developed and multiplied (to around 250 currently) across Latin America, forming underground horizontal alliances in similarly fertile social and cultural soils.
The UL recently acquired a new edition of the Antologia de poesia portuguesa erótica e satírica, a book that represents an important part of Portuguese literary and political history. First published in December 1965, the book’s release earned its editor, the poet and writer Natália Correia, a 3-year suspended prison sentence.
Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan poet, priest and revolutionary, died on the 1st of March aged 95. He wrote numerous works of poetry, as well as essays and memoirs. His poetry embraced a great variety of topics, including but not limited to history, social justice, politics, love, mysticism and astronomy. Continue reading “Ernesto Cardenal: a cultural icon of the Nicaraguan revolution”→
In an earlier blog post, I talked about the artist books donation of the Diane française publisher “Musée de Poche” collection to Cambridge University Library. One of the works I discovered in this series is that of Remo Giatti, an artist form Northern Italy who uses a variety of techniques (engraving, lithography, drawing and collage…), and whose prints often include elements in “relief”. His work featured on the cover of the catalogue (F201.a.4.1), accompanied in the numbered Cambridge copy by an original print. Giatti also contributed to four “Musée de Poche” books (three of them are double volumes containing up to eight prints).
Le plus beau poème du monde est un poème d’amour (2014) by the Italian poet Arturo Schwarz, translated into French by Raphael Monticelli and inspired by Lucretius is a tribute to the beloved woman and her body through the elements. In this context, Giatti’s first and last prints evoke the stains of biological elements enlarged through a microscope, and the cracks forming on an arid soil in shades of grey. In the central double print, a grey shape with lines, strokes and cracks, pops up dramatically towards the viewer. It is set on top of another print which acts as a colourful brown and green background for the other one, reusing patterns of bubbles, stains and lines, and creating a strange effect of alignment and perspective from the top to the bottom print. Continue reading “Remo Giatti’s prints in the Cambridge Diane française, “Musée de Poche” collection”→
Following an event and book display organised by Jean Khalfa at Trinity College Wren Library on 15 October 2018, Cambridge University Library recently received a donation of about 40 artists’ books published in Nice by La Diane française between 2004 and 2018.
The UL recently acquired Poesia by Mário Cesariny (1923 – 2006), the first comprehensive collection of poetry by the Portuguese Surrealist. The library began collecting Cesariny’s work in the late 1980s, when much of his poetry was re-published and gained a new audience – but by which time he himself had more or less abandoned writing to focus on painting.
Cesariny was born and lived his whole life in Lisbon, though during his early 20s he briefly studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. While he was there, in 1947 he met one of his major influences, André Breton. Spurred on by this encounter, Cesariny and his circle, who regularly met at Lisbon’s cafe A Mexicana, formed the Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa later that same year. Before formalising the birth of Portuguese Surrealism, these young writers and artists, amongst them the poet Alexandre O’Neill, had already begun to reject the strict Neo-Realism that had formed the dominant artistic opposition to Salazar’s regime. Continue reading “Mário Cesariny: Between us and words”→
An exhibition in Trinity College’s Wren Library which runs until 12 June 2018 celebrates the work of the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, using items from the Wren’s extraordinary Kessler Collection of Artists’ Books. In this blog post, we look at the University Library’s own holdings of Lam books and related material.
Fata morgana / André Breton ; illustrated by Wifredo Lam
The exhibition focuses on Wifredo Lam’s many collaborations with a wide variety of international artists and writers such as Aimé Césaire, Gherasim Luca, and René Char. The UL’s earliest holding of his work reflects this aspect of his career: a 1969 English translation of André Breton’s poem Fata morgana illustrated by Lam (1990.9.1800). This collaboration dates from the Cuban artist’s time in France from 1938 to 1941, when he met and worked with many of the Surrealists and other leading European writers and artists of the period. However, the artistic exchange between Wifredo Lam and contemporary European art and literature had already begun years before, when he first went to study in Madrid in 1923. We hold a number of titles in French, Spanish and English dealing completely or in part with this side of Lam’s life and work:
André Masson : de Marseille à l’exil américain (2016.9.657)
Languages across Borders 