Ancient history

Julio Cortázar in memory:30 years after his departure

In the last broadcast of our radio program Open School (Radio Exitosa, Sundays from 9 to 10am.), the literary critic Ricardo Gonzáles Vigil recalled the youthful and playful spirit of the stories of the famous creator of the cronopios, fictional characters that have an animal and a stroke, of objectivity and subjectivity in parallel. To graph his example, he used the excellent hyperbole he used in his work Around the Day in Eighty Worlds , paraphrasing the famous book by Jules Verne, another essential writer for children and adolescents in any reading plan in the world. Reading Cortázar's creations is always an apprenticeship, due to the multiple connections he made with other artistic expressions, given his profound erudition and love of language. But so is reading about the life of Julio Cortázar which constitutes, in itself, an escalation of knowledge and intertwined arts, as we can glimpse in this brief tribute that we publish today, February 12, which marks the 30th anniversary of his death.


A photographic image can contain the entire world if you look closely. What at first seemed not to represent any challenge for the senses, becomes a puzzle that makes it necessary to sharpen perception if the intention is to reveal what lies beyond, break that glass that hinders perspective and be able to grasp reality as few can experience it.

With the film by Italian Michelangelo Antonioni Blow up (1966), which adapts the story The Devil's Babas of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar , the viewer leaves the movie theater with the impression of having lived in an eternal daze that makes it essential to learn a new way of observing and distinguishing, of perceiving reality.

Fifty-one years of Hopscotch, are nearing completion the most representative novel by Julio Florencio Cortázar, central and unquestionable representative of the Latin American boom in literature. This novel represents a break with the conventional forms of literary narration. In the words of Cortázar himself, it can be read just as children play Hopscotch -a children's game known among us as "World"-, jumping from one chapter to another without the need to follow a structured order.

With Hopscotch, Cortázar shows us what it means to completely innovate within a literary genre that, at that time, was still highly influenced by the habitual and formal forms and formulas of storytelling. It is a work that admits multiple interpretations, appreciations and readings.

The rhythm that jazz music gives to the novel is undeniable, the characters listen to great musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk and Oscar Peterson all the time, behaving like antennas that react to the waves of a large sound emitter. Cortázar's story in this book brings together many facets of the human personality in a constant reflection on the importance of literature in people's lives.

With his best-known book, this distinguished writer refers us to so many other forms of cultural expression (the arts), a circumstance that reveals a rich range of realities, inclinations, predilections and affections in what constitutes a sum of universes that make it of an inexhaustible abundance.

Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, in August 1914, when the world was in the opening months of the First World War. The son of an official who worked at the Argentine embassy in Brussels, Cortázar was a precocious reader and writer who, at just 9 years of age, had already written his first mini-novel, in addition to spending hours reading his Little Larousse dictionary. The genres where the writer ventured ranged from the novel to the short story, passing through poetry and the short story. He also worked as a translator for UNESCO because of the facility he had to speak and interpret English and French.

The admiration he felt for the work of his compatriot and brilliant writer, Jorge Luis Borges, was limited only to the field of literary creation because both were at the opposite end of the spectrum of political thought. Borges was an individualist who, in principle, said he dissented from any dictatorial regime, however he did not experience any unease when receiving decorations from illegitimate governments, a situation that provoked a furious repudiation on the part of Cortázar, a self-confessed sympathizer of leftist movements.

Among the best-known works of Julio Cortázar , must be mentioned without omission:the tales of him Bestiary (1951), Endgame (1956), Octahedron (1974), Somebody out there (1977), the novels of him Hopscotch (1963), Sixty-two, model to assemble (1968) and its miscellaneous Around the day in eighty worlds (1967) and Territories (1978).

Cortázar, who signed some of his works under the pseudonym Julio Denis, was an intellectual reference and model of rebellion for a large number of writers of later generations. The fractious nature of this phenomenon of universal literature could be summed up, in some way, in his own words: “For me, words are not just that, words. On the contrary, a journey begins with a word, a journey full of mystery that I can only solve sometimes. One of the things that is clear to me is that I seem not to be made to accept things as they are given to me” . Nothing could be closer to this literary genius than this description he made of himself, an eternal rebel and creator who taught us to observe, elucubrate and conclude.

Julio Cortázar He physically ceased to exist 30 years ago, in Paris, on February 12, 1984, but his work is still valid in the collective that loves good literature.