From The God of the Bulls in Six Problems for Don Isidoro by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares.
Unlike the reader, Parodi was unacquainted with Carlos Anglada. Don Isidro had not looked into the sonnets of The Senile Pagodas (1912) or the pantheistic odes of I Am All Others (1921) or the capital letters of I Spy with My Little Eye (1928) or the telluric novel The Cahiers of a Cowhand (1931) or a single one of the Hymns for Millionaires (five hundred numbered copies, plus the popular Catholic Boy Scouts Press edition, 1934) or the Antiphon of the Loaves and Fishes (1935) or—outrageous as it may seem—the learned imprint of Test Tube Editions, Inc. (Loose Leaves of a Diver, Collected and Edited by the Minotaur, 1939).* It pains us to confess that in the course of twenty years of imprisonment, Parodi had not had time to study Carlos Anglada’s Itinerary, The Genesis and Development of a Lyric Poet. In this indispensable study, José Formento, advised by the master himself, documents Anglada’s various periods: his modernist beginnings; his assimilation (at times transcription) of Joaquin Belda; his pantheistic fervor of 1921 when, thirsting for complete communion with nature, the poet rejected any sort of footwear and limped, bruised and bleeding, among the flower beds of his attractive villa out in Vicente López; his rejection of impersonal intellectualism—those now celebrated years when Anglada, in the company of a governess and a Chilean version of D. H. Lawrence, paid many an intrepid visit to the lakes in Palermo Park, childishly dressed in a sailor suit and armed with a hoop and a scooter; his Nietzschean reawakening, which germinated in Hymns for Millionaires, a work that was based on an article by Azorín and upheld aristocratic values but which Anglada would ultimately disown when he became the popular catechumen of the Eucharistic Congress; and finally, his altruistic forays into the provinces, where the master submits to the scalpel of criticism the latest unpublished generation of poets, for whom Test Tube Editions, Inc., provides a forum thanks to its nearly one hundred subscribers and projected handful of thin-nish booklets.
*Carlos Anglada’s commendable bibliography also comprises the following: the crude naturalistic novel Drawing-Room Flesh (1914), the magnanimous palinode Drawing-Room Spirit (1914), the long since superseded manifesto Words to Pegasus (1917), the travel notes In the Beginning Was the Pullman Car (1923), and the four numbered numbers of the review Zero (1924-27).
Extracts 