by Antonio Porchia
259 aphorisms from Antonio Porchia's Voces - the only book he wrote, revised across seven editions over twenty-three years. Carpenter, basket-maker, port-worker, printer in Buenos Aires; the most quietly read aphorist of the twentieth century. Bilingual: W.S. Merwin's English alongside the Spanish original.
tags: porchia, voces, voices, aphorism, argentina, merwin, bilingual
- THE COMPLETE -
VOCES
Voices
1885 - 1968
translated from the Spanish by
W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press · bilingual edition · 2003
“Yo sé lo que les he dado a ustedes; no sé lo que ustedes han recibido.”
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
259 aphorisms · arrow-keys to turn pages
“Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance”
- Situado en alguna nebulosa lejana hago lo que hago, para que el universal equilibrio de que soy parte no pierda el equilibrio
Antonio Porchia was born in 1885 in Conflenti, a hill village in Calabria, and emigrated to Argentina at sixteen with his widowed mother and six younger siblings. He worked as a carpenter, a basket-maker, a port labourer, and finally as a printer in a Buenos Aires shop. He never learned to type. He wrote his sentences out by hand on small pieces of paper, refined them slowly, and kept them in folders.
He published one book in his lifetime - Voces. The first edition appeared in 1943 in a print run of a few hundred, paid for by his brother. He kept revising it. Over the next twenty-three years, six more editions appeared, each adding new lines and dropping or rewriting old ones. The final edition came out in 1966; he died in 1968. There is no second book and there will not be one. Porchia wrote one book his whole life.
He was unknown outside Argentina until Roger Caillois translated him into French in 1949. Borges read him and said he was un escritor genial - "a genius writer". Cortázar quoted him. Patti Smith carried Voices with her and read from it during the years she was writing Just Kids. W.S. Merwin found him in the late 1960s, attempted to visit him in Buenos Aires, and arrived too late - Porchia was already dead. Merwin translated him anyway, and kept revising the translation until the bilingual Copper Canyon edition of 2003.
Porchia's aphorisms are short - usually one sentence, occasionally two. They are not polemical, like Hitchens; they are not satirical, like Lichtenberg; they are not arguments for a position, like Taleb. They are observations, often paradoxical, sometimes mystical, sometimes plain. The closest neighbour on the shelf is the Tao Te Ching. The voice is whisper-quiet and very slow.
He works almost entirely with abstractions - I, you, truth, time, the world, shadow, light - and almost never names a particular thing. The sentences move by reversal: X is, but its opposite is also X. Before I travelled my road I was my road. I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received. The form is unmistakeable; you can recognise a Porchia line in three seconds. What you cannot do is paraphrase it. The compression is the point.
The aphorisms below are presented bilingually - Merwin's English on top, Porchia's Spanish underneath. Toggling Spanish off in the tab row gives you a cleaner English-only view. The themes - world, self, time, words, love - are loose; most aphorisms touch more than one. Porchia is best read in small doses: pull one with the random button, sit with it, then close the tab.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI