“A diez cuadras de Rivadavia comenzaba la pampa”3 (“La pampa is ten blocks away from Rivadavia”). The convergence between the countryside and the city in aguafuertes porteñas4 by Roberto Arlt

Abstract

Roberto Arlt, the Argentinian writer, started to write his column “Aguafuertes porteñas” a few days after the newspaper El Mundo was established, in May 1928. As it is stated in the title, the chronicler has showed in these articles the different sides of the city undergoing the process of modernization. Thus, an endless number of different urban settings may be found within the corpus: visual images from downtown where neon signs are glowing, port views and rural landscapes. Regarding this, the present article aims at examining the aguafuertes devoted to the description of the margins of the city in order to analyze how and in relation to which graphic and plastic images of the period the writer represents in his texts that space lingering between the countryside and the city. Therefore, it will be observed that the representations of the urban margins designed by Arlt coincide with the rough neighborhood described in tango lyrics by Enrique González Tuñón, with those corner shops painted in pink and open skies depicted in the first poems by Jorge Luis Borges, and with lots of press images and artwork by artists during the same period (Pío Collivadino, Lino E. Spilimbergo, Horacio Marcho, Horacio Cóppola, among others.)