In 1963, his second novel Hopscotch-about an Argentine’s existential and metaphysical searches through the nightlife of Paris and Buenos Aires-really established Cortázar’s name.
Writers he translated included Poe, Defoe, and Marguerite Yourcenar. In Paris, he worked as a translator and interpreter for UNESCO and other organizations. It wasn’t until after Cortázar moved to Paris in 1951, however, that he began publishing in earnest. One of his first published stories, “House Taken Over,” which came to him in a dream, appeared in 1946 in a magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges. He took a degree as a schoolteacher and went to work in a town in the province of Buenos Aires until the early 1940s, writing for himself on the side. When his family returned to Argentina after the war, he grew up in Banfield, not far from Buenos Aires. A kiosk salesman, apologizing that he had no more of Cortázar’s books, held out a Carlos Fuentes novel for him to sign.Ĭortázar was born in Brussels in 1914. The bookstores on the boulevards still being open, the students hurriedly bought up copies of Cortázar’s books so that he could sign them. One night in Buenos Aires, coming out of a cinema after seeing the new film based on Osvaldo Soriano’s novel, No habra ni mas pena ni olvido, Cortázar and his friends ran into a student demonstration coming towards them, which instantly broke file on glimpsing the writer and crowded around him. Alfonsín’s cultural minister chose to give him no official welcome, afraid that his political views were too far to the left, but the writer was nonetheless greeted as a returning hero. With the victory, last fall, of the democratically elected Alfonsín government, Cortázar was able to make one last visit to his home country. Though Cortázar had lived in Paris since 1951, he visited his native Argentina regularly until he was officially exiled in the early 1970s by the Argentine junta, who had taken exception to several of his short stories. When Julio Cortázar died of cancer in February 1984 at the age of sixty-nine, the Madrid newspaper El Pais hailed him as one of Latin America’s greatest writers and over two days carried eleven full pages of tributes, reminiscences, and farewells. Interviewed by Jason Weiss Issue 93, Fall 1984
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