The editor Borges – The País.com (Spain)

Jaume Vallacorba was the editor I think he would have liked to know Jorge Luis Borges. I always found it a Borgesian editor. Their culture and literary curiosity had enough of Argentine writer. But the editor of Catalan Borges was his catalog. Books that suddenly entered the imagination of readers to sit comfortably. As if they were lifelong friends. Books, many of that miraculous catalog that often seemed invented by the editor itself.

At the industrial level, at the epidermal side you always have paper books, Jaume Vallcorba was the engineer and labor. In addition to the interior of that building proud, fundamental books, many undiscovered, raised as many planetary oblivion. Read Memories Crypt , by François-René de Chateaubriand, or Someone like cold , Ring Lardner, on which Scott Fitzgerald wrote one of his best pages, Along the way , Julien Gracq, or Alexander the Great , Robin Lane Fox, is to read, in addition to various forms of literary, autobiographical essays or sensitivity, print neatly, right down to his last editorial, symmetrical detail in composition, clean spaces in between words.

The book, as industrial object, is a treasure to keep. That know much Vallcorba. And I knew a lot of that mysterious balance between the mainland and the contents of a book. Between what we have always reserved a volume in its pages and silky and crystalline face of those same pages.

Jaume Vallcorba became its publishing activity in a landscape of expectations. What books announced for next fall we Publisher Cliff? What book we did not know existed in a remote place will kindly bibliographic announce our dear borgiano editor? For me, the ultimate gift of Cliff was editing the diary of travel in Italy musical eighteenth century English musicologist Charles Burney: Burney, meeting Mozart himself; see Mozart in near real time.

I enjoyed and learned a lot with books that lit Jaume Vallcorba. I enjoyed the Chekhov Natalia Ginsburg ; with Burning Secret , Stefan Zweig; with Aventura. A nomadic philosophy , Rafael Argullol; with Autobiography , of Chesterton; with all that rescued Danilo Kis, especially with A Tomb for Boris Davidovich ; with The two friends and poisoning , of Alfred Döblin. And I enjoyed the texts of Cervantes and Francisco Martín Rico Riquer. And with the last Simenon. And all the untold Arthur Schnitzler. And so forth.

I’m so sorry now, having never told you how much I learned from your publisher. And the gaps that helped me fill. And the debt that I can never pay you for allowing me to personally meet teenage Mozart. Thank you very much, sir editor.