I.4.3 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1054178
American historian and social critic Waldo Frank (1889–1967) delivered “Palabras pronunciadas en la comida de bienvenida en Buenos Aires, después de los discursos de Alfredo Colmo (Presidente del Instituto Cultural Argentino-Norteamericano) y Leopoldo Lugones (Presidente de la Asociación de Escritores Argentinos)” at a dinner welcoming him to Buenos Aires during his lecture-tour of Latin America in 1929. There, Frank articulated his vision for a unified America in spiritual and aesthetic terms. Although Alfonso Reyes, who was Mexico’s ambassador to Argentina, had first introduced Frank to the Latin American intellectual community, Argentinean editor Samuel Glusberg and Peruvian cultural theorist José Carlos Mariátegui, among others, were the organizers of the tour. This text was first published as part of Primer mensaje a la América Hispana, a compilation of Frank’s Latin American speeches edited by José Ortega y Gasset under the Revista de Occidente imprint [(Madrid, 1930), 15–23] and on which this English version is based. Frank wrote his speeches in English; however, only the Spanish translations by Glusberg, Eduardo Mallea, Salvador Novo, and Gilberto Owens survive.
. . .
THE TWO EXEMPLARY MEN1 WHO HAVE WELCOMED ME this night know quite well that some of my opinions differ from theirs. Do not think they are not aware of this. I recognize with lively and overt satisfaction how much their attitude honors them—just as it honors all of you, in your generosity, the generosity of the strong. I will do whatever I can to deserve it, saying what I must say, without distrust or compromise.
Nevertheless, do not expect a full discourse from me this night. I would like to believe that today I find myself among friends, old friends to be sure, given that I have known you in letters and in spirit for a long time. It is surely impossible to deliver speeches to your friends. Of course you may count on their good will; nevertheless, this does not keep a speech from becoming an unpardonable offense. I need all your good will and I believe I can count on it. Because, although I feel at home among you all, I am very far from feeling comfortable in your language. This is why I do not wish to address you in English, even though you would understand me more easily. . . . It was just a few years ago that I spent a few months in Spain; more recently, I spent a few weeks in Mexico: I have here all my learning, without taking into account the hidden books I read (many of them yours); and, above all, my love for the spirit of Spain and that of Hispanic America, which is embodied in your language. For these reasons you will have to pardon me if I torment you by tormenting your beautiful language. Sometimes it seems that brothers were made to torment one another.
I am here, my friends, chiefly because I am an artist. I did not come to preach or to dish out anything. I am here because creation is the most important thing to me in the world: aesthetic creation, spiritual creation. And it has been some time that I have felt the need to create something here, among you all, with my own means and in my own humble way. America is a potential organism: completely latent. It is only now that it can be said to be more than a mere word. And America must be created by artists. I mean artists of all kinds: artists of thought and of word, of architecture, of the visual arts, of music; and also artists of the law, of harmony, and of action. Only artists can create America, and only the measure of success they have in their creative task will determine if politicians and critics will be able to further develop all that these artists bring forth. The measure of success that artists have in creating America will determine if the peoples of America will be able to feel and enjoy their country. And this is, for me, the principal goal: an America that is conceived, felt, and enjoyed by all the American peoples. Now you see just how ambitious I am. I admit it. It does not matter to me what personal success I might enjoy in the task of creating America. What I do know is that there is no task more worthy of being undertaken. There is no heroism or sacrifice in what I do. I am simply devoted to the work that most pleases and excites me. I find satisfaction in the work itself.
I could, in this modern world, dedicate myself to many other things. I could dedicate myself to earning money, for example, or to making myself as popular as possible, or to inciting and indulging my senses. Or I could shut myself in an ivory tower, to commune with a lofty and secret Muse or with some superior and elusive God. But it has been some time that I have considered such activities much less worthy than the other goal: the one that calls to all of us who feel ourselves to be American. We are the children of all the ancient worlds. There is no culture—Mediterranean, Nordic, Oriental—whose essence has not imbued our minds. But we are also the potential progenitors of a new culture. And it is not difficult to choose between the joy of being a son and the joy of being a father! And so it is our joy and our obligation to create this new world; and, given that it will be our creation, we will truly be able to call it America.
You see that this will be a work of art, in the most ample and truest sense of the word. Art entails beauty. But the appreciation of beauty is nothing more than an awareness of life; beauty is the conscious participation in life. The America we should create must then be more conscious, more alive—that is: more beautiful—than any world of the past.
Let us take as an example Greece, India, or Egypt. They were certainly all great civilizations, each in their turn. But how small a portion of humanity really contributed to the consciousness and beauty of each of those worlds! In Greece, a few patricians laid the foundations of their beautiful creation on a dark mass of slaves. In India and Egypt, only the men of the holy caste laid claim to the sacred light, jealously hiding it from the blind, anonymous masses. And it was not only the majority of men who were exiled from the conscious and active splendor of those cultures, but the women as well. These were not cultures of humanity; they were mere cultures of class, of the tiny, insolent minorities that exploited everything. And in almost all the values and ideologies that we have inherited, we find this same sense of exploitation, this dualism, this exclusivity. It cannot even be said that the earth has seen a race of men that lives wholly under the same light. Until that day arrives, the human race will live as one mutilated: it will be as a body separated from its soul, like a body only partly nourished by food and light, while another part languishes with neither.
America was founded to produce this human culture. Why? Because this dream is for all the ages. Such an undertaking seems more inspiring to me than any other. And I find the most humble participation in this lofty undertaking entirely superior to anything else! Our problem consists in creating MORE LIFE. Deep down, this is the essence of the arts: more light and more life.
. . .
You see I speak to you all openly: I want you to receive me as a brother. But let there be no mistake. I want it to be very clear among us that sometimes I am critical—and I can criticize harshly—but my deepest motivation is always to create beauty, that beauty born of truth; to create life, and at every moment more life, that life whose awareness and whose experience we recognize by the name of beauty.
There is another point I wish to clarify. I am, in my own country, an uncompromising critic. To such a degree, that some foreigners who know only a fragment of my work, or just a few translated pieces, suppose that I have no love for my country. But the truth is that all my critical works regarding life in the United States were inspired by the love I have for my country; and, even more so, by the faith in my country’s great destiny. If it were not for this love and this faith, I would never have become a critic: I feel much happier writing stories and novels. If it were not for this love and this faith, I would have followed the easy advice that my European friends—those who cannot share my faith and love for the United States—, and I would have gone to live in Europe, like so many other American artists.
The errors and vices of the United States are, in great part, the dominant features of the whole modern world and nothing more than that: a world that stands in the full chaos of transition. As I hope to demonstrate to you all, this era that is proudly called the modern era, is essentially one of chaos and transition. The features of modernity are emphasized in the United States because our energy, our tremendous will and our spirit sharpen and make visible the contours of our being and our actions. In the desire to create this new world, in the effort to work for its creation, and in the sheer capacity for creation itself, there is no region in the Americas—no region on all the Earth—superior to the United States. We have a mystic and exalted tradition that has never disappeared, from the days that the Jesuits and Puritans arrived on our northern shores. This tradition has suffered changes and failures; and it will suffer more still with regard to form. It is a tradition of an ideal that has yet to reach its goal. But neither the tradition nor the ideal has perished. Our great authors belong to this tradition and it is for this ideal that they fought. And at least many of our statesmen (Roger Williams, [Thomas] Jefferson and [Abraham] Lincoln, for example) made the effort to express their aspiration [to this ideal]. And this aspiration still lives on.
. . . I love my country in a manner neither officious nor romantic. My love does consist of seeing this and not seeing that, but in trying to illuminate the whole. It is, I believe, a type of naturalism. And if I am a mystic, as I often hear myself called, I am a naturalist mystic.
I believe in life; not in those instances of life that heal or nurture me, but in life as it is, and in how it shall be. I believe, like [Argentinean writer Enrique] Espinoza, that error and evil are nothing more than insufficient knowledge. As an artist, the wholeness of creation matters to me. And I have come to you, to share more intimately with you, the creative task of our generation, which is to give life to a truly whole America.
Such an America, where conscience and conduct, however much they might vary, remain universal; where life, in its totality, will be confused with beauty, [such an America] does not yet exist.
1
Frank refers to Alfredo Colmo, president of the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Norteamericano, and to the well-known modernist writer Leopoldo Lugones.—Ed.