Eloy Armesto made his critical debut for Hendiadys and was afterwards encouraged to write for less boring journals by Cristóbal Niaris and, above all, Annick Bérrichon. Author of valuable works of fiction: (The Prince of Modesty, Tatami, Sensei, Progress [[Vienna while in Prague]]) (novels). Pretérito anterior (Past Perfect) collects all his critical works to date.
The Meaulnes, Edgar Alain: the journal’s first exegete and faithful apologist. Berna, while in Riga.
Biruté Aurigón: the first lady to penetrate the virile cloister of Agraphia—patterned after a confessional — was this Cuban exile living in Buenos Aires. She was married to Virgilio Anscombe Melián, who held a diplomatic post at the (…) embassy. In the early fifties she was officially Urlihrt’s lover. All her books, which anticipate magic realism, merit republication. They are: Sepúlveda and us, The Tales of Jeremiah (children’s), The Dazzling Kingdom, The Bone and the Salt, She Recovered at Home (Casa de las Américas Prize), Beyond Them were All, The Fruit of Yesterdays, Spring of Ashes, The Statuette Prince (children’s), Migraines and other Private Weaknesses, George Gershwin (illustrated biography).
Zi Benno: nom de plume of the author of a gigantic work entitled, The Epsilom (or My Scruples), a cycle of almost four hundred novels (among them, The Surface of Venus, The Sirius Point of View, The Anecdotal Father, The Times, A Small Wonder, The Spartan Minutes, The Ionian Spy, The Gay Physicist, For a Terrible Theatre, Without Sensing that they Call Me, The Chance Encounter of V[irgilio] P[iñera] and T[ennessee] W[illiams] at the Poolside Surrounded by Guests, The Ankles of Memory, Mexican Journal, High Jump, Embroidered with Cadmium Thread, Mortuga, The Snail, The Winding, By the Grace of Terence, Fossil Chamber, The Unfortunate, An Adaptation, The Patrol, Ghetto Bosses, Age of Fractals, The Intellectual Hoard, In Search of Madame Tussaud, Tabitha Salieri, The Bearcat’s Search, The Mongoose’s Pagoda, Titanium Thigh, etc.)
Shortly after his death (September 11, 2003), when the identity of this prolific and well-regarded (though still poor) writer was revealed, those who didn’t know the man by his real name — a few close friends — were astonished: César Quaglia.
Constantin Beret (1899–1966). “For all exiled Russian writers, the German word Zeitgeist is a fairy with no counterpart,” wrote Beret, christened Constantin by his fantasist mother, who was an admirer of his homonymous precursor, Balmont. He even wrote a work in Russian, French, and English in which he homelized on this maxim throughout, although it had failed to conquer his imagination, an environment inimical to fairies. He dedicated himself to showcasing his style, which tended more to the playful and suggestive than the polemical and invective, in his first collection of short stories, Broken Mirror (from which “Semblance” is taken), which remains the best place to encounter at once his elusive heroines, his borrowed moneylenders, his transgressions, and predictable use of candelabra. He also wrote a tedious biography of Lermontov (translated into Spanish with the title, El héroe sin tiempo), which cemented his reputation in France. The translation of “Semblance” was attributed to Belasario Tregua, with multiple emendations by Urlihrt, Luini, and someone else. Of Beret’s many works, the Agraphia committee used always to recommend three titles: Rhapsody in Pink, Symmetry and the Diabologhs, Hotel Abîme.
Annick Bérrichon (1888–2000)
Eloísa Betelgeuse (1950–1979) a.k.a. Eliza Beetlejuice (née Consuelo Inés Maspero), author of The Chysalid Initiation, Perspective in Botteghe, Catalogue of the Annunciation. Committed suicide on November 22, 1974, in Buenos Aires. Publication in French [?] and English earned her a universal reputation for … A sequence of posthumous poems, edited and published in 1980 with the title, Gris gris. Tango Elegies. The author of this note first encountered her famous sestina in 1997, and it was [almost immediately] translated into French by … Bettina Agutter.
Deborah Dubois Verdoux
Letter to Artemisia Gentileschi
Hilarión Curtis Ertebehere: A writer, dead almost six decades. Agraphia’s most assiduous contributor and its Canterville ghost. Indeed, he was more than just a contributor to Nicasio Urlihrt, who said he was “the legend I’d wanted to be” … To his other descendants, Curtis was just another Argentine writer, but according to another exegete, Federico Prosan, he was “The most extraordinary Latin American writer you can imagine: typical and, at the same time, completely atypical.” Although none of Urlihrt’s forefathers had his surname, it is certain he’s Curtis’s direct descendent, his grandson.
(See also “The Seychelles.”)
Urlihrt was a German from Bavaria: proof in the Almanach de Gotha
Eccles, Ciaran: wrote under countless pseudonyms, including Lord Swimmingpool, Eliseo Arias, Sabás Salazar, Sal Simpson.
Oliverio Lester: (see Liborio Treles).
Cora Beatriz Estrugamou. Primary studies at the Mallincrodt College then, immediately afterwards, lottery of cards, escoba de 15, truco, canasta, card routines. Backgammon. Chess. Go, Mahjong and Tarot, luck and anarchy. Never learns to draw. First happy book: Unfavorable feast. Later: We Visited, Sleep of Night, Original Sins.
Her poetical works. Her versatility. The little that’s known about her. The pseudonyms.
A Night is the Lifetime Stars (Calderón), Biography of the Imagination, Original Sins …
The Place of Apparitions, her unfinished novel and a smattering of short stories, and The Times, which collects all her theatrical works (Kropotkin’s Closet, etc), published under the pseudonyms, Clara Gazul, Elena Sombra. There are some legendary stories about Elena, some disseminated by her ex-husband, but it is certainly untrue that she resurfaced in Italy as the interior designer of the Gnu house (which her ex-husband, by then senile and reduced to a state of infancy, thought a belated tribute) (Principles of the Imagination on the Other Side of Sleep, translated into Spanish in the early seventies, in Chile).