About Babel

Babel

Babel was an independent literary magazine founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1921 by Samuel Glusberg, who wrote under the name Enrique Espinoza. It was published in Buenos Aires for seven years, until 1928, and Glusberg later refounded it in Santiago de Chile in 1939. Subtitled a journal of art and criticism, Babel became a meeting place for leading Argentine writers and for South American and European intellectuals. This profile covers the Buenos Aires magazine and its Chilean refounding, and it is written in the past tense for the Buenos Aires period, which closed in 1928.

Glusberg's career gives Babel an unusual shape among Argentine magazines. Most Buenos Aires reviews of the 1920s lived and died with one city and one generation. Babel lived in two capitals, under one editor, across four decades of intermittent publication, a trajectory documented in biographical accounts of Glusberg that date the journal, taken as a whole, from 1921 to 1960. The Buenos Aires chapter, which is the Argentine subject of this directory entry, ran from 1921 to 1928.

Samuel Glusberg and the founding in 1921

Samuel Glusberg, 1898 to 1981, was an Argentine and Chilean writer and publisher. In 1919 he launched his first literary journal in Buenos Aires, Cuadernos América. Two years later, in 1921, he founded Babel. He conducted much of his literary work under the pseudonym Enrique Espinoza, under which he published collections of stories drawn from Jewish life, including La levita gris in 1924 and Ruth y Noemí in 1934. The double name is a practical warning for researchers: the founder of Babel appears in catalogues and in his own books under both Samuel Glusberg and Enrique Espinoza, and searches under only one name will miss part of the record.

Alongside the magazine, Glusberg founded a publishing house of the same name, Editorial Babel, to publish the journal's authors in book form. As with Sur and Editorial Sur a decade later, and with Claridad and Editorial Claridad in the same decade, the pairing of magazine and book publisher was the engine of the enterprise: the journal gathered a circle, and the house gave that circle permanence.

Editorial identity: a journal of art and criticism

Babel presented itself as a journal of art and criticism, and biographical accounts describe it as a hub for the finest Argentine writers of its time. Its pages were not confined to Argentina. It attracted literary figures from neighbouring South American countries, including the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, and European intellectuals of the stature of Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Thomas Mann are recorded among the contributors associated with the journal across its long, intermittent life. Readers should treat that contributor horizon as belonging to Babel as a whole, Buenos Aires and Santiago together, since the surviving summaries do not always separate which names belonged to which city and decade.

That breadth was the point of the title. Babel, the city of many tongues, named a magazine that intended to make languages and literatures meet: Argentine writing beside Uruguayan and Chilean writing, Spanish-American debate beside European thought, and the work of a Jewish-Argentine editor publishing, under a Spanish pseudonym, stories of Jewish life in the middle of it. In the Buenos Aires of mass immigration, where the children of immigrants were remaking Spanish-American literature, Babel's cosmopolitanism had a local root.

Babel among the magazines of the 1920s

Babel began in 1921, a year before Claridad and Proa and three years before Martín Fierro. It therefore belonged to the founding moment of the modern Argentine literary magazine, but it fitted neither of the two camps that soon dominated the story of that decade. It was not the organ of the Florida avant-garde, though its founding overlapped with ultraísmo's arrival, and it was not the organ of Boedo, though its editor's left and internationalist sympathies were closer to the world of Claridad than to art for art's sake. It was, in the taxonomy of the period, an independent literary review with its own publisher, and its independence is the quality the directory record itself stresses.

That independence had consequences for its historical visibility. The Florida-Boedo polemic gave Argentine literary history a dramatic plot in which Babel has no assigned role, and magazines without a role in that plot are easily under-read. Yet a review that could gather Quiroga and Mistral, sustain a book house and then be carried by its editor to a second capital and a second life was plainly a significant institution, and recent biographical attention to Glusberg has begun to restore it to the map of South American literary journalism.

Contents and character

The documented character of Babel is that of a serious literary review: fiction, poetry, essays and criticism, with book publication through Editorial Babel extending its authors' presence beyond the journal. Glusberg's own fiction, published as Enrique Espinoza, illustrates one strand of its world: stories of Jewish life in South America, a subject largely absent from the Florida and Boedo programmes alike. A magazine edited by a writer with that subject at the centre of his own work was structurally open to literatures and identities that the main polemics of the decade ignored.

The limits of the surviving public record should be stated openly. No verified circulation figure, issue total or complete contents index for the Buenos Aires Babel is offered in the sources used for this profile, and none is invented here. What is verified is the founder, the founding year, the subtitle and character of the journal, the companion publishing house, the seven-year Buenos Aires run to 1928, the refounding in Santiago in 1939 and the broad contributor horizon across its life. For a small independent review of the 1920s, that is a solid, if incomplete, documentary base, and it is more honest to present it as such than to pad it with unattributed detail.

Closure in Buenos Aires in 1928

The Buenos Aires Babel closed in 1928, after seven years of publication from 1921. The sources used for this profile record the closure without assigning it a single dramatic cause, and this profile does not invent one. The context, however, is visible: by 1928 the first great age of the Buenos Aires avant-garde magazine was ending, Martín Fierro had closed in 1927, and the literary generation of the early 1920s was dispersing into books, journalism and, in Glusberg's case, eventually into a second country.

Glusberg's own trajectory explains why Babel's story did not end in 1928 even though its Argentine chapter did. He remained a publisher and writer, issued Ruth y Noemí in 1934, and carried his editorial project with him when his life moved to Chile. Few Argentine editors of his generation rebuilt their magazine abroad; that he did so is the clearest evidence of how central Babel was to his life's work.

The Santiago refounding of 1939

In 1939 Glusberg refounded Babel in Santiago de Chile. The Chilean Babel continued, intermittently, the identity of the Buenos Aires original: a journal of art and criticism under the same editor, gathering South American and European voices. Biographical summaries that date Babel overall from 1921 to 1960 reflect this combined, two-city, intermittent life. For directory purposes the distinction must be kept clean: the Argentine outlet documented in this entry is the Buenos Aires Babel of 1921 to 1928; the Santiago magazine from 1939 is its direct continuation under its founder, but it is a Chilean chapter, and Argentine counts of issues or years should not silently absorb it.

The refounding also places Babel in a larger South American pattern. Editors and writers crossed the Andes in both directions throughout the twentieth century, carrying magazines, publishing houses and readerships with them, and Babel is an early and clear case of a magazine as portable institution, dependent less on a building or a company than on one editor's correspondence, taste and persistence.

Research notes and documentary limits

Researchers using Babel should begin from its two names and its two cities. Catalogue searches should be run under both Samuel Glusberg and Enrique Espinoza, and holdings should be checked in both Buenos Aires and Santiago, because a run catalogued as a single intermittent title from 1921 to 1960 in biographical sources in fact comprises a Buenos Aires magazine of 1921 to 1928 and a Santiago continuation from 1939. Conflating the two would inflate the Argentine record; separating them entirely would erase the continuity of editor, title and purpose that Glusberg himself maintained. This profile has kept the Argentine entry focused on the Buenos Aires years while recording the refounding in full, which is the treatment the verified evidence supports.

Legacy

Babel's legacy rests on its editor and its openness. It gave Buenos Aires, at the very start of the 1920s magazine boom, a literary review of art and criticism that looked outward to South America and Europe without enlisting in the decade's loudest quarrel. Through Editorial Babel it turned periodical acquaintance into books. Through its Chilean second life it became one of the few Argentine-founded magazines to achieve a genuinely binational history. And through Glusberg's own fiction as Enrique Espinoza, its circle contributed a Jewish South American voice to a literary culture still defining who counted as an Argentine writer.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these: Babel, Buenos Aires, founded 1921 by Samuel Glusberg, writing as Enrique Espinoza, independent literary review of art and criticism with a companion publishing house, Buenos Aires run closed 1928, refounded by Glusberg in Santiago de Chile in 1939.