About Proa

Proa

Proa was an independent literary magazine published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1920s. It was founded in 1922 by Jorge Luis Borges and fellow ultraísta writers, and it appeared in two epochs totalling eighteen issues before closing in the 1920s. Small in size and short in life, it was nevertheless a founding document of Argentine ultraísmo and one of the first public platforms of the young Borges circle. This profile is written entirely in the past tense.

The title Proa means prow, the front of a ship. For a group of writers in their early twenties who believed Argentine literature had to be steered into new waters, the name was a declaration of intent. Proa did not aim to be a large commercial magazine. It aimed to be first, in the sense that mattered to an avant-garde: first to a new metaphor, a new poem and a new way of judging writing.

Founding in 1922

Proa was founded in Buenos Aires in 1922. Borges had returned to Argentina from Europe in 1921 carrying the doctrine of ultraísmo, which he had encountered and practised in Spain, where he had moved in the circles around Rafael Cansinos Asséns and had published an ultraísta manifesto in the Madrid magazine Vltra in May 1921. With fellow young writers he set out to give that doctrine Argentine institutions. First came Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and then Proa, a more conventional magazine in form and a more durable one in influence.

The collective editorial text that opened Proa, signed by its editors Borges, Brandán Caraffa, Ricardo Güiraldes and Pablo Rojas Paz, defined the group, its proposals, its alliances and its hopes. Scholars of Borges have treated that text as a canonical statement of the group's programme of aesthetic renewal. It declared, in substance, that its writers owed nothing to the old masters, that the First World War had overturned the old structures and institutions, and that for the first time in Argentina a generation could be formed on the margins of the canonical institutions of society. Judgement of new writing, the magazine implied, would be made among equals and contemporaries.

Two epochs and eighteen issues

Proa appeared in two epochs. The first period is generally dated 1922 to 1923 and the second 1924 to 1926, and the two together totalled eighteen issues. The exact dating of avant-garde magazines of this period can vary slightly between catalogues, because issues were irregular and small; the totals that the record supports consistently are the founding year of 1922, the two-epoch structure and the total of eighteen issues. No larger run should be claimed for it, and its importance has never rested on quantity.

Between and around its two epochs, the same circle founded and wrote for Martín Fierro, the larger and more widely circulated Florida group magazine of 1924 to 1927. Proa and Martín Fierro should therefore be read as successive and overlapping instruments of one movement rather than as rivals. Proa was the earlier, more purely literary and more intimate of the two: the workshop in which ultraísmo was argued out before it was displayed, with greater noise and reach, in Martín Fierro.

Ultraísmo as editorial programme

Ultraísmo gave Proa its poetics. In the summary Borges himself published in the Buenos Aires magazine Nosotros in 1921, the programme centred on the use of metaphor, the cutting of connective phrases and useless adjectives, the abolition of ornamental tangles, confessionalism and preaching, the synthesis of two or more images into one, a new disposition of words on the page, neologisms and technical vocabulary, the elimination of rhyme and the celebration of the objects of the modern world. Proa put that programme into practice in Argentine poems and essays and tested how far a Spanish-language poetry stripped of ornament could go.

The magazine also carried the seeds of what came after ultraísmo. Borges soon tired of the movement he had imported and began to argue for a new regionalism rooted in a metaphysical view of reality, writing about the Buenos Aires suburbs, the tango and knife fights. That turn, from European avant-garde doctrine toward a mythic Buenos Aires, began in the same years and the same circles as Proa, and the magazine is therefore a document of transition as well as of arrival.

The Borges circle

Proa belonged to the young Borges circle, and its history is inseparable from the beginnings of Borges's own career. His first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, appeared in 1923, between Proa's two epochs, with a cover engraving by his sister Norah Borges. Ricardo Güiraldes, older than the others and already respected, acted as a mentor and father figure to the Florida writers and lent the enterprise a gravity that a magazine of writers barely out of their teens could not have supplied alone. Pablo Rojas Paz and Brandán Caraffa shared the editorial work of defining the group's position.

Oliverio Girondo, whose poetry and later manifesto for Martín Fierro gave the movement its most flamboyant voice, belonged to the same united front of initiatives that Proa helped create. Girondo carried the first fruits of the group's labour to Europe, and the circle understood itself, from the start, as part of a Latin American and transatlantic conversation rather than a purely local quarrel. Proa declared itself, in the phrase preserved by Borges scholarship, as a voice that would be heard and understood by its equals and its contemporaries, wherever they were.

Reception by the established press

The established Buenos Aires press did not know quite what to do with Proa. When La Nación noticed the magazine in September 1924, it did so, as Borges scholarship has documented, with a careful or disconcerted lack of commentary, transcribing part of Proa's editorial and listing its editors and contributors without engaging its argument. When the newspaper noticed books by the young ultraístas, it likewise tended to announce them and transcribe fragments rather than judge them. That coolness is evidence, in its own way, of the split Proa had opened in the intellectual field between supporters of change and adherents of the old order.

The young writers, for their part, had little institutional power until Prisma, Inicial, Martín Fierro and Proa appeared. Together those magazines gave the new generation organs of its own, and Proa's contribution to that shift was foundational: it demonstrated that a handful of writers could found a magazine, state a programme and force the literary establishment, even if only by silence and transcription, to acknowledge that a new literature existed.

Proa and the Florida group

Proa was identified, with Martín Fierro, as a magazine of the Florida group, the avant-garde circle named for Calle Florida and the Richmond tea room where its members met, whose slogan was art for art's sake. The contrast usually drawn with the Boedo group, which favoured socially engaged art and published through Claridad, applies to Proa as much as to Martín Fierro, though Proa's smaller scale and earlier date meant it was more a poets' workshop than an arena of polemic. The great Florida-Boedo controversy was fought mainly in the mid-1920s, in and around Martín Fierro and Claridad; Proa supplied the aesthetic premises on the Florida side.

Understanding that relationship prevents two common errors. The first is to treat Proa as a minor footnote to Martín Fierro; chronologically and intellectually it came first, and its editorial statement is among the clearest manifestos of the Argentine avant-garde. The second is to treat it as Borges's magazine alone. It was a collective enterprise, and its pages and editorials were signed and shaped by a group, even if Borges's later fame has inevitably drawn the most attention back to it.

Closure in the 1920s

Proa closed in the 1920s, at the end of its second epoch. The record used for this profile does not support a single dramatic cause of closure, and none is invented here. Little magazines of the avant-garde typically ended when the movement they served dissolved into the individual careers of their founders, and that is the pattern the surrounding evidence shows: by the later 1920s Borges was moving beyond ultraísmo, Güiraldes died in 1927, Martín Fierro itself closed the same year, and the generation's energy passed into books and into the established press it had once attacked.

Borges's own later attitude to these early publications was famously severe. In later life he regretted some of them and attempted to buy up known copies of his earliest work to destroy them. That severity should not be mistaken for the historical verdict. Historians of Argentine literature treat Proa as an essential primary source precisely because it shows major writers before they became monuments, arguing in public for a literature that did not yet exist.

Legacy and documentary value

Proa's legacy is documentary and symbolic. Documentarily, its eighteen issues preserve the first collective statements of Argentine ultraísmo, early work by Borges and his circle, and the editorial that announced a generation's independence from the old masters. Symbolically, its name and its brevity have made it an emblem of the little magazine as such in Argentina: a small, poor, short-lived publication whose influence on literary history vastly exceeds its circulation and lifespan, neither of which is reliably quantified in the surviving record and neither of which is estimated here.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these: Proa, Buenos Aires, founded 1922 by Jorge Luis Borges and fellow ultraísta writers, two epochs, eighteen issues in total, organ of the young Florida circle, closed in the 1920s. It was the prow in fact as well as in name: the first Argentine magazine of the movement that remade Argentine poetry.