Chad W. Post of the Three Percent blog, an excellent source of information on literature in translation, is in Buenos Aires for the annual book fair and a meeting of foreign editors.

Our schedule is packed”“starting tomorrow morning at 9:30, we have meetings from 10am till 7pm (or later) every day of the week. And no scheduled tango dancing”“all literary meetings.

You can follow his updates.

As someone with Irish ancestry (way, way back), I’ve written a bit before about Irish immigration to Argentina. A great resource for this topic is the wonderful Irish Migration Studies in Latin America (IMSLA).

The latest issue of IMSLA, Sporting Traditions in Latin America and Ireland, focuses largely on Argentina. In his introduction to the issue, guest editor John Kennedy explains

As the articles in this journal demonstrate, the contribution of the Irish and subsequently Irish-Argentines to the sporting landscape was varied and wide-ranging. Many Irish people who worked for British-owned railways or businesses were either co-founders or members of the first sports institutions, initially cricket clubs and later football and rugby clubs.

Even if you don’t have a strong interest in sports, there are a lot of fascinating historical insights about Buenos Aires and Argentina in these well-researched articles.

Who are the legendary figures of Buenos Aires? Obviously, Eva Peron is the most known (along with hubby Juan). Among those who read, Borges is legendary. Among those who dance tango, there’s Gardel.

Buenos Aires has great old architecture but are any of the architects of Buenos Aires really legendary, the likes of Louis Sullivan or Gaudí?

Actually, this really isn’t about Buenos Aires. The main reason behind this post is to provide an opportunity to quote a passage from a novel by James Salter that I’m reading. Light Years (recently reissued by Penguin and with an introduction by Richard Ford) is about the marriage of Viri and Nedra. Viri is a New York architect:

He could not be Sullivan, he could not be Gaudí. Well, perhaps Gaudí, who lived to that old age which is sainthood, an ascetic old age, frail, slight, wandering the streets of Barcelona, unknown to its many inhabitants. In the end he was struck by a streetcar and left unattended. In the bareness and odor of the charity ward amid the children and poor relations a single eccentric life was ending, a life that was more clamorous than the sea, an everlasting life, a life which was easy to abandon since it was only a husk; it had already metamorphosed, escaped into buildings, cathedrals, legend.