Borges said that a literary work arises from reality or from another book. And he knew this well, both from extensive reading and from his own creativity, in which he sometimes started from some ancient book, fictional or not. WITH Aeneid in my memory I notice a couple of links that could not have been created without the famous background of the Latin master. He is the first Divine comedy, a product of that universal culture’s obsession with the theme of death. Dante Alighieri’s Christian Cradle leads him to rely – extremely – on the doctrine of his church, despite the fact that he is a direct successor to a Roman poem in which Greco-Roman mythology explains the afterlife.

The first tribute to the Florentine triplets is the masterful Virgilio, taken as a guide at that moment “in the middle of life’s journey”, when the soul is lost and has the opportunity to explore what may await it at death. Averno is conceived as a double territory – Elysium and Tartarus – in a poem from the 1st century BC. C. becomes the nine circles of hell, purgatory and heaven. The souls of children swarm the shores of the Styx lagoon (advancement to Limbo?), and those who have sinned for love are the first that Aeneas, the visitor, sees. These are many of Virgil’s traces in the medieval poem, which, with its critical sense, announced that the world was opening to a new age. The audacity of the author to place sinners with first and last names in places of punishment – among them the Pope – balanced fiction, tradition and novelty.

Irene Vallejo is the name of a Spanish philologist who left a mark in the middle of the pandemic with a book that knocked on the doors of countries and readers (she just received an award in China): infinity in a reed (2020). It is about the history of the appearance of the book as a valuable cultural asset and all the efforts to create, preserve and store it. The character of an expert in classical literature and its languages, and his ability to rejuvenate these data so that they reach our days, marks his texts with a beautiful, close and clear style, a delicious read.

One of the characteristics of the classics is… suggesting renewed multiplications…

I associate it with Virgil and Dante in his work Goalkeeper’s whistle (2016) as it draws its raw material from the first four tracks Aeneid to concentrate in a short novel a love story, a vision of a world without gods (giving the floor exclusively to Cupid, frozen in eternity envious of human passions), personal use of words by the lovers Aeneas and Dido. Fate burdens the hero who must found a city that will lead to great Rome, but the heart is free to decide between life and death. The best thing about the novel, in my opinion, is the inclusion of a tormented Virgil who feels unable to write an assignment for Octavius ​​Augustus, until a flash of revelation illuminates his mind.

One of the characteristics of the classics is precisely this: that it suggests renewed reproductions, that it connects discourses, that it survives under different views that turn into new flesh some works that openly reveal the water they drink and make the flow more abundant. literature (OR)