Estela Canto

 ( 1915 Births ) 

In 1944, at the house of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, Canto was introduced to Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was, at this time, already well regarded in literary circles. Initially he took little notice of Canto. Though she observed him with admiration and curiosity, she had no interest in forming romantic attachments to intellectuals. On their second meeting at Bioy's house, Borges asked her out. After an evening of dancing and chatting they discovered, among other things, a common admiration for George Bernard Shaw. Borges fell in love with Canto and wrote her a number of romantic letters, which Canto would later publish in her 1989 book about their relationship. In this book, Canto said of their relationship:

Borges' mother Leonor Acevedo Suárez disliked Canto on account of her sexual liberality and casual affairs with men. Nevertheless, Borges proposed to her. She replied:

Borges' infatuation with Canto faded with time. Many years later, they reestablished contact and became friends. Borges dedicated his collection The Aleph to Canto and gave her the original manuscript as a gift. According to her memoir of their relationship, she responded that the manuscript would be worth a lot more after his death; Borges responded, "If I was a gentlemen, in this moment I would go to the bathroom and you would hear a gunshot." It is widely assumed that Canto was the inspiration for the character of Beatriz Viterbo in the central story "The Aleph", the narrator's unrequited love.http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-148999 Adiós al amor de Borges, El Tiempo, 12 June 1994 Canto sold this manuscript to Sotheby's for thirty thousand dollars, and it was later bought at auction by the National Library of Spain. Letraslibres.com

Canto contributed numerous translations to Sur, including selections from In Search of Lost Time. Sobre los traductores de Proust, La Nación, 6 November 2005

• 1945 El muro de mármol ("The Marble Wall")
• 1950 El retrato y la imagen ("The Portrait and the Image")
• 1953 El hombre del crepúsculo ("The Man of the Evening")
• 1956 El estanque ("The Pond")
• 1962 La noche y el barro ("The Night and the Mud")
• 1966 Isabel entre las plantas ("Isabel among the Plants")
• 1973 Los otros, las máscaras ("Others, Masks")
• 1976 La hora detenida ("The Delayed Moment")
• 1978 El jazmín negro ("The Black Jasmine")
• 1980 Ronda nocturna ("Night Patrol")
• 1982 Detrás de la medialuna ("Behind the Half-Moon", written under the pseudonym of Evelyn Clift)
• 1989 Borges a contraluz ("Silhouette of Borges")

• 1945 Premio Municipal for El muro de mármol
• 1945 Premio Imprena López por El muro de mármol

• Jorge Luis Borges
• Adolfo Bioy Casares

• Estela Canto: a portrait by Andrés Rivera. Diario Página/12, 20 April 2008.
• Estela Canto: the sabotage of "genre" in a poetics of vision by María Rosa Lojo. Revista Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 1999.