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MAXIMILIANO GREGORIO-CERNADAS
comprehensive and complex issues of the human being, which is clearly
reflected in the prolific senses to which the term refers as a typical polysemic
concept.
On the other hand, already from its cradle, the concept “identity”, which
etymologically descends from the Latin word identitas, and this from idem,
which means “the same”, anticipates the prejudice of the single explanation.
In other words, the concept “identity” seems to take sides in the ontological
discussion, even before any discussion about its sense is begun.
But in my opinion that doesn’t inevitably mean that we are forced to choose
between one comprehensive perspective or many singular ones in order to
cope with such complexity. On the contrary, the methodological basis of
my thesis is that the intricate nature of the topic deserves exploring with a
diagonal approach. I will hence propose here that a poetical perspective could
get over either the hard glare of sociology or the abstractions of philosophy as
well, with which identity is usually associated.
Art as an alternative way of reflection, postulated brilliantly by minds of
the scale of Aldous Huxley, is perfectly suited to light up some special quests
of the Geistwissenschaften, as the Germans prettily called them, such as the
concept identity requires. As Saint-John Perse once stated at his Nobel Price
ceremony, poetic intuition as a tool of knowledge is like a pack of hounds
hunting for truth on the border of science. One of the most famous 20th
century hunters in this hazy frontier was the Argentine poet Jorge Luis
Borges, superbly gifted to follow the trail of big game spiritual issues like
human identity.
But he did not restrain his vision to a mere all-inclusive, cold and impersonal
approach. On the contrary, he was passionately involved in the entangled
question of Argentine identity, around which he wrote unsurpassed pages
during the first half of the 2°* century. In this regard, Borges was from the
1920s on, a genuine mirror of the Argentine society’s identity concerns. This
could be the matter of a whole international conference on its own, but I would
dare to sum it up in this way. Between the second half of the 19" century
and the first half of the 20 century, millions of people escaping from deep
dramas like wars, famines and persecution, in which they had lost their past
and their identities, search desperately in Argentina for a way to be others.
While the Argentine state provided them with a “national” way of being
Argentinian, Borges built, not without zigzagging first, a rather universal way
of being Argentinian, with which none of the immigrant identities could feel
uncomfortable.
Amidst this radiant construction, Borges did something that may look
humble in the context of his complete work, but is gigantic for our local
purpose. He conceived one poem which threads three interesting elements for
those of us living in Budapest: Argentine and Hungarian identity concerns,
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