He discovered the Leica camera in Paris and took it with him as Baudelaire wore his
flâneur
eyes
,
searching for corners, homeless, lonely, public urinals or suicides ... She was Iliá Ehrenburg (Kiev, 1891-Moscow, 1967), a Russian communist who lived in the capital French with Lenin, escaped Stalin's purges, was close to Pasternak, but repudiated
Doctor Zhivago
,
and in the Spanish war, where he came as a journalist, he embraced the republican cause and believed that fascism would fall here.
He was a friend of Picasso and the surrealists.
His photographs of Paris advance Italian neorealism, they focus on the solitude of men and, when he finds them in company, his portraits insist on compassion, as if he were, in a time of precarious peace, before a concentration camp.
The result of his adventure with the Leica is a rare book that Juan Barja, editor of Abada, discovered by chance in Buenos Aires, had it translated from Russian and is now publishing in Spanish.
Ilia Ehrenburg, the man who saw it all
When the wars returned (in Spain first, in Europe soon), Ehrenburg carried out his most famous oath, that of persecuting anti-Semites everywhere, and that also led him to be anti-German. In this book,
My Paris,
that Barja, also a poet and philosopher, discovered in the studio of the gallery owner Jorge Mara in Buenos Aires, that Ehrenburg who came from everywhere (but especially from Paris, he said) is so amazed that everyday life contains such poetry that it leaves that she herself, life, constitutes a narrative that stands out without words.
The Leica follows the path it wants and the story that the poet ends up making moves as a prelude to the disasters of the wars that left millions of human beings alone in the world and particularly in the territories traversed by Ehrenburg as a soldier and journalist.
'Deep satisfaction'.
Ilia Ehrenburg
The editor Barja appreciated in this kind of graphic manuscript found in the concentration camp of history that what Ehrenburg portrayed was the Paris of Baudelaire or Boris Vian, "a pedestrian who takes the photo and writes the text", and so it was makes him one of the few authors capable of tackling both poetic tasks with the same tone of gaze.
The entire book is "a
Paris la nuit
from the time of Versailles, of the surrealists, of the prewar era, when many German intellectuals had already fled the city."
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Barja does not know what happened to the originals of these photographs, which appear in the book arranged according to the primitive design of El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Russian designer, photographer, typographer and architect, friend of the writer. Among the portraits that have the most symbolic value, says the editor, "is that camera used as a revolver barrel, or those images in which the darkened Paris is cited as a white light." It is a hug to Paris, a sad, desolate Paris, which nevertheless gets these expressions from him: "I love Paris for its intensity" or "I love Paris because everything about it is fake."
Barja was surprised that in this collection, which he considers unusual "from the first photograph", the one in Ehrenburg is not at all "the Paris of tourists", but is the poet's own city, who has been there for 13 years. , and that for this he had been accused by his compatriots of cosmopolitanism, a sin under the statutes of the followers of Stalin. It is not an eccentric book in the history of Ehrenburg, but in what it means of poetic synthesis of his own way of telling things. Here the characters don't matter. People matter, that these are everyday beings, and that cats also appear, empty streets, normal citizens who begin to exist above the rural city. The city is already a place of refuge, of imagination, of life, of everything that can excite or torment man.In the collection there is not a single interior, people are crossing the street, to meet or to say goodbye, in the middle of walks that seem to find passersby between anguish and search.
'The last musketeers', ilia ehrenburg
Barja found it in Cyrillic characters and had it translated from Russian by María Loreto Ríos Ramírez.
It is published in Spain with the same images and the same edition as the original.
“I once saw another one in English at the Ocho y Medio bookstore in Madrid.
In Spanish, as far as I know ”, says Barja,“ no one has published it before ”.