Antonio Porchia

Antonio Porchia was born in Italy and emigrated to Argentina after the death of his father. He began working as a basketweaver at the age of fourteen and later bought and operated a print shop with his brother. Voices, his only book, was first published in a small, private edition in 1943 and was expanded and republished in 1947. It caught the attention of a noted French critic who assumed that Porchia must be a scholar of Kafka and Buddhism, rather than a self-educated, humble man who loved to tend his garden. Porchia died in Buenos Aires in 1968.