In 1955, Borges stated that "Lugones was and continues to be the greatest Argentine writer." Here's a sample of Lugones' writing:

Soon we were forced to abandon this hope in deference to a spectacle as desolate as it was dangerous.

It was a troop of lions, the fierce survivors of the desert, which had repaired to the city as if it were an oasis, furious with thirst, crazed by the cataclysm.

Thirst and not hunger infuriated them, since they passed by without noticing us. And in that state they circled and circled. Nothing revealed the lugubriousness of the catastrophe as revealingly as they.

Bald as mangy cats, their manes reduced to pitiful wisps of singed strands, their flanks seared unevenly, giving them the comic disproportion of half-clothed clowns wearing oversized masks, their tails standing on end and twitching, like those of rats in flight, their pustulous paws dribbling blood -- all this declared in the clearest terms their three days of horror beneath the celestial lash, at the mercy of the insecure dens which proved unable to protect them.

They prowled the dry precincts with a human derangement in their eyes, abruptly meandering from extinguished well to extinguished well; until finally they sat down in the dust, dropping onto their haunches, blistered muzzles in the air, eyes glazed over in a wandering stare filled with desolation and with eternity, questioning the sky, I am sure of it, as they started to roar with unendurable abjection.

Ah...nothing, not the cataclysm with its horrors, nor the clamor of the moribund city was so horrific as this lament of the beasts atop the ruins. Those roars had contained evidence of speech. They cried with who knows what unconscious and deserted sorrows, to some obscure divinity. In the succinct souls of the beasts the fear of the incomprehensible was added to the terrors of death. If everything else remained the same, the daily sun, the eternal sky, the familiar desert, why was everything burning up and why was there no water...? And lacking any idea whatever of the relationship of these phenomena, their horror was blind, which is to say, even more frightful. The conveyance of their pain was elevated by a certain vague notion of forethought, before that sky from which the infernal rain had been falling; and their plaintive roars unmistakably asked what tremendous thing had been the cause of their affliction. Ah...those roars, the only aspect of grandeur kept by these diminished brutes: what a comment on the secret horror of the catastrophe; what an interpretation of the irremediable pain of eternal solitude, eternal silence, eternal thirst...

From "The Firestorm," a story found in Strange Forces: The Fantastic Tales of Leopoldo Lugones, translated from the Spanish and with a foreword by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2001, in the series Discoveries). Please read my interview with Alter-Gilbert, in which he talks about Lugones. Strange Forces was first published as Las fuerzas extrañas in 1906.

Cover image: "The Visionary" by Jerry Wayne Downs.

Kirkus sums up the book: "A tantalizing collection of 12 brief stories by [an] Argentinian fiction writer and poet (1874–1938) whose baroque style and fixation on 'paranormal' experiences and phenomena link him with such distinctive kindred spirits as Poe, Avram Davidson, Uruguayan surrealist Horacio Quiroga, and H. P. Lovecraft. As in the latter's horror tales, Lugones'... scientists and visionaries... pay a steep price for dabbling in arcane mysteries better left unsolved.... Translator Alter-Gilbert's affectionate foreword assures us that many more of Lugones' stories remain to be translated. Readers of this highly entertaining volume will await them eagerly."

Earlier this year Oxford University Press published Lugones' Selected Writings (translated by Sergio Waisman) in their Library of Latin America series.

I quote here from Alter-Gilbert's foreword to Strange Forces, which expands on what he discusses in the interview:

The works of the German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Adelbert von Chamisso, who so influenced Poe, also, no doubt, influenced Lugones' own forerunners in the long and rich tradition of Argentine fantastic literature. Lugones' friend and mentor Eduardo Holmberg had authored an excellent collection of fantastic tales as early as 1870. Other Argentine predecessors include Miguel Cané, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduardo Wilde, Carlos Olivera, Carlos Monsálve, and Carlos Octavio Bunge. All were crafting outstanding tales of horror, fantasy, and science fiction well in advance of the appearance of Strange Forces. Lugones, in turn, would set a pattern for all the practitioners of imaginative fiction to follow, consciously or unconsciously exerting influence on Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and others down through Luisa Valenzuela, Fernando Sorrentino, and Ana Maria Shua. The difference between Lugones and other authors in this line was that for Lugones, his notions of supernatural operations and secret forces were not merely framing devices or dramatic pretexts on which to hang his stories, but actual verities; confirmed truths to which he whole-heartedly subscribed.

The foreword ends:

Nearly one hundred years after they were written, these coruscating tales owe their enduring power to a mind which wrought them with a nobility of conception, vividness of construction, and lyricism in the telling only a true poet could bring to bear. But more significantly still, remains the message at the heart of these lasting works of art—and it is essentially pessimistic—the gloomy reminder that, like Verne's Captain Nemo or Wells' denizens of the dismal future -- man has been sentenced to an eternally recurring punishment for crossing boundaries he was not meant to cross, as has been happening ever since Adam plucked the first forbidden fruit.

Finally, this comes from the Lugones' bio in William E. Colford's 1962 anthology Classic Tales from Spanish America (another handy little paperback):

Lugones' life was a constant inner struggle: he was at war with the world and with himself. Starting out as an anarchist and then a zealous international Socialist, he passed through the political and intellectual wringer until he came out an ardent Catholic nationalist. And in his literary ideology he went from a kind of neo-gongorism through romanticism and symbolism to realism. Hopelessly embittered, he finally committed suicide.