Maria Elena Walsh

María Elena Walsh (Villa Sarmiento, February 1, 1930-Buenos Aires, January 10, 2011) was an Argentine poet, writer, singer-songwriter, playwright and composer, considered as « living myth, cultural hero and emblem of almost every childhood.

The writer Leopoldo Brizuela has highlighted the value of her creation saying that «what was written by María Elena constitutes the most important work of all time in its genre, comparable to Lewis Carroll's Alice or Pinocchio; a work that revolutionized the way in which the relationship between poetry and childhood was understood.

Famous for her children's works, among which the character/song Manuelita the turtle and the books Tutú Marambá, El Reino del Revés stand out. i> and Dailan Kifki, she is also the author of several popular songs for adults, including Como la cicada, Serenata para la tierra de uno and The valley and the volcano. Other songs of his authorship that make up the Argentine popular songbook are The studious cow, Canción de Titina, El Reino del Revés, La Pájara Pinta, The Vaccine Song (known as The Witch of Gulubú), Queen Batata, Chacarera of Cats, Twist of the Smooth Monkey, Tea Song, In the Land of Nomeagree, The Polillal family, The executives, Zamba for Pepe, Lullaby for a ruler, Prayer to justice, Song of Walkers, among others. Among his notable albums are “Songs for me” (1963), “Songs to look at” (1964), “The Country of Nomeagreement” (1966) and “Let's play in the world” (1968), “The sun has no pockets ” (1971) or “Like the cicada” (1973). In the panorama of children's music in Latin America, she stands out alongside great masters such as the Mexican Francisco Gabilondo Soler and the Cuban Teresita Fernández. The animated film Manuelita (1999), directed by Manuel García Ferré for children, is inspired by her famous character and brings together some of her songs.

He jumped onto the public scene with the publication, at just 17 years old, of the poetry book Otoño unforgivable. Her work earned her recognition in the literary circuits of the time and the sponsorship of Juan Ramón Jiménez, who invited her to settle in the United States for a while. The experience was not easy for the author, as she recounted on several occasions. However, this trip was the first in a series of journeys that would lead to her formation as an author.

Around 1948 he was part of the literary movement of La Plata, which gathered around the publishing label Ediciones del Bosque, created by Raúl Amaral. This publishing house published some of his poetic works. Between 1951 and 1963 she formed the duo Leda y María with Leda Valladares and between 1985-1989 she was appointed by President Raúl Alfonsín to join the Council for the Consolidation of Democracy. Throughout her career she published more than 20 albums and wrote more than 50 books. Among the artists who spread María Elena Walsh's songbook, the Zupay Cuarteto, Luis Aguilé, Mercedes Sosa, Jairo, Rosa León and Joan Manuel Serrat stand out.

Now retired from music, she continued writing journalistic articles, some scripts for television and the autobiographical novels Boyfriends of yesteryear and Ghosts in the park.

Throughout his life he formed a couple with the folklorist Leda Valladares, the film director María Herminia Avellaneda and the photographer Sara Facio, with whom he lived from the early 1980s until his death.

Biography

Childhood

His father, Enrique Walsh, was an English railway employee who worked as chief accountant of the accounting department of the New Western Railway of Buenos Aires and played the piano very well. María Elena's London grandparents, David and Agnes Hoare, had arrived in the country in 1872. From English popular culture María Elena would take the nursery rhymes, traditional songs for children, such as Baa Baa black sheep or Humpty Dumpty, which her father sang to her as a child, as well as the habit of verbal constructions that characterize the British nonsense, as one of the main sources of inspiration in his work.

His mother, Lucía Elena Monsalvo, was Argentine, the daughter of an Argentine father and an Andalusian mother, and she had ten siblings. She had married her father, his second marriage, and they had two daughters together, Susana and María Elena. From his first marriage, her father also had four children.

She was raised in a large house located in the Buenos Aires town of Villa Sarmiento, in the Morón district, with patios, a chicken coop, rose bushes, cats, lemon trees, orange trees and a fig tree. That environment emanated greater freedom regarding traditional middle class education of the time. The song Fine Fideos and her first novel, Novios de antaño (1990), with autobiographical roots, are dedicated to recounting and reconstructing her childhood memories.

Precocious poetess

At the age of 12 he entered the Manuel Belgrano School of Fine Arts in the city of Buenos Aires. There she would become friends with Sara Facio, who would later become a prominent photographer and partner of María Elena in the last stretch of her life, Carmen Córdova (daughter of the critic Córdoba Iturburu) who would become an architect and Juan Carlos Distéfano, who would become a sculptor with international recognition.

Shy and rebellious, she read a lot when she was a teenager. In 1945, at the age of 15, he published his first poem in the magazine El Hogar (issue dedicated to spring), titled Elegía and illustrated by his schoolmate Elba Fábregas. That same year he also wrote in the newspaper La Nación.

In 1947, when he was 17 years old, he suffered the death of his father and published his first book, a collection of poems titled Otoño unforgivable which received the second Municipal Poetry Prize, although the jury excused itself. telling her that she had not been awarded the first because she was too young. Despite her youth, it is a notable book, which immediately drew attention to her in the Latin American literary world. It brings together poems written between the ages of 14 and 17, which surprise for their expressive maturity and a natural style, full of discoveries and lyrical games, as in "Término", where it defines itself as "a place where creativity will flourish." death."

The book was praised by critics and by some of the most important Hispanic writers, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Eduardo González Lanuza and Pablo Neruda.

After finishing her secondary studies in 1948, graduating as a Drawing and Painting teacher, she accepted the invitation of Juan Ramón Jiménez (author of Platero y yo) to visit him at his home in Maryland (United States). United States), where she would remain for six months in 1949. It was a complex experience, because Jiménez treated her mercilessly, without any consideration for her personal needs and inclinations. María Elena herself would describe that experience a few years later in these terms:

Every day I had to invent my courage to face it, to review my insignificance, to cover myself with a misery that today rebels me. I felt like I was found and doomed. I tend to evoke with grudge the people who, the greatest in the world, had my green destiny in their hands and did nothing but paralyze it. With generous intention, with protective conscience, Juan Ramón destroyed me, and had no right to make mistakes because he was Juan Ramón, and I, nobody. In the name of what should we forgive him? In the name of what he is and means, beyond the failure of a relationship.

Maria Elena Walsh.

Back in Buenos Aires and already around the middle of the century, María Elena frequented literary and intellectual circles and wrote essays in various publications.

In 1951, he published his second collection of poems, Baladas con Ángel. The book was published in the same volume with Lovers' Argument, by the equally young writer Ángel Bonomini, who at that time was María Elena's boyfriend. The volume constitutes a whole in which two lovers exchange their emotions expressed in verses.

On this occasion Walsh resorts to the ballad to construct her poetic work, a lyrical form built from the musicality of its structure, probably reflecting the influence of Jiménez. They show the poet in a moment of optimism and joy induced by love, but at the same time they reveal an underlying dissatisfaction that would soon explode. These emotions can be found in Ballad of Lost Time, where the writer expresses the anguish that had been harassing her, now calmed by the arrival of love:

Like their vain leaves
Time lost me.
Claved to the wood of another dream
They flew over me nights and days.

Pobbing me of a
distracted nostalgia
the earth, the sea, entered my eyes
and for idle tears they went out.

María Elena Walsh ("Battle of the lost time", fra., on Ballads with Angel.)

María Elena Walsh seemed to begin to define her life as one of the most promising figures in the intellectual world of Buenos Aires. However, although no one noticed it, she felt suffocated: by family and social repressions related to a sexuality that she always kept reserved for intimacy, by jealousy and small betrayals in the cultural world and by a political climate polarized between Peronism and anti-Peronism. the latter trend with which the young woman identified.

Leda and María

María Elena Walsh began her artistic and emotional association with Leda Valladares in 1951, by letter. At that time she was 21 years old, eleven younger than Valladares, a Tucumán artist related to the everyday folklore of the Northwest - sister of the legendary folklorist Chivo Valladares - and one of the first women to graduate from the National University of Tucumán. Leda was settled in Costa Rica, and invited María Elena to join her in Panama to leave together for Europe, an invitation that she accepted, abandoning her family and her intellectual environment, to embark on a path of experimentation.

In 1952 they settled in Paris and began singing folk songs from the oral tradition of the Andean region of Argentina, such as carnavalitos, bagualas and vidalas. After singing in cafes and boîtes, the duo got a contract at the famous Crazy Horse cabaret. In the capital of France they interacted with other artists such as the Chilean Violeta Parra or the American Blossom Dearie and recorded their first albums Chants d'Argentine/ Cantos de Argentina (1954). and Sous le ciel de l'Argentine/ Under the skies of Argentina (1955), with songs from oral tradition of Argentine Andean folklore, such as Dos palomitas and Huachi tori, but also with songs by Atahualpa Yupanqui —at that time based in Paris—, such as La arribeña, by Jaime Dávalos; such as El humahuaqueño, by Rafael Rossi or Viva Jujuy and by Rolando Valladares, Leda's brother.

Back in Argentina in 1956, Leda and María made an extensive tour of the Argentine Northwest where they gathered several songs that they would later record in their first two albums made in their country, Entre valles y quebradas vol 1 and Entre valles y quebradas vol 2, both from 1957. Many of those songs would become part of the folk songbook. Both albums were very well received in the circles of artists and intellectuals, such as Cuchi Leguizamón, Manuel J. Castilla, Victoria Ocampo, Atahualpa Yupanqui, María Herminia Avellaneda. The latter led the duo to appear on Channel 7 television.

At that time, differences began to appear between the two that would lead to their separation: while Leda Valladares claimed the value of indigenism and pure folklore, in the sense of anonymous creation, María Elena Walsh was inclined to create new expressions, feeding on folkloric roots, but without being strictly restricted to them, guided by the values of social justice, feminism and pacifism.

In 1958 they released their fifth album Canciones del tiempo de Maricastaña, where Spanish folklore songs are presented with a playful and informal title that anticipates the new trends that were incubating in the duo. The album includes songs like El Tururururú ("it's your fault"), How we are alike, or the Romance of Love and Death i>.

Simultaneously, María Elena published her third book of poems, Almost a miracle.

The following year Leda y María published the LP Leda y María cantan villancicos, including four anonymous Christmas carols, one from northern Argentina, another from Bolivia and two from Spain. The cover of the album is a photo of a little boy smiling while looking at a drawing of a Santa Claus, appearing for the first time a children's theme.

The dreams of King Bombo, Tutú Maramba, Songs to look at and the children's world

In Paris, he began to create poems, songs and children's characters, which he would only show to Leda Valladares. In 1956 the duo had won a competition to sing in Édith Piaf's show at the Olympia Theater in Paris, but the famous singer finally excluded them, apparently for emotional reasons, and both then decided to return to Buenos Aires.

In 1958 María Herminia Avellaneda offered Walsh to write television scripts for children's programs. Among them, Good morning Pinky stood out, starring Pinky (Lidia Satragno) and Osvaldo Pacheco, who played a grandfather. The program lasted only three months, but achieved notable success, earning it two Martín Fierro awards (Best Children's Program and Male Revelation for Osvaldo Pacheco) and the Argentores award for María Elena herself as a screenwriter, awarded in 1965.

That experience made her mature the possibility of creating a genre similar to a "cabaret for children" or a "children's variety show", which would revolutionize the world of entertainment, folklore and children's music.

The Dreams of King Bombo premiered at the Auditorium Theater in Mar del Plata on February 2, 1959 by Roberto Aulés's El Teatro de los Niños. The play moved, in March of the same year, to the Teatro Presidente Alvear in Buenos Aires, and in 1962 it was revived at the Teatro Cómico. The original text is lost and the only surviving document is the 8 songs, edited by Ricordi for voice and piano. “The March of King Bombo” and “El gato Confite” will be part of the book Tutú Marambá, published in 1960. The Book Tutú Marambá also includes some other texts from the show King Bombo, like "Tringuiti Tranguiti", "The Dream Seller" and "The Witch Eulalia".

In 1960 Leda and María showed a notable change in their style when they recorded the EP Canciones de Tutú Marambá, in which they sang children's songs that Walsh had written for the scripts he was making for television.. Included there are the first four songs that would make María Elena Walsh famous in children's music: The Studious Cow, Song of the Fisherman, The Upside Down Kingdom i> and Song of Titina.

The next musical-dramatic show for children was Songs to look at, which the duo put on stage - with a very reduced budget - in the Casacuberta Room of the General San Martín Municipal Theater in Buenos Aires, in 1962. Unexpectedly, the show had enormous success, prompting the preparation of a new show for 1963 and it became one of the most important cultural events in Argentine cultural history.

The work was composed from twelve songs by Walsh, which Leda and María sang dressed as minstrels, while the actors Alberto Fernández de Rosa and Laura Saniez mimed them: "La familia Polillal", & #34;The Kingdom of the Upside Down", "Milonga del hornero", "The studious cow', "La Pájara Pinta", "Song of the sneeze', 'La mona Jacinta', 'Gardener's Song', 'Vaccine Song', 'Titina's Song', "Song to dress up" and "Fisherman's Song". In the intervals between songs, two characters, Agapito and the Lady of Morón Danga, said comic monologues, a dramatic structure that Leda and María had taken from Crazy Horse, combining it with humor, traditional rhythms, lightheartedness and a child audience.

Doña Disparate y Bambuco was Leda and María's last performance. The new show had a much larger budget, being directed by María Herminia Avellaneda, and starring Lydia Lamaison (Disparate) and Osvaldo Pacheco (Bambuco), as well as Teresa Blasco and Pepe Soriano, playing various roles of secondary and bizarre characters. In this work the Smooth Monkey appears, and especially the turtle Manuelita, the most paradigmatic and well-known character of the children's universe created by María Elena Walsh. The work had a similarity to the dreamlike atmosphere of Alice in Wonderland. A television version was later made starring Perla Santalla and Walter Vidarte. In 1990 the play was revived under the direction of José María Paolantonio, and the cast was made up of Georgina Barbarossa, Adrián Juliá, Gustavo Monje, Debora Kepel, Ivanna Padula and Jorge Luis Freire. Running three seasons. From 1990 to 1992.

The critic Leopoldo Brizuela has said:

"According to the interviews at that time, Walsh conceived Doña Disparate as the parodic incarnation of common sense, while Bambuco is the "personification of childhood". But, more deeply, both represent Walsh's two personalities: the rigorous, romantic and a little too rhetoric Unforgivable autumn, and the girl, popular, and a little too fresh Tutu Marambá. The two go out to mourn, they never beat each other and always reborn in the ever more luminous bonfire of humor, in the courageous ordaly of creating".

Leopoldo Brizuela

By then, Leda and María had already decided that they wanted to follow different paths. Before separating in 1963, they recorded one last EP, Christmas for the Boys, which brings together four of Walsh's Christmas songs, in which they both sing with Roberto Aulés.

Songs to Watch were followed by the publication of five children's books, The Upside Down Kingdom (1964), Crazy Zoo (1964), Dailan Kifki (1966), Cuentopos de Gulubú (1966) and Aire libre (1967), which consolidated the children's universe that María Elena built in that decade and that would strongly mark the cultural formation of the following generations of Argentines.

In 1965 he published Hecho a mano, his fourth poem for adults.

Let's play in the world and songs for adults

In 1968 he premiered his show of songs for adults Juguemos en el mundo, which became a cultural event that would strongly influence the new Argentine popular song, which had been taking shape from various approaches, such as New Songbook Movement promoted by musicians like Mercedes Sosa and Armando Tejada Gómez, the vocal folklore that groups like the Huanca Hua and the Cuarteto Zupay were developing, the modern tango that had its epicenter in Astor Piazzolla and the "Ballad for a madman" that the following year she composed with Horacio Ferrer, or the songs of Nacha Guevara and Alberto Favero would also begin to be shown the following year in Anastasia querida . As she had done with her children's songs, María Elena Walsh showed in Juguemos en el mundo a style of composition marked by creative and thematic freedom. Her melodies gave life to very modern songs, which took inspiration from the most diverse musical sources, from folklore to tango and from jazz to rock. Their lyrics contributed innumerable themes to the Latin American protest song, which flourished in those years (The executives, Diablo are you?), but they also introduced themes practically absent from the Argentine songbook., such as emigration (Zamba de Pepe, dedicated to the photographer Pepe Fernández), Peronism (El 45) or the social pacatería of the middle classes (Mirón and Miranda). The show included Serenade for one's land, one of her most notable creations, which borders on the protest song without being one, is constructed as a love song to her country, as If it were a lover:

Because it hurts if I stay,
But I die if I leave
for everything and despite everything
My love I want to live in you.

The show was accompanied by the release of an album also titled Juguemos en el mundo, which had extraordinary success and was followed the following year by Juguemos en el mundo II i>.

In 1971 María Herminia Avellaneda directed her in the film Juguemos en el mundo where Doña Disparate y Bambuco reappeared by Perla Santalla and Jorge Mayol accompanied by Hugo Caprera, Eduardo Bergara Leumann, Virginia Lago, Jorge Luz, Aída Luz, Eva Franco and Norman Briski.

That year, China Zorrilla and Carlos Perciavalle premiered in Buenos Aires their version of the Songs to look at that they had brought to the stage in 1966 in New York and Montevideo.

El País Kindergarten and its latest songs and reflections

Suffocated by the censorship imposed by the military dictatorship, in July 1978, in the middle of the World Cup, she decided "not to continue composing or singing in public anymore." Paradoxically, several of her songs became symbols of the struggle. for democracy, such as Like the grasshopper, Lullaby for a ruler, Prayer to Justice, Song of walkers i>, Ballad of Comodus Viscach, War Postcard or its version of We shall overcome, the classic march of the civil rights movement in the United States.

The following year, on August 16, 1979, María Elena published in the cultural supplement of the newspaper Clarín an article titled "Misadventures in the Kindergarten Country", a title that in 1993 she would return to title a book.

We've been like kids for a long time and we can't say what we think or imagine. When the censor disappears, because he will ever be demolished by a highway!, we will be decrepit and without knowing what to say. We'll have forgotten how, where and when, and we'll sit in a square like Quino's cartoon couple who wondered, "What were we...?".

Maria Elena Walsh.

When in 1991, during the presidency of Carlos Menem in Argentina, the possibility of implementing the death penalty was being debated in the country, he wrote a reflection on this topic, which ended with the following sentence:

"Throughout history, learned or brutal men knew for sure what crime the death penalty deserved. They always knew that I, not another, was the culprit. They never doubted that the punishment was exemplary. Every time it alludes to this escarp Humanity backs in four legs".

Maria Elena Walsh
Published in Clarin (Buenos Aires), 12 September 1991.

As a columnist, his article The eñe is also people had a great impact in defense of the use of this letter so characteristic of the Spanish language on the Internet.

Let's not let ourselves take the eñe! We have already been bitten by the signs of openness of interrogation and admiration. They already reduced us to the apocope [...] We continue to own something that belongs to us, that letter with suede, something very small, but less tin than it seems [...] The survival of this letter concerns us, without distinction of sex, creeds or software programs. Let us struggle not to add more wood to the bonfire where our discriminated sign [...] The dream is also people.

María Elena Walsh, newspaper La Nación, Buenos Aires, 1996.

Democracy, recognition and books

With the return of democracy to Argentina, he hosted a daily journalistic program on television, together with María Herminia Avellaneda and the tango singer Susana Rinaldi, called "Como la cigarra" (in direct allusion to Walsh's song that gained special relevance among singers exiled by the dictatorship, such as Mercedes Sosa). The program was a space for reflection and raising some unusual topics for television at the time.

In 1985 she was named Illustrious Citizen of the City of Buenos Aires and in 1990, Doctor Honoris Causa of the National University of Córdoba and Illustrious Personality of the Province of Buenos Aires. In 1994 the complete compilation of her songs for children and adults appeared and in 1997, Manuelita ¿ donde vas? In 2000 she also received the Grand Prize of Honor from the SADE. She also won two Konex Platinum Awards in 1981 in the Children's discipline and in 1994 in the Children's Literature category. In 2014 she received the Konex de Honor, an award given to the most important deceased figure of Argentine Literature. That same year, the Alfaguara publishing house published a book called "Poems and songs", a compilation of her musical works and her most notable poems.

Feminism

Her feminist activities are recognized in some references. In her letter to a compatriot, from 1973, she says, for example: "The Women's Liberation Movement is a revolutionary ideology, not squeezed from moth-eaten books but from the daily martyrdom of half of humanity.".

María Elena Walsh with her works talks about various topics such as art, education, games, happiness, nature and life. But the most important thing is her messages about the rights of boys and girls, women and access to tolerant and quality education for children.

Walsh was a great Argentine intellectual of the 20th century who dedicated her life to defending women's rights. In all of her works she reflected her feminist ideas that she obtained from reading great writers such as Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing and Victoria Ocampo, among others. In addition, she wrote various articles that talked about the struggle and role of women in society and feminism.

She was a fighter for women's rights, an activist in favor of abortion and fought for those who could not do so. She even met with Raúl Alfonsín, president of Argentina, to advocate for abortion. She was also founder of the Argentine Feminist Union and the Feminist Liberation Movement, whose objective was that all Argentine women could have knowledge about feminism.

Thanks to her ideas and her great writings, she became one of the thinkers who spoke about politics and feminism. She, along with the filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg and the novelist Angélica Gorodischer, were the most involved representatives of the most relevant movement of the time.

In 1983 this author starred in a television program called “La Cigarra” along with Susana Rinaldi, in which there was programming for women, where they questioned all the events or news that occurred. But, this program received so many negative reviews and rejection from the public that its broadcast only lasted a few months.

Between the 80s and 2000 she made various reflections on feminism and how the patriarchal culture of the time affected women's rights. For this reason, among the feminist writings that she wrote, it is worth highlighting the manifesto that she dedicated to the men of the 80s, entitled "Know why you are sexist", which she published in Humor Magazine in 1980 and in which 24 reasons are described. why one is sexist.

Thus, the poet, singer and writer became a reference for Argentine women.

Death

After a prolonged stay at the Sanatorium of the Trinity, due to bone cancer that limited much of his life due to pain in his legs, he died on January 10, 2011 at the age of 80.

He died of my hand. The night before, I approached his head. She said to me, "My love, here we are." He held my hand and wept. Then I told her I had to rest, that we were all with her. We were a group. Sara and three more girls. She called us the petit committee. The other day he woke up bad. The doctor came and said to me, "She's leaving." So I stayed there, holding his hand. I had combined Sara to go to the studio and that I would call one of the petit committee girls to warn her. At the end, when everything happened, Sara came and I said, "You're not going in, are you?" I wanted her to stay with the image of Mary Elena awake.

Mariana Facio, niece of Sara Facio (Walsh couple)

His remains were laid to rest at the SADAIC headquarters and the burial took place in the entity's pantheon in the Chacarita Cemetery, where the Argentine musician Eduardo Falú dedicated a few farewell words to him.

The death caused a commotion in the artistic environment, many celebrities offered their condolences through the main media outlets in Argentina. All the air and cable news broadcasts reported the news, as well as the radio stations and newspapers. Even the official page of the Ferro Carril Oeste Club, María Elena Walsh's favorite club, recognized her in one of her online articles and named the playground after her.

Literary works

Poetry and prose for adults

• Unforgivable autumn (1947)
• Just travel (1948)
• Ballads with Angel (1951)
• Almost miracle (1958)
• Handmade (1965)
• Let's play in the world (1970)
• Older boyfriends (1990)
• Desventuras en el País-Jardín-de-Infantes (1993)
• Ghosts in the park (2008)

Songs for adults

• Song against evil eye (1976)

Children's literature (complete)

• Mona Jacinta. Buenos Aires: Editorial April 1960
• The Polillal Family. Buenos Aires: Editorial April 1960
• Tutu Marambá. Buenos Aires: Author's Edition, 1960
• Circus of Bichos. Buenos Aires: Editorial April 1961
• Three morrons. Buenos Aires: Editorial April 1961
• Crazy Zoo. Buenos Aires: Fariña Editores, 1964
• The Kingdom of the Revés. Buenos Aires: Fariña Editores, 1965
• Cuentopos de Gulubú. Buenos Aires: Fariña Editores, 1966
• Dailan Kifki. Buenos Aires: Fariña Editores, 1966
• Versos para cebollitas. Buenos Aires: Fariña Editores, 1966
• Folkloric verses for cebollitas. Buenos Aires: Fariña Editores, 1967
• Open air. Reading book for second grade. Buenos Aires: Editorial Estrada, 1967
• Traditional vegetables for cebolites. Buenos Aires: South American, 1967
• The English devil. Buenos Aires: Editorial Estrada, 1974
• Angelito. Buenos Aires: Editorial Estrada, 1974
• Mermaid and Captain. Buenos Aires: Editorial Estrada, 1974
• The country of geometry. Buenos Aires: Editorial Estrada, 1974
• Chaucha and palito. Buenos Aires: South American, 1977
• I see.. Buenos Aires: Hispamérica, 1984
• Bisa flies. Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1985
• The Glegos. Barcelona: Lumen, 1987
• The treacherous cloud (Free version of "le Nuage rose" by George Sand). Buenos Aires: South American, 1990
• Pocopan. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• A philharmonic giraffe. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• A cat of the moon. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• Theplate. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• The Osofete package. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• Martín Pescador and the domador dolphin. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• History of a princess, her dad and... Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• The catpato and the Princess Monilda. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• Crazy fowl. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• The pimp and the seven Snow Whites. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• Don Fresquete. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1996
• Manuelita Where are you going? Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1997
• Manuelita the turtle. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1998
• Bears the bear. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1998
• The Liso Monkey. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1998
• The cat fishing. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta 1999
• The sausage dog show. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta 1999
• Queen Batata. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta 1999
• Doña Disparate Bs.As. (Tuta Marambá): Edition: Alfagüara. In 2000
• The romance of love and death Bs.As. (Tuta Marambá): Editorial: Alfagüara. In 2000
• Hotel Pioho's Palace. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2002

Discography

With Leda Valladares (Leda and María)

• Chants d’Argentine[1954] (Le Chant du Monde LDY-M-4021)
• Sous le ciel de l’Argentine[1955] (London International FS 123619/WB 9113)
• Between valleys and cracks, vol. 1[1957] (Disc Jockey Stars 10071)
• Between valleys and cracks, vol. 2[1957] (Disc Jockey LD 15052)
• Songs of Maricastaña Time[1958] (Disc Jockey 77076)
• Leda and Maria sing villancicos (EP), [1959] (Disc Jockey TD 1007)
• Songs of Tutú Marambá (EP), [1960] (Disco Plin s/n)
• Songs to watch[1962] (Disco Plin 102)
• Doña Disparate and Bambuco (EP), [1962] (Disco Plin 103)
• Christmas for the kids (EP) (with Roberto Aulés), [1963] (Abril Fonorama Bolsillitos 502)

Soloist

• Songs of Tutú Marambá (EP), [1960] (Disco Plin s/n)
• Songs for me[1963] (CBS 1097)
• Songs to watch[1964] (CBS 1098)
• The country of Nomeagre[1966] (CBS 1113)
• The country of Christmas(EP), [1968] (CBS 1762)
• Talent[1968] (CBS 1115)
• Let's play in the world[1968] (CBS 8830)
• Counties for recreation[1969] (CBS 1125)
• Let's play in the world II[1969] (CBS 18969)
• Four northern villancicos[1971]
• The sun has no pockets[1971] (CBS 19107)
• Like the cigar[1972] (CBS 19311)
• The good way[1975] (Microphon SE 573)
• Punch and lyrics[1976] (Microphon SE 761)

Filmography

Actress

• Let's play in the world (1971)
• Time to create (1982)

Guionist

• I need a mother. (1966)

His life brought to the stage

One of the tributes paid to him was with the one-man show Vivir en vos based on his life and his bibliography performed by actress Virginia Lago and adapted by Javier Margulis masterfully directed by Rubens Correa in 1987, 1992 and 2001.