aleno, escritor y bardo;
un buen hijo del lunfardo
y de Corrientes angosta.

A long time ago Enrique Cadícamo sketched these lines lovingly, but the portrayal is incomplete.

Besides being a physician with a long practice in geriatrics, we have to add something that for many years has enriched his background: he belongs to the homeopathic school of the mythical Paschero. He even teaches and advises new specialists: his disciples are over a hundred upright colleagues.

Neither his consulting room nor teaching have succeeded in mitigating his other old devotions and, on the contrary, he accumulates new literary works. His published books are nearly twenty-five. Since 2000 he’s been a member of the Academia Nacional del Tango and of the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo. He joined the latter in 1968. Eight years later he joined the Junta Central de Estudios Históricos de Buenos Aires and is president and founder of a similar organism in Villa Urquiza.

However, despite so much activity, the deliberate low profile of Luis Alposta is not only uncovered in lectures and radio programs. It’s impossible to obviate the quality of his many songs that, with tango or milonga beat, populate the air of our cities. Since "Campaneando mi pasado", composed with Rosita Quiroga, he has accumulated tens of creations; for example: seven co-written with Edmundo Rivero. Among them, "A lo Megata" which is regarded as a classic tango in Japan, a country he visited three times.

He also was a close friend of Osvaldo Pugliese’s with whom he signed compositions they co-wrote. Day after day others discovered Alposta’s professional, artistic and fraternal quality. One of the best exporters of his numbers is Tata Cedrón today, who recorded in Paris seven of his lyrics translated into French. Also there through the hoarse-voiced Daniel Melingo his “horror” suite was acclaimed. It includes numbers that allude to "Jack the Ripper", "Frankestein", "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde", "Tango the Vampire" and other bloody creatures.

Let us go back: physician, poet, historian, scholar and, we should have to add: sporadic plastic artist with works that have deserved the high honor of being stolen from the Café Tortoni. Furthermore besides being a playwright, he is a traveler with three trips around the world and many other things impossible to be catalogued.

Alposta prefers to be regarded as a friend, friend of so many famous people that his home and consulting room, in the heart of Villa Urquiza, keeps an infinity of written memory, painted or sculpted that is the history of the house itself but, above all, the living memory of a city.

Can you believe that, besides the fluent activity of the owner, he has found time and space for the noisy traffic of a happy and numerous family? The person that, in fact, composes all the time is his young wife Vicky. The opposing forces, sometimes hidden in their own mysteries are the kids: Luis, Ignacio, Emilio and Virginia that are staggered between the pre-adolescence and all the world noises.

In spite of all this, Dr. Luis Alposta dreams and devises his own harmonies there. There is no doubt, due to the number and quality of the unusual elements he chooses and mixes, that the multiform creation to which he devotes his life is queer and arduous but unique. Surely it’s a symphony.

Director’s note:
It turns out interesting transcribing the paragraphs written by our beloved Jorge Waisburd when Mosaicos Porteños, one of the Luis Alposta’s books was presented:

«We have to say it: Luis is many Alpostas. The doctor, the neighbor of Urquiza, the studious man, the friend, the poet, the kid that hides behind the gray-haired doctor, the collector, and the husband and father, of course. In other words: Luis Alposta is made of mosaics, all them from Buenos Aires, like his book, put together like a big art wall painting from which emotions, teachings spring up and which has that feature of the creators that willingly —or unwillingly—, amaze us.

«Luis is the one who without prejudice writes with Edmundo Rivero, with the Tata Cedrón or with the rocker Daniel Melingo. The one who manufactures fables, tangos, micro-programs for the radio or chapters of the book with characters of an incredible gallery which includes from the kid that was drowned in the river to the Baron Megata or the Count Dracula himself, just to mention only three».

And also, by Waisburd, the note he sent to the Editorial Badosa of Barcelona for a similar reason:

«I’m not astonished, but he’s a marvel. I’m not astonished, I say, because I know -in part- the incredible, prodigious, generous work by Luis Alposta. He is a marvel, I say, because this poet is like an ocean capable of surrounding all the coasts.

«He can fold himself down like a stocking (like Serrat tried with Tarrés), and when he sees his inside he can reflect us all, —one by one— in the mirror. He who said «The mutilated and the rejected ones opened the windows celebrating their happiness. They were able to laugh upon the books dancing in the space in which butterflies leave footprints».

«He is also author of lunfardo sonnets, loose pages, porteño mosaics like an Arlt of the twenty-first century, unprecedented observations, limitless creativity, universal porteñeza; all impregnated in poetry.

«Alposta is a volcano in permanent eruption that faces us to an abyss with so much poetry that sometimes we have vertigo».

A final confession. I was with Federico in our daily routine of searching and adding new contents when we realized that we had never included a portrayal of Luis in the Todo Tango pages. We could not believe it.

We tried to find out the reason of such a unforgivable omission and we were only able to infer that the reason of such serious carelessness ought to be originated in the frequency of our contact –either in the Academia Nacional del Tango or in the daily chats we have by phone or by e-mail-. By all this we had thought we had published it long ago.

Because of that I think it’s important a last comment by us. Luis’s oeuvre, his tangos, his poems and his prose, taking aside the lunfardesque and porteño aspects they have, paints in watercolors the city man with a talented pen, full of humor and sensitivity that belong to an intelligent fellow with a deep commitment.

Furthermore, he dares to deal with unexpected characters far removed from the subject matter of the genre. Then we have a parade of vampires, murderers, body choppers and even the mythical Frankestein in lyrics full of grace and originality.

To this we have to add his natural disposition for everything connected with research and airing of tango and his constant collaboration with our work.

In sum, we are witnessing another deluxe character of Todo Tango that, like the word puzzle, mixes homeopathy, painting, poetry and tangos in a big saucepan filled with life.