Oliverio Girondo Is a Violent Man

As part of the publication of the newest TWO LINES, we're featuring short essays by translators on the pieces they have in the new volume. Today we have Heather Cleary Wolfgang on the Argentine poet Olivero Girondo. Wolfgang translated Girondo's poetry for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the newest TWO LINES.

If you're intrigued by what you see, you can order Some Kind of Beautiful Signal directly from the Center right here, or on Amazon right here, or Indiebound right here.

More than forty years after his passing, Oliverio Girondo is still something of a household name in Argentina. Yet when people speak of him in North America, if they speak of him at all, his life and work are usually refracted through the eyes of his contemporaries. There is, most famously, his feud with Jorge Luis Borges, which was of both a literary and a personal nature (it involved a lady) and his friendships on both sides of the Atlantic with writers such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca. Yet little is said of Girondo’s foundational role in the development of the Latin American avant-garde, and less still about his unique aesthetic project, which pairs prose with verse, the grotesque with the sublime, to create a poetic language all his own.

Girondo was born to a wealthy family in Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century. As a young man, he cut a deal with his parents: he would humor them by attending law school on the condition that they send him to Europe every year. This arrangement allowed the poet to come into contact with writers and literary movements that would have a profound influence on his early work and would help shape the literary landscape of Buenos Aires in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

Titled Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (1922), the poet’s first collection takes a swipe at high modernism by asserting that poetry need not be relegated to the halls of academia or the rarefied space of the salon. Its poems are a series of snapshots that evoke both the photographic image and the frenzy of city life. Though most of these focus on the urban landscape, I’ve chosen one that was written in Mar de Plata, a popular resort town in Argentina, as a bit of a farewell to summer.

SKETCH IN THE SAND

The morning strolls along the beach dusted with sun.

Arms.
Aputated legs.
Bodies intermingling.
Floating rubber heads.

Tossing the bodies of the bathers, the waves spread their shavings along the sawdust beach.

Everything is blue and gold!

The shade of the cabanas. The eyes of girls who inject themselves with novels and horizons. My joy, in rubber-soled shoes, that makes me bounce along the sand. For eighty cents, photographers sell the bodies of the bathing women.

There are kiosks that exploit the drama of the coast. Moody servant girls. Irascible soda water, with a hint of brine. Rocks with the seaweed breast of a sailor and the painted heart of a fencer. Flocks of seagulls that mimic the weary flight of a scrap of paper.

And above all, the sea!
The sea! Rhythm of digression. The sea! with its spittle and its epilepsy.

The sea! . . . until you scream
                           ENOUGH!
                                                       like at the circus.

In his review of Girondo’s second collection, Calcomanías (1925), Borges half-approvingly asserts that the poet is “a violent man” who looks at something for a time and then suddenly slaps it in the face, crumples it up and holds on to it for safekeeping. Girondo did indeed have a penchant not only for disruption, but also for collection. Nothing, not the primordial pornography being sold along the shore or the stray dog ‘with the hips of a ballerina,’ is overlooked in Veinte poemas, and nothing is left unchanged by the poet’s gaze.

In 1932, following his own dictum that “A book should be constructed like a watch and sold like a sausage,” the poet released his next collection, Espantapájaros: al alcance de todos, amid a publicity spectacle the likes of which had never been seen in Buenos Aires. The poet hired a funeral carriage and two drivers in formal attire to cart a giant papier-mâché scarecrow in a top hat and monocle around the city while attractive young women sold copies of the book from a storefront on a busy street downtown. This collection, made up of one concrete poem shaped like a scarecrow and 24 prose poems, marks a turning point in Girondo’s production. Whereas the collections that come before it tend to center on the image, those that follow begin to move toward the linguistic experimentation that characterizes his later work.

Girondo brings this experimentation to its logical illogical conclusion with his final collection, En la masmédula (1956), known in English as In the Moremarrow. In this work, language not only serves as a means of conveying ideas or images, but becomes an experience unto itself. Between its neologisms and its complex rhythmic and phonetic structures, this is a collection that is meant to be felt just as much as it is meant to be read.

TROPES

I touch
I poke pores
lines
touch tastes
neural lattice
landings
tissues that touch me
scars
ashes
touch tropics paunches
lonely only
excesses
rasps
I palpate and mastocate
and nothing

Harbingers of absence
inconsistent tropes
what you
what what
what whistles
what chasms
what masks
what hollow solitudes
what yes what no
what if not unhinged by a touch
what shadows
what depths
what bewitching elements
what keys
what midnight matter
what cages not unlocked
what naught I touch
in all