Poems, (PDF)
Introduction and translation, Molly Weigel
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1891, Oliverio Girondo studied and traveled widely in Europe as a young man, serving as a European correspondent for Argentine literary magazines and establishing close friendships with writers and artists who introduced him to surrealism and other vanguard movements. Among Girondo’s circle of friends and influences throughout his life were Blaise Cendrars, Salvador Dalí, Macedonio Fernández, and Federico García Lorca, as well as Rafael Alberti and Pablo Neruda, both of whom dedicated poems to him. Author of seven volumes of poetry, Girondo published his first book, Veinte poemas para ser leídos en un tranvía, in 1922. He belonged to the Argentine ultraist vanguard, which also included Jorge Luis Borges, and returned to Argentina in 1924 to cofound the Ultraist magazine Martín Fierro, for which he wrote the manifesto. It exalted vitality and faith in self and in Latin American intellectual values. Ultraism started to dissolve in 1927; Espantapájaros (1932) begins with a questioning of the referential function of language and a declaration of nihilism, elements that would continue in his work and culminate in En la masmédula (1956). In the 1940s and 50s, the home of Girondo and his wife, writer Norah Lange, served as a meeting place for the younger literary generation, including Francisco Madariaga, Enrique Molina, and Olga Orozco. Girondo died in Buenos Aires in 1967.
These poems are from En la masmédula (In the Moremarrow), which culminates Girondo’s career of poetic engagement with the vanguard; his lifelong rejection of academic authority and search for new forms of poetic articulation find their last and best expression here. With this last volume, according to Trinidad Barrera, Girondo puts a period to the Latin American modernism begun in the 1920s, of which he was a central figure, and provides a model and a jumping off point for contemporary Latin American poetry’s concern with the nature of referentiality. Girondo’s work and especially In the Moremarrow is an inspiration to many contemporary Latin American poets, including Jorge Santiago Perednik and Néstor Perlongher, among others. Like Vallejo’s Trilce and Huidobro’s Altazor, with which it is frequently compared, In the Moremarrow forges from the Spanish language a new poetic language with its own psychic vocabulary and syntax, constituting a journey into the uncharted space of whatever “more” the marrow of language may or may not hold. The poems persistently struggle with a basic human dissatisfaction with language and other forms of human communication and with the question of whether there is anything beyond or even whether the beyond is to be found within the limitation itself. With seemingly unlimited combinatory properties and multivalence, Girondo’s language, or “pure impure mix” (“La mezcla/The Mix,” En la masmédula/In the Moremarrow), communicates desire and disgust, moves fluidly between ironic distance and unguarded sadness or wonder at the limits and possibilities of signification. According to Argentine poet and critic Enrique Molina, each line of En la masmédula (In the Moremarrow) is “a verbal galaxy,” an alchemy of the word in which “the language is rushing into a state of eruption.”
Recent Then
If the setting
the subslurping
the barter bang burrow
the bitterly begotten
the spawning
to the gills
if the herniated egohollow
the co-gutspilling to zero
the catalogues of disgust
the abeliefs
the finite family were less able
if they were exincapable barely of the vital scrapings
the bellyful in chains
the pallid postmasticated
if the final sinister swallow of light, fog of affliction weren’t so forecapable
ah
the greenseeing
the seeing everything perhaps in free flutter the being
the pure being without leaves already without either coasts or wild waves or against
only its sphere only
recent
perhaps
recent then
The One Odd No.
The one total less
plenicorrupt odd no. no sooner coddled by the zero
that in time gone crazy returns with its sexual succubi multitudes and its fauna
of forgetting
The one subsoul
although unburied intact beneath its multicrypts with beyondbottoms of arcades,
retchings
that feeds its own echoes of great expert in nothing
as it grows into the abyss
The one and only in one
four-footed animal of chance that goes out for air before nightfall dogging its wretched
limits
and sunflower litmus licked by innumerable putrescences interulcerates the darkness of
its own I whole one
crucipending only from itself