Oliverio Girondo, Scarecrow & Other Anomalies
Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
Riverside, CA: Xenos Books, 2002
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 68 (May 2004)
In the lottery of literary fashions, the writing of Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967) has waited a long time to be translated. Provocative, challenging, rich in dreamlike evocations, his poetry and prose marked a consistently vanguard stance while remaining stylistically elusive. Girondo was born in Buenos Aires to a wealthy family of Basque descent; he belonged to a generation of ardent internationalists (Victoria Ocampo, Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo) committed to articulating a modernist aesthetic that might at the same time be distinctly American. He did not publish many books, but his work was highly regarded, and he was always an important partisan of new writing in Argentina—as co-founder in 1924 of the journal Martín Fierro and later, when he and his wife, poet Norah Lange, opened their home as a meeting place for younger writers, such as Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, Aldo Pellegrini, who were all surrealists.
From an early age, Girondo traveled extensively—in Europe, Africa, Latin America—and that instinct for travel entered his first books. Scarecrow, however, is accented toward a more interior journey, as the volume consists mostly of work from the 1930s, subsequent to his first books, with its inner theater full of extravagant gestures and surrealist atmospheres. The only edition of Girondo’s work in English, translated with admirable resilience by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, Scarecrow is really several books: the full texts of Espantapájaros (Scarecrow, 1932) and Interlunio (Lunarlude, 1937), selections from his first and a later book of poems, the manifesto he wrote for Martín Fierro and cultural notes he contributed to the journal, all in less than a hundred pages each of English and Spanish. Even his final book, the untranslatable En la masmédula (1956) with its playful and constant fusions of language, is glimpsed briefly in the introduction.
Throughout his work, Girondo proves ever the sensualist. Espantapájaros comprises half of the present volume; it begins with lines made famous again many years later in Argentine director Eliseo Subiela’s film The Dark Side of the Heart (1994), where they open and subsequently recur: “I couldn’t care less if women have breasts like fresh magnolias or withered figs, skin smooth as a peach or rough as sandpaper . . . I am perfectly capable of enduring a nose on them that could take first prize in a carrot exposition. But here’s the thing!—and in this I am inflexible—I do not pardon them, under any pretext, if they don’t know how to fly.” The twenty-four pieces in Espantapájaros are a mix of prose-poem reverie, ecstatic rant, narrative jag, and loony incantation. This is a book that takes up legs and jumps off the table. It seethes with desire, with strange erotic scenes, metaphysical interminglings, and a love for linguistic play that borders on dangerous (“I don’t have a personality; I am a cocktail, a conglomerate, a riot of personalities”). But the pieces also display a sort of slapstick bravado, a fondness for absurd situations, even as they recognize at every turn the grinning specter of death and emptiness peeking from the shadows.
Girondo was equipped with that proclivity of vanguard artists: he liked to shock the audience. The spectacle he staged for the presentation of Espantapájaros made a mockery of such events, while capitalizing brilliantly on it. He built a life-size papier-mâché model of a pompous professorial type, the “academic scarecrow” pictured on the book’s cover, and this he placed in an open funeral coach amid stacks of his book instead of flowers. He got in as well and, drawn by six horses with footmen along the streets of Buenos Aires, he announced the book’s publication through a megaphone, directing the public to a shop on Calle Florida. There, a host of pretty girls handled sales, and the 5,000 copies sold out in a few weeks. It is a rare book indeed that can live up to such a send-off.
Interlunio, a more brooding, nocturnal work, was published by Victoria Ocampo’s house, Editorial Sur. His only sustained short narrative, it takes the form of a story containing other stories, as the narrator recounts the arrival at his local café of a dilapidated old poet from Paris. “I saw him leaning against a wall, his eyes almost phosphorescent and, at his feet, a shadow much twitchier and raggedier than that of a tree.” The poet’s weariness and decrepitude are described in hallucinatory detail, but he emerges from his long silences to offer the narrator anecdotes from his life and occasional samples of his verse that were “as worn out as the envelopes on which he had scribbled them.” He would say that “Europe is like me . . . something rotten and exquisite; a Camembert with locomotive ataxia.” By contrast, for him, Buenos Aires is a place of marvels. The bulk of the narrative, though, concerns a startling mystical epiphany, which the desperately miserable poet relates the last time they chance to meet, late at night in some café.
Each of Girondo’s books was notably different than the ones before; yet each, in its way, explores the same existential enigma regarding the separateness and connectedness of beings. By far his longest book, Persuasión de los días (Persuasion of the Days, 1942), loose colloquial free-verse poems with titles like “Invitation to Vomit” and “Miasmic Execution,” is represented here by a small but effective selection. Much as it may be a ferocious response to the times, the collection also reveals an enduring metaphysical doubt:
When I am going to sit down
I notice that my body
settles in another body that just sat down
where I feel myself to be.
Perhaps that was the route by which language broke down a decade later, or rather came gushing forth in a molten state, with its Joycean voluptuousness, when he published En la masmédula. Girondo recorded that work himself in 1960, in his deep and resonant voice, which may still be heard on the internet.
Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
Riverside, CA: Xenos Books, 2002
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 68 (May 2004)
In the lottery of literary fashions, the writing of Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967) has waited a long time to be translated. Provocative, challenging, rich in dreamlike evocations, his poetry and prose marked a consistently vanguard stance while remaining stylistically elusive. Girondo was born in Buenos Aires to a wealthy family of Basque descent; he belonged to a generation of ardent internationalists (Victoria Ocampo, Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo) committed to articulating a modernist aesthetic that might at the same time be distinctly American. He did not publish many books, but his work was highly regarded, and he was always an important partisan of new writing in Argentina—as co-founder in 1924 of the journal Martín Fierro and later, when he and his wife, poet Norah Lange, opened their home as a meeting place for younger writers, such as Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, Aldo Pellegrini, who were all surrealists.
From an early age, Girondo traveled extensively—in Europe, Africa, Latin America—and that instinct for travel entered his first books. Scarecrow, however, is accented toward a more interior journey, as the volume consists mostly of work from the 1930s, subsequent to his first books, with its inner theater full of extravagant gestures and surrealist atmospheres. The only edition of Girondo’s work in English, translated with admirable resilience by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, Scarecrow is really several books: the full texts of Espantapájaros (Scarecrow, 1932) and Interlunio (Lunarlude, 1937), selections from his first and a later book of poems, the manifesto he wrote for Martín Fierro and cultural notes he contributed to the journal, all in less than a hundred pages each of English and Spanish. Even his final book, the untranslatable En la masmédula (1956) with its playful and constant fusions of language, is glimpsed briefly in the introduction.
Throughout his work, Girondo proves ever the sensualist. Espantapájaros comprises half of the present volume; it begins with lines made famous again many years later in Argentine director Eliseo Subiela’s film The Dark Side of the Heart (1994), where they open and subsequently recur: “I couldn’t care less if women have breasts like fresh magnolias or withered figs, skin smooth as a peach or rough as sandpaper . . . I am perfectly capable of enduring a nose on them that could take first prize in a carrot exposition. But here’s the thing!—and in this I am inflexible—I do not pardon them, under any pretext, if they don’t know how to fly.” The twenty-four pieces in Espantapájaros are a mix of prose-poem reverie, ecstatic rant, narrative jag, and loony incantation. This is a book that takes up legs and jumps off the table. It seethes with desire, with strange erotic scenes, metaphysical interminglings, and a love for linguistic play that borders on dangerous (“I don’t have a personality; I am a cocktail, a conglomerate, a riot of personalities”). But the pieces also display a sort of slapstick bravado, a fondness for absurd situations, even as they recognize at every turn the grinning specter of death and emptiness peeking from the shadows.
Girondo was equipped with that proclivity of vanguard artists: he liked to shock the audience. The spectacle he staged for the presentation of Espantapájaros made a mockery of such events, while capitalizing brilliantly on it. He built a life-size papier-mâché model of a pompous professorial type, the “academic scarecrow” pictured on the book’s cover, and this he placed in an open funeral coach amid stacks of his book instead of flowers. He got in as well and, drawn by six horses with footmen along the streets of Buenos Aires, he announced the book’s publication through a megaphone, directing the public to a shop on Calle Florida. There, a host of pretty girls handled sales, and the 5,000 copies sold out in a few weeks. It is a rare book indeed that can live up to such a send-off.
Interlunio, a more brooding, nocturnal work, was published by Victoria Ocampo’s house, Editorial Sur. His only sustained short narrative, it takes the form of a story containing other stories, as the narrator recounts the arrival at his local café of a dilapidated old poet from Paris. “I saw him leaning against a wall, his eyes almost phosphorescent and, at his feet, a shadow much twitchier and raggedier than that of a tree.” The poet’s weariness and decrepitude are described in hallucinatory detail, but he emerges from his long silences to offer the narrator anecdotes from his life and occasional samples of his verse that were “as worn out as the envelopes on which he had scribbled them.” He would say that “Europe is like me . . . something rotten and exquisite; a Camembert with locomotive ataxia.” By contrast, for him, Buenos Aires is a place of marvels. The bulk of the narrative, though, concerns a startling mystical epiphany, which the desperately miserable poet relates the last time they chance to meet, late at night in some café.
Each of Girondo’s books was notably different than the ones before; yet each, in its way, explores the same existential enigma regarding the separateness and connectedness of beings. By far his longest book, Persuasión de los días (Persuasion of the Days, 1942), loose colloquial free-verse poems with titles like “Invitation to Vomit” and “Miasmic Execution,” is represented here by a small but effective selection. Much as it may be a ferocious response to the times, the collection also reveals an enduring metaphysical doubt:
When I am going to sit down
I notice that my body
settles in another body that just sat down
where I feel myself to be.
Perhaps that was the route by which language broke down a decade later, or rather came gushing forth in a molten state, with its Joycean voluptuousness, when he published En la masmédula. Girondo recorded that work himself in 1960, in his deep and resonant voice, which may still be heard on the internet.