A Chaos That Can Cry

Lost, that little four-letter word, tantalizes with its vast potential for contradiction and indeterminacy. The word connotes sadness with a hint of hope. If something is lost, then perhaps it can be found again: a lost masterpiece recovered, or a lost-in-translation meaning restored.

The Lost Literature series from Ugly Duckling Presse hinges on the possibility inherent in loss. Focused on the recovery of marginal 20th-century avant-garde figures from around the globe, the series is committed to neglected, never previously translated, or otherwise not-widely-available work. Last winter, #32 in the series appeared: a translation of Ova Completa, the final book by the Argentinian poet Susana Thénon.

Originally published in 1987—four years before Thénon’s premature death—the collection is, as the poet María Negroni puts it in her afterword, “an acid, a linguistic witches’ sabbath, a diatribe against politically correct thinking.” Thénon can be as scatological as she is erudite, shifting from Greek allusions to bureaucratic jargon, swear words to Latin fragments, as if composing a magical spell. She seeks to destabilize the assumed foundations of power, gender, and even language itself, as when she writes in the title poem, “Philosophy means ‘rape of a living being.’ / It comes from the Greek philoso, ‘which cuts deep.”

Translator Rebekah Smith gives readers an electrifying experience of this multivalent poet. In her translator’s note, she explains, “I have been living with these poems, reading and re-reading, translating and re-translating, for five years. Sometimes I think I could keep at it for at least another five.” Given the book’s mix of languages and tones, its dual registers of comedy and tragedy, and what Smith describes as its “two-pronged assault with both form and content: against literary canons and established poetic, linguistic, and semantic forms; and against patriarchal and colonial methods of control,” it’s no wonder the project took so long and could easily have taken longer.

Ova Completa, considered the most radical of Thénon’s five collections, blends sociopolitical commentary with grim humor and linguistic play to critique Argentina’s military dictatorship under which the Dirty War festered in the late 1970s and early ’80s, resulting in the deaths and so-called disappearances of some 30,000 citizens, especially leftwing political opponents. Thénon fulminates with astonishing verbal felicity against colonialism, femicide, academia, and the war with England over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands and more.

If that sounds panoramically ambitious, it is. Even the book’s brief and deceptively simple two-word title gives a taste of what Smith grappled with as a translator. Ova Completa is a pun on Obra Completa, or Complete Works, staking out a grandiosity for the poems within. Yet ova comes from Latin, not Spanish, meaning eggs. Thus Thénon’s title also puns on the Argentine slang “huevos llenos” or “tener los huevos llenos”—literally “to have full balls,” but idiomatically “to be fed up.” As Smith notes, Thénon “re-genders the expression with her ova, telling us that it is she, a woman, who is fed up.” With what? You name it.

The details of her personal life remain somewhat mysterious. (Appropriately, in a 1988 interview she calls herself a “great reader” of mystery and crime novels.) While writing this essay, I communicated with Negroni, Smith, and Thénon’s first translator, Renata Treitel, now 90 and living in Tulsa, and they all expressed the opinion that Thénon was something of a recluse. Even Treitel, when pressed about the time she spent working closely and in person with Thénon on the poet’s penultimate collection, distancias (1984), could only say, “She had a good presence. She was more tall than short. She was opinionated,” concluding that “She was a very complicated being. You didn’t know much about her personally. She was interested in politics. I think she was very intelligent and she was up to date with the world.”

The only child of the psychiatrist Jorge Thénon, author of a book titled Psicologia Dialéctica, and a mother who was an accomplished pianist, Susana was born in Buenos Aires in 1935 and died there in 1991, from a brain tumor, at age 56. Treitel notes that Thénon had a good background in music, as well as a lifelong fascination with the visual arts. At university, she took a degree in Letters, the equivalent of an English major. “She was a linguist and had a very classical education,” Treitel says, noting that in Argentina a Letters degree includes courses in Latin and Greek.

Thénon was not only a poet but also a translator, known for her work on Rainier Maria Rilke. With characteristic authority and élan, she claimed, “I had no choice if I wanted the poems to appear in a more universal Spanish, considering the absurd things I found in the existing translations.” She extended her fascination with Rilke to fine art photography. Her first exhibition, as she put it, “meant to show Rilke’s poetry through photography,” albeit “not to illustrate the poems but to provide a version of them.” She was best known in that medium for her arresting black and white images of the influential Argentinian dancer and choreographer Iris Scaccheri. Here again, the scrim of Thénon’s vaunted privacy intrudes, for as Negroni says, these pictures supposedly arose “from their ‘romantic’ involvement, though I have no proofs [sic] of that.” Ediciones Anzilotti published a book of these photos, Acerca de Iris Scaccheri, in 1988.

As revelatory as what Thénon’s relationship with Scaccheri might have meant erotically is what that collaboration meant artistically, unblocking the poet at a period when she had begun to feel stuck. In her note to distancias, Thénon offers special thanks to Scaccheri, “whose dancing, unbeknownst to her, inspired the definite vision I needed to revise and complete this work which was threatening to become interminable.”

Just as they agreed on Thénon’s fundamental need for privacy, so too did Negroni, Smith, and Treitel concur that the poet’s final two books represented a shocking and energizing break with what had come before. Thénon’s first three books, Treitel says, “were in very classical Spanish, very balanced, very formal,” but “distancias is so mysterious and then she wrote Ova Completa and it’s full of sarcasm. She makes fun of many things there, and the style doesn’t seem to be her, it’s very different.” When I suggest that Thénon almost blows up language itself, Treitel replies instantly, “What she blows up is the world.”

Although Thénon was never formally affiliated with any movement, she is often classified as part of Argentina’s Generacíon del 60 along with her contemporaries Alejandra Pizarnik and Juana Bignozzi. In 1967, with fellow poets Juan Carlos Martelli, Eduardo Romano, and Alejandro Vignatti, she coedited a small literary magazine, Agua Viva, which lasted only four issues. (Smith says she has yet to see a copy and that no librarian she has talked to in the United States can find it.) Thénon described it as “a very tough magazine, very pedantic, very harsh. But we tried to do a few things—that is to say, we tried to disseminate work and open up the landscape,” but “it wasn’t long before an editorial included some political commentary, then another, and another, and we all started to come apart due to disagreements, and it ended as all things always end.”  

Chronologically, Thénon belongs to what the Spanish-born Mexican poet and critic Ramón Xirau called “The New Generation,” the group of postwar Latin American poets born between 1924 and 1940. Xirau divided this group into “poets of protest,” including Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua and Enrique Lihn of Chile, and “poets with a lyric tendency,” such as Blanca Varela of Peru, and Rosario Castellanos and Jaime Sabines of Mexico. As Treitel notes in her introduction to distancias, Thénon has always defied such neat categorization, for “she is an innovator, and her work has great affinity with writers outside her country.” In Ova Completa, Thénon is an angry and absurd synthesis of both—a poet of deeply lyrical protest.

Thénon, like most writers of her generation, was influenced by surrealism, anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, but Treitel points out that “she also recognizes her indebtedness to the Italian writers of the 1960s, the so-called I Novissimi, a group of avant-garde writers with whom she shares matters of form, lack of traditional syntax, violence of language and images, fragmentation.” Appearing in the 1961 Italian anthology-manifesto The Newest Poets: Poems for the ’60s, these writers included the collection’s editor Alfredo Giuliani, as well as Elio Pagliarani, Nanni Balestrini, and Edoardo Sanguineti. Thénon also expressed fondness for Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and E.E. Cummings, which makes sense given how she toggles between high and low culture, and how she uses fragments and idiosyncratic punctuation. 

The untitled opening poem in Ova mocks the expected concerns and decorum of capital P poetry, interspersing lines such as “look at what beautiful flowers” and “look at the little mirrors” and “little birds” among repeated lines of

why is that woman screaming?
why is she screaming?
why is that woman screaming?

Known for being difficult to translate due to what Mónica de la Torre calls her “flair for code-switching,” Thénon blends slang and scholarly references, esoteric wit and earthiness into her overall virtuosic linguistic performance. The only other collection of Thénon’s to appear in English is Treitel’s aforementioned distancias/distances, put out by Sun & Moon Classics in 1994. Speaking admiringly of the challenge Thénon’s work poses to a translator, Treitel wrote in the Translation Review in 1985 that “preoccupation with language lies at the core of her poetry.”

These self-aware and ludic tactics are on display in “Y Vos Tambien,” in which she writes, “you’re a poet, no? /or Sappho made in Shitland / poetess / don’t you see she’s a woman?” Here and throughout, Thénon’s humor shades into invective as she expresses resentment of gender-based and literary stereotyping. In the laugh-out-loud-funny “The Anthology,” she skewers the well-intentioned condescension of North American academics through the figure of “Petrona Smith-Jones,” an assistant professor “at the University of Poughkeepsie / which is just a weensie bit south of Vancouver” who is “in Argentina / on a Putifar grant / to put together an anthology / of developing, developed, / and also menopausal writers.” This clueless cultural appropriator explains that she is looking for women writers who are

feminists
and if possible alcoholics
and if possible anorexics
and if possible rape victims
and if possible lesbians
and if possible very very unhappy
 
this will be a democratic anthology
but please don’t bring me
the independent or sane.

Elsewhere, Thénon extends her satire to inanimate objects. In “The Funds of the Treasury,” she speaks in that institution’s voice. “I am the Treasury,” she writes, “a fabulous animal / don’t touch me / dedicate yourselves to ahrt,” lampooning the bureaucratic brush-offs that citizens too often receive from organizations that claim to serve them but don’t. “I am the Treasury,” the poem concludes, “sleeping I grow gigantic / and waking I die // leave me in peace.”

In that 1988 interview, Thénon argues that Ova “is not a funny book,” although she concedes that she sometimes “died laughing while writing it, but without ever ignoring the terrible aspects concealed within.” Her interlocutors, the poets Mirta Rosenberg and Diana Bellessi, elaborate: “As is often the case, a joke, if re-elaborated, appears as tragedy, and if elaborated again, reappears as a joke, but imbued with all the enrichment implicit in the process.”

Ova was published just four years after the end of Argentina’s military junta (backed by the United States), and the book is rife with ire. “I am the little fish // I’m going for your teeth,” Thénon threatens; “all my affairs are in order // there is no way to alter my destiny / as proverb.” Outraged by her country’s violent legacy, part of Thénon’s I-don’t-give-a-fuck tone and frenetic energy is attributable to the fact that she was able, thanks to the political opening after the junta, to become more overt regarding her targets and more insolent in her critiques. In distancias, she had to be more covert, “saturating the white space with meaning, opening subterfuges, making the poems dance across the page like skeletons or material ghosts,” as Negroni explains, so as to “elud[e] the pincers of censorship and its deadly risks.

To read Thénon’s profane and carnivalesque work is to be reminded that language can be a tool or even a weapon to manipulate, influence, and oppress. A goofy viciousness animates her voice as she makes this point, declaring, “some carry a rosary in their hands / others a book / others a bouquet of chard / I carry a Colt from a John Wayne movie,” adding “I’m considering killing / I’m doing my work for tomorrow.” Just as language can be used to justify or even enact violence, so too does Thénon commit gleeful violence against that kind of language.

Thénon stakes out a place for the power of poetry and poets without overstating literature’s impact. In one untitled poem, whose premise is that ever-practical engineers study poets to discern their purpose, the speaker notes, “nobody will feed off this / they report // but I advise you not to deactivate them.” In “La Musik,” she warns

hold on tight
this is culture
which means:
that some turned the fields and out came plants
and others turned their encephalons and out came
the brothers Karamazov.

Sardonic yet joyful, sarcastic and crazed, the poems in Ova Completa indulge in a transgressive delight in the way that all language—governmental or poetic, casual or authoritative—can be worked over, either made to crumble or to recompose.

“That’s how this little book came up,” Thénon says in her conversation with Rosenberg and Bellessi. “When questions are not answered, most of all to very young people—and we are all someone very young at certain times—you end up with these questions. And then you have a pointless craziness, chaos: a kind of chaos that can smile, a chaos that can cry.”

Interestingly, the English versions of the poems in this edition are all printed first, followed by the original Spanish, as opposed to the more traditional back-and-forth en face format of most work in translation. Reading Thénon is already so purposefully disrupted by the author’s own strategies that this decision feels felicitous, leading to a slightly smoother and more continuous experience. Fittingly, Smith notes, “Given her mixing of languages, registers, and forms, I often felt it was best—instead of aiming for representational exactitude in the English—to try to translate the play as much as the letter.”

Nonetheless, as the truism reminds us, something is always a bit lost, or perhaps incomplete, about a translation. “I think I made some interesting and challenging poems in English,” Smith confesses in her translator’s note, “although it makes me nervous still to imagine them as ‘finished.’” But in Thénon, this gap is foregrounded as an open-endedness not to be mourned or grieved, but to get lost in—lost in an active and sometimes (but not always) pleasing way, as in a labyrinth or a flow state.

As the critic Ana María Barrenechea wrote in the magazine Disposito in 1987, Thénon’s poetry operates by “the construction of terrible games.” There is an abyss or a chasm of meaning, Thénon seems to acknowledge, but there is also a multiplicity; her work suggests we might as well have a good time with the countless ways in which language is always already falling apart even as we attempt to master it. The process of reading her work feels exceptionally participatory to me, as though I have to be willing to bring as much as Thénon to the process. It was validating to learn that in a 1979 letter to Treitel, Thénon wrote, “The reader is an active being who participates in the act of creation.”

In that sense, if reading is sometimes like being invited to a party by the author, then reading Thénon is like being invited to a costume party—you can’t just come as you are, you’re going to have to put in some effort. If you do, she makes it worth your while. As she writes at the end of “Intermission,” “you’ve finally arrived / on the wings of the void / dressed up like a little white bunny.”