Looking on Argentine Poet Oliverio Girondo at Length

At Public Books, Gayle Rogers writes about the Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo, "one of the most fascinating and innovative avant-garde figures of the 20th century." When Girondo's poems have been translated, says Rogers, "they have often appeared—quite accurately—strange, inscrutable, even inaccessible." More:

Girondo was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges and a fixture in the provocative publications of the Argentine avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, when he was typically considered an Ultraist. Borges felt an unusually strong anxiety of influence when regarding Girondo, calling him “violent” and observing that his countryman “looks on things at length and suddenly gives them a smack.” But far from both Borges’s endlessly complex metaphysical puzzles and from the contemplative, profound Romantic poet, Girondo feigns meditation only to dislocate and disfigure the object of his fixation with quick, sometimes apparently cheap and unearned force.

Like Borges, he left Argentina for the bustling, kinetic literary scene of interwar Europe and became a key intermediary in the transatlantic aesthetic exchanges that marked this era of literary history. His first collection, Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (Twenty Poems to Be Read on the Streetcar), appeared in France in that globally magical annus mirabilis of 1922—the watershed year for modern aesthetics, from Joyce’s Ulysses to Modern Art Week in Brazil. The collection was published not as a pocket-sized edition, but, as Galvin and Feinsod’s introduction notes, “in an oversize, demi-luxe edition, embossed and illustrated with his own watercolors.”

Girondo’s star was rising internationally when Calcomanías (Decalcomania) followed, in 1925. But he did not find the same lasting reputation in the Anglophone world that an even denser and more difficult Spanish-language poet, César Vallejo, did...

Read the full piece at Public Books.