Rachel Galvin and Harris Feinsod Introduce Argentinian Poet Oliverio Girondo

Literary Hub shares an adapted version of translators Galvin and Feinsod's introduction to Decals (Open Letter, 2018) by Oliverio Girondo. "Things are never only what they seem in Oliverio Girondo’s early poems, and in fact they often merely imitate reality," they begin. Picking up from there: 

In “Rio de Janeiro,” the city “is a cardboard imitation of a porphyry city,” and in “Siesta,” Girondo writes, “How real, the landscape that looks fake!” “Café-Concert” ends with the line “The curtain, on closing, simulates a half-open curtain.” Land and sea are inclined to mingle.

The poems are crisscrossed by the constant embarking and disembarking of ships, often metaphorically, so that elderly women “board” the nave of a church and weary, land-bound sailors “board” the city’s cafés. The present moment mixes with memory, and nostalgia is a type of pipe smoke that wafts through the city. Sometimes a tavern is also a bullring, as in “Carousal,” where the waiter inserts a corkscrew the way a picador jabs a bull with his lance. Everywhere, Girondo conveys the teeming metropolis with striking sensory details and playful comparisons. These lines from “Street Note” aptly summarize this urban experience: “I think about where I will store the kiosks, streetlamps, passersby that enter through my pupils. I feel so full I fear I’ll burst . . . I might need to drop some ballast on the walkway.” There are fleeting city scenes described as “notes” or “sketches,” nocturnes, landscape poems, tango and nightclub poems, travel tales of ethnographic encounter, critiques of Catholic ritual, and a lone, unrhymed sonnet (“Siesta”). In one poem, Girondo announces the “Humble and humiliated song of urinals tired of singing!” in a twist on Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1917 provocation. In these poems, the nightingale of lyric is replaced by a banal object already debased at an early moment of technological modernity. Car horns, shadows, and other elements of the evolving cityscape all take on intense feelings of their own.

Read more at Literary Hub.