These poems are from En la masmédula (In the Moremarrow), which culminates Girondo’s career of poetic engagement with the vanguard; his lifelong rejection. “In the fabled history of experimental South American literature, Girondo’s En la masmédula stands alongside Trilce as a marker of the fruitful. “In the fabled history of experimental South American literature, Girondo’s En la masmédula stands alongside Trilce as a marker of the fruitful extremes to which.

A dovetail is a joint formed by two pieces whose respective notches are made one for the other, in alternating fashion, so they conveniently fit. Which, in creation myths, sounds like the soul blown into dust to animate a person. Perhaps, then, this is not so foreign.

It is more primordial marrow. It is hard to say what stubborn female couplings refers to. Maybe something about the male poet accepting his anima, that female part of him that is stubbornly there but his machismo stubbornly rejects.

Oliverio Girondo – Wikipedia

This is a reach, as psychoanalysis is a reach. Every left page gives the original Spanish ej of the poem, and the right page holds the translation. I notice the Spanish helps. The original version of that first line is two. The writing is self-referential. It ties itself to the Word. It hermetically seals itself. Because it rewrites itself by correcting the mistakes of our World.

Therefore the recombinations in this book are all still legible, because they adhere to grammar rules but comment on them while deforming them.

This seems a problematization. To undo the dovetails, quite literally. A beautiful translation choice. The shores Girondo sticks his bridges with. A lot of poems end on their own titles, creating a feeling of being in an enclosure.

Which is, like, incredible. But once again, very gestural. There are other people there, straying, erranding. Love for Girondo is a force that howls out.

We are inside it. We are exposed to its symptoms. In the poem Plexile, the page topography is different. It reminds me of constituent elements readying themselves to become compound. Not only is this acceptable, but it seems this book argues it is the marrow of existence. Love is the essence.

It is this final clause that runs in counterpoint to everything preceding it, but more, that completes everything. Everything I do is everything I do, but, at end, shot through with love. But my love takes partners, too. If love is the essence of things, the essence of love is More. It takes an object. And if love takes an object, love conducts violence. And problematizes; who wants to be an object?

Who wants to be subject to objectification? There are 45 mouths. But the essence of the instrument is water.

Variations on a theme of water. It is split into two short sections. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in This introductory passage I think offers reasons:.

This book is hard to write about, around, through. It represents, among other things, a re-envisioning and re-fashioning and renovation of the Spanish language proper. For this reason it is full of neologisms created via new word compounds, new combinations, then recombinations of those prior new combinations: Is there an authoritative, origin-al essence to be mined at the bottom?

Or mwsmedula it just turtles all the way down? I want to explain. The first deals with the subtractive, the distinctive essence ; the 2nd deals with the additional, with excess.

We have here competing notions: Or grammatically speaking, the definite article v. What we have here is Reproduction vs. The ButMarrow sounds horrific. But then again, marrow, or the essence of e thing, is already part masmexula this tension. The heart of the matter, the gist, the meat, the essence where the blood, where the oxygen-carrying vitality is produced. So we make an inference. Both the process of writing experimental poetry and the process of translating it — as well as the process of reading it — entail risk, a surrender of certainty and control in mzsmedula of trying to know and em through language in the present in new ways.

This seems to be the question at the heart of the book, enacted by its constant linguistic slippages.

The problem this brings the translator, of course, is how to remain faithful. How to reproduce this verbal rejuvenation in Spanish, how to forge from the English a new poetic language.

Faithfulness may be a practice rather than a result. It contained the slant of my personality and point of view and present experience, but I made it as big as I could, giondo myself bigger in the process. Maybe this is necessary. I know that analysis is a fundamental part of translation. Maskedula mean, in order to move all the plants from one hothouse to another, one ought to take inventory to ensure that no plant was left behind. These only grow at high elevations in the Andes.

This is understandable, and this is understandably impossible. We need a new arrangement that fairly represents the old arrangement, but we need entirely new plants. We cannot simply transplant them, we must translate them.

Oliverio Girondo, poems

Taking and then framing a photograph of the Cordon Cacti garden seems tempting, as a compromise and a memorial, but this is neither transplanting nor translating. It is simply a record hirondo a static moment. It is not a garden. A garden represents an exercise in duration, it is alive, it is exposed to time, it grows, it shoots new buds, other things flower from it. A photograph, in this case at least, is not a poem.

It is a historical document, a hasty epitaph to something maskedula living elsewhere. The most faithful translation to me then embraces failure as a mode of lx. The first left-indented column is the original Spanish poem. The third right-indented column is the finished translation. Between the two is the masmedlua column, the Middle Version. There are moments in the middle version, in column 2, that actually appear quite poetic, whether intentional or not.

This too points out something for me that is disconcerting. What I mean to say is this. We see an organism build its limbs in response to each limb just built.

Mi lu builds to mi lubidulia. Mi lubidulia builds girodo mi golocidalove. My Lumy does this, too, at its best moments. This entire book does this, in fact, at its best moments. But the first two lines of the translation are confusing to me. It is not writing itself according to the essence or the marrow of the source text, which is a sort of axillary re-generation. The majority of the book is such best moments.

I think this book is extremely important. Action Books has a knack for finding works like this. I trust it as a mode of writing poems.