Decals: Complete Early Poems

by Oliverio Girondo, Rachel Galvin (Translator), Harris Feinsod (Translator)

Overview

An important influence on Jorge Luis Borges and many others, Oliverio Girondo was at the center of Argentine poetry in the twentieth century. A very cosmopolitan writer, his early poems—many of which are collected here for the first time in English—demonstrate his wanderlust, crisscrossing Europe and the Americas on streetcars, express trains, and ocean liners. Many of the poems in here were written in diverse world ports, and are perched at the seaside, among sailors, seagulls, and tango cafés. They take the reader on a tour of Spain that cleverly deflates the romantic glamour of the country found in Hemingway and Dos Passos, but reinvigorates it with a sexiness found in Girondo’s intensive wordplay, Surrealistic influences, and idiosyncratic flare for metaphor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940953946
Publisher:	Open Letter
Publication date:	12/31/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Oliverio Girondo authored seven innovative collections of poetry before his death in 1967. Born in Buenos Aires, he frequently traveled to Europe, where he was involved with both the French symbolists and the Spanish avant-garde. He was at the center of an Argentine vanguard focused around the influential journals Martin Fierro and Proa. He has two other collections available in English: Poems to Read on a Streetcar (New Directions) and In the Moremarrow (Action Books).

Harris Feinsod is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of a literary history, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, as well as many essays on modernist literature in Europe and the Americas. He is the director of Open Door Archive. His next book is a cultural history of modernism at sea.

Rachel Galvin is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. Her books include two collections of poetry, Pulleys&Locomotion and Elevated Threat Level; a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945; and Hitting the Streets, a translation from the French of Raymond Queneau, which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation. She is a co-founder of the Outranspo, an international creative translation collective, and assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

“Express Train”

The carriages slide
over the frets of the tracks
to sing on two strings
the landscape’s grit.

Fields of stone,
where vines shoot
a menacing hand
out of the earth.

Nags who lead
ascetic lives
aiming to enter
the bullring.

Haggard hogs gone mad
who think they are Salomé
because their hams are rosy.

On the crest of the crag,
dressed for First Communion,
the villagers’ houses kneel
at the foot of the church,

they press together,
they lift it
as if it were a monstrance,
they are anesthetized by siesta
and the tintinnabulation of bells.

At the risk that the trip will end for good,
the locomotive propels the stones
at sixteen kilometers per hour
and when it can’t go on any longer
it stops, panting.

At times, it “usually” happens
that a station
is precisely there.

Bells! Whistles! Shouts!;
and the engine driver, who bids the station chief
seven farewells;
and the parrot, who is the only passenger to protest
the fourteen-hour delay;
and the girls who come to see the train pass
because it is the only thing that comes to pass.

The carriages slide
over the frets of the tracks
to sing on two strings
the landscape’s grit.

Fields of stone,
where vines shoot
a menacing hand
out of the earth.

Nags who lead
ascetic lives
aiming to enter
the bullring.

Haggard hogs gone mad
who think they are Salomé
because their hams are rosy.

In the first-class compartments,
the seats screw springs into us
and uncork our kidneys,
while spiders
practice their firemen exercises
around the nightlight
that kindles on the ceiling.

At the risk that the trip will end for good,
the locomotive propels the stones past
at sixteen kilometers per hour
and when it can’t go on any longer
it stops, panting.

Will we arrive at dawn,
or tomorrow evening . . . ?
Through the grimy windows
dusk scares off shadows
that creep out from the rocks
while we go on burying ourselves
in catacomb light.

You can hear:
the song of women
peeling stew vegetables
for the day after tomorrow;
the snore of soldiers,
which assures us,
who knows why,
that they’ve taken their boots off;
the numbers of the lottery summary
which passengers learn by heart
since they haven’t found anything else
to read at the newsstands.

If we could have at least cozied an eye
up to one of those pinholes in the sky!

Bells! Whistles! Shouts!;
and the engine driver, who bids the station chief
seven farewells;
and the parrot, who is the only passenger to protest
the fourteen-hour delay;
and the girls who come to see the train pass
because it is the only thing that comes to pass.

The carriages slide
over the frets of the tracks
to sing on two strings
the landscape’s grit.

Spain? 1870? . . . 1923? . . .

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award

"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 that modernism—anywhere & everywhere—can take us."—Jerome Rothenberg

"Girondo’s poetry is a song to the transgressive imagination, an assault on routine. . . . Unlike other experimental artists, his gestures usually transcended mere provocation. His work not only paved the way for a rigorous vanguardia, with a profound theoretical basis, but it also took up the quotidian as a field of action, enriching it with an absurd humor that ties it to a Hispanic tradition that stretches from Quevedo and Gracián to Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Julio Cortázar, or Augusto Monterroso."—Andrés Neuman

"Girondo’s effectiveness undeniably frightens me. I came to his work from the suburbs of my own verse, from that long line of mine where there are sunsets and little lanes and a blurry girl who looks clear next to a sky-blue balustrade. I saw him as so skillful, so apt at hopping off a streetcar in full stride, being reborn safe and sound amid the menace of car horns and stepping away from the passing crowd, that I felt provincial next to him. . . . Girondo is a violent one. He looks on things at length and suddenly gives them a smack."—Jorge Luis Borges

From the Publisher