Oliverio Girondo

Oliverio Girondo


Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1891, Oliverio Girondo … belonged to the Argentine ultraist vanguard, which also included Jorge Luis Borges and for which he wrote the manifesto. … [The poems presented here] are from En la masmédula (In the Moremarrow) [1954], which culminates Girondo’s career of poetic engagement with the vanguard; his lifelong rejection of academic authority and search for new forms of poetic articulation find their last and best expression here. With this last volume, according to Trinidad Barrera, Girondo puts a period to the Latin American modernism begun in the 1920s, of which he was a central figure, and provides a model and a jumping off point for contemporary Latin American poetry’s concern with the nature of referentiality. … Like Vallejo’s Trilce and Huidobro’s Altazor, with which it is frequently compared, In the Moremarrow forges from the Spanish language a new poetic language with its own psychic vocabulary and syntax, constituting a journey into the uncharted space of whatever “more” the marrow of language may or may not hold. … With seemingly unlimited combinatory properties and multivalence, Girondo’s language, or “pure impure mix” … communicates desire and disgust, moves fluidly between ironic distance and unguarded sadness or wonder at the limits and possibilities of signification. According to Argentine poet and critic Enrique Molina, each line of En la masmédula is “a verbal galaxy,” an alchemy of the word in which “the language is rushing into a state of eruption.” Traveling widely in Europe for a large part of his life, Girondo died in Buenos Aires in 1967.

Molly Weigel

Posted over on Poems & Poetics