Oliverio Girondo


OLIVERIO GIRONDO was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1891, to an illustrious Basque family. At the age of 21, Oliverio begins studying law and makes a pact with his family: he will study law in Buenos Aires, if the family promises to finance a series of European vacations during university breaks and holidays. They assent, and Oliverio roves the continent for much of the 1920's and 1930's.

Around the same time that Vallejo published Trilce, Girondo published, Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (1922). Vallejo was a contemporary of Girondo, and their lives proved germaine in many ways. In 1924, Girondo returns to Argentina and founds Martin Fierro, a journalist's rag of literary caliber for the people of el Río de la Plata. Calcomanias (1925) is published in Spain, three years after Veinte poemas. And, seven years after Calcomanias, Girondo publishes Espantapajaros (1932).

In 1943, Girondo and Norah Lange are married. They travel to Europe in 1948 and 1965, although the trip in 1965 would prove to be their last. Injuries sustained in a car accident in 1961 greatly diminish Girondo's health and output. Girondo dies in Buenos Aires in 1967 as a result of these wounds.







Sketch in the Sand

The morning is passed on the beach, dusted by the sun.

Arms.
Amputated legs.
Bodies that reintegrate.
Floating craniums of tire tread.

As the bathers turn their bodies, the waves elongate their nautical shavings over the beach of sawdust that is the beach itself.

Everything is gold and blue!

The shade of the tarps. The eyes of the girls that inject themselves with novels and horizons. My happiness, of shoes with rubber soles, which make me bounce on the sand.

For .80¢ photographers sell the bodies of the women who bathe.

There are bodegas that exploit the dramatic nature of the breaking. Broody maids.
Irascible siphons with sea extracts! Breakers and rocks with algaed breasts of mariners and hearts painted with a fencer’s foil.

Gangs of seagulls that fake their flight, destroyed by a white piece of paper.

And, before everything, that sea!


--Translated by Yago Cura and Amanda Duran



Exvoto


The girls of Flores have sweet eyes like the sugar-encrusted almonds of Café Molino and they use silk ribbons to suck in their butts at the altar of the butterfly.

The girls of Flores stroll arm in arm to transmit their trembling, and if someone looks them square in the pupil they clamp their legs shut—afraid that their sex will fall on the sidewalk.

When it gets dark, they hang their “green” breasts over the steel balconies so that their dresses bruise them in the nude. At night, towered by their mothers, they stroll through Flores Park so that men may ejaculate words into their ears and light up their breasts like intermittent light bugs.

The girls of Flores live with the anxiety that their asses will rot like apples left on the radiator and the desire of men suffocates them so much that they would wish to abort that desire as if it were a corset.

Because they have neither the courage to cut their bodies into morsels nor the gumption to distribute samples to those who stroll the boulevards.


--Translated by Yago Cura and Amanda Duran


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