Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read online

  Oliverio Girondo

  SCARECROW

  & other anomalies

  translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

  A Xenos E-Book Edition

  Xenos Books

  2011

  Electronic Book Edition 2011

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 1-879378-28-0

  *****

  English translation copyright 2002

  by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

  All rights reserved

  Original texts copyright

  by Herederos Sucesión Oliverio Girondo

  Contact: Susana Lange de Maggi:

  [email protected]

  [email protected]

  This Xenos Books publication was made possible by a gift

  from the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Charitable Foundation.

  Cover art: Alfredo Castañeda, “Cuando el espejo sueña con otra imagen” (1988), reproduced with permission from The Bonino Gallery, New York, New York.

  Cover design: Greg Boyd.

  Book design: Karl Kvitko.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  for the Print Edition

  Girondo, Oliverio, 1891-1967.

  [Selections, English & Spanish, 2002]

  Scarecrow & other anomalies / Oliverio Girondo ; translated from the Spanish by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert with an anti-preface by Karl August Kvitko.

  p.cm.

  “Xenos dual-language ed.”

  Includes bibliographic references.

  ISBN 1-879378-21-3 (pbk.)

  1. Girondo, Oliverio, 1891-1967—Translations into English. I. Title: Scarecrow & other anomalies. II. Alter-Gilbert, Gilbert. III. Title.

  PQ7797.G535 A23 2001

  861’.62—dc21

  2001026983

  Published by Xenos Books

  Box 16433, Las Cruces

  New Mexico, USA 88004

  www.xenosbooks.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PREFACE TO THE KINDLE EDITION

  Anti-Preface

  SCARECROW

  ONE: MARIA LUISA

  TWO: THE VISITORS

  THREE: MY WIFE

  FOUR: FLAGELLATION AND FLAMENCOS

  FIVE: RELATIVES

  SIX: NERVES

  SEVEN: LOVE

  EIGHT: PERSONALITIES

  NINE: OUR SHADOW

  TEN: SUBLIMATION

  ELEVEN: AFTER SUICIDE

  TWELVE: THEY CONJUGATE

  THIRTEEN: A KICK

  FOURTEEN: GRANDMOTHER’S ADVICE

  FIFTEEN: THE PROPHET

  SIXTEEN: TRANSMIGRATION

  SEVENTEEN: THE SUCCUBUS

  EIGHTEEN: WEEPING

  NINETEEN: GRATITUDE

  TWENTY: A CATASTROPHIC MAN

  TWENTY-ONE: CURSES

  TWENTY-TWO: DEFENSES AGAINST WOMEN

  TWENTY-THREE: SOLIDARITY

  TWENTY-FOUR: THE INESCAPABLE

  POEMS

  INVITATION TO VOMIT

  IT’S ALL DROOL

  MIASMIC EXECUTION

  WEARINESS

  BLOODLESS DICHOTOMY

  NIHILISM

  PROWESS

  DOWNFALL

  VORTEX

  QUIBBLE

  NARROW PURPOSE

  LUNARLUDE

  PROSE POEMS

  NOCTURNE

  STREET SKETCH

  DEVOTION

  ANOTHER NOCTURNE

  PEDESTRIAN

  MEMORANDA

  THE MANIFESTO OF MARTIN FIERRO

  OLIVERIO GIRONDO BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

  OTHER KINDLE EDITIONS FROM XENOS BOOKS

  PREFACE TO THE KINDLE EDITION

  THE PRINT EDITION of Scarecrow and other anomalies is a Xenos Dual-Language edition: the original Spanish text appears on pages to the left, the English translation on pages to the right. It offers the dying analog generation of book readers the obscure pleasure of comparing words back and forth, tracing them with their arthritic fingers and mumbling them out loud as spittle slides from their lips. Preparing this curious little book for the bright new digital generation, in particular for the amazing digital device that can carry seven-hundred thousand million books without any of them weighing a page, I foolishly thought of attempting to retain that feature; but try as I might, I could not find a way to make matching pages on an electronic reader. The technology is there, it must surely be possible, but I have not mastered it, and none of the guides to producing e-books was written by a person introduced to the English language before the vast digital divide. So I can’t get from there to here. Given that there are no pages in an e-book, let alone facing pages, I was forced to dump the Spanish text and retain the English alone. But then it hit me: the book is more streamlined this way, shorn of a tiresome encumbrance, and worthy of joining the new age.

  The first page of Scarecrow is a pictogram—that is, a jocular poem typed in such a way as to form a picture. The picture is one of a strange little mannikin with a top hat.

  The hat reads:

  I know nothing You know nothing Thou knowest nothing He knows nothing Men know nothing Women know nothing You all know nothing None of us knows anything at all.

  The outspread arms read:

  The disorientation of my generation has its explanation in the direction of our education, whose idealization of action, was—without question!—a mystification, in distinction to our passion for meditation, contemplation and masturbation.

  The belly or body reads:

  (Guttural, as guttural as can be.) I believe I believe in that which I believe I do not believe. And I believe I don’t believe in what I believe I believe.

  The two outstretched legs make up a “Song of the froggies.” It reads vertically from top to bottom. Such a thing is probably possible to produce on a digital reader, but only with an advanced degree. I will simply spell it out here horizontally, left to right:

  And above the stairways climbing overhead! And below the ladders curving underneath! Is it there? It isn’t here! Is it thither? It isn’t hither! And above the stairways climbing overhead! And below the ladders curving underneath!

  The whole thing makes up, you see, a drawing of letters. I can’t show it, so you’ll just have to imagine it. But I will include it at the start of the book, though it will certainly be jumbled on your screen by the conversion of a doc file into hypertext. Nevertheless, it should produce an effect, for the point is not actually the text, but the combination of text and picture, sort of like telling a story while making shadows on a wall.

  The moribund print edition also contains a small number of graphics between its antiquated covers: a line drawing of the author, some of his own illustrations and representations of the scarecrow he fashioned out of papier-maché. But these don’t show up well in an e-book and have been dropped. An address is provided at the end of my Anti-Preface (which follows) that will direct you to a website that shows the gigantic creation.

  Well, enough. Here in Kindle format you have the complete English text of Scarecrow and other anomalies by Oliverio Girondo. Because it is best in a digital book for the chapters to have titles, since they form the basis for a “linked toc,” and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. does not make a good table of contents, I have added a title to each of the twenty-four sections of Scarecrow. All the other titles are the author’s own. The book concludes with some notes and biographical sketches of the participants. I might have tried a few footnotes, but they seem to be beyond the capacities of e-books at their present stage. Soon they will have them—and photographs, and interactive features, and videos, and songs, and holograms of the characters, and then everything will be transformed.
r />   Karl Kvitko

  Editor, Xenos Books

  P.S. If you prefer to go straight to Scarecrow, go back to the Table of Contents and click there. Otherwise, next come introductory words about the contents of the book.

  Anti-Preface

  THE SCARECROW STANDS ALONE

  1. Idiocies & Introductions

  There are countless idiocies in life, and many are ineradicable. One of them obliges millions of men around the world to wear a strip of cloth called a necktie from their Adam’s apple down to their omphalos. The convention originated when Croatian mercenaries flourishing a cloth talisman at their throats visited the court of King Louis XIV in 1668. The Sun King liked the fashion statement of the “cravates” (origin of the word “cravat”), as did the people, and so today believers in the scientific method, believers in the omnipotence of God and in the transformative power of faith in Jesus Christ, atheists, agnostics and neo-pagans alike ward off evil spirits with the selfsame artifact of superstition; and if you want to get and keep a job in the twenty-first century, you’d better wear that colorful and constrictive strip of idiocy too.

  An idiocy of more recent derivation is wearing a baseball cap backwards, originating, evidently, in the murderous youth gangs of our cities as a show of juvenile defiance. Other kids liked the look; it said: “Look at me! I’m different, I defy the conventions of society.” And so today all the youth, most of the aging youth and a considerable number of millionaire entertainers, plus high-school coaches and dads who want to be pals, show themselves different and defiant by wearing a sign that easily reads: “I’m an idiot who follows a fashion begun by degenerate thugs.” You would think that someone might wear the tie and the backward baseball cap at the same time to demonstrate originality, or qualified conventionality, or double idiocy, but so far I haven’t seen it.

  Or take the greatest idiocy of all: the parking meter—an instrument with which the citizens of a society penalize themselves for parking their vehicles in spaces laid out in their very own city, while they go about on foot to do perfectly legitimate business, paying a sub-class of citizens, supposedly civil servants, to prey on them, devise traps for them and to regard them as detestable but inexhaustible sources of revenue, with which to fund ever more elaborate furnishings for the civil servant-predators and ever more sophisticated devices for monitoring and punishing their nominal masters, the citizens, who are idiots for letting it happen.

  So long as there are men’s suits, kids’ sports caps and private automobiles, and we shall not begin to discuss high-heeled shoes, theatrical greasepaint and civet anal scent prized as adornments by women, these three idiocies will not disappear; and so long as there are books, the particular idiocy that concerns us right now will not go away either. It is the practice of introducing a literary work designed to surprise, startle and perhaps even shock the reader with a critical preface that reveals nearly the whole story or content of the book, or analyzes it, and thereby deadens the surprise, startle and whatever there might have been of a shock.

  The idea seems to be that readers are more interested in the intellectual assessment and categorization of a work than in responding to it directly, with naïve emotion and an unconditioned mind; they want to know to what school it belongs, what critics have said about it and what cultural values it possesses before they will bring themselves to read it; therefore they will forgo the stimulation and possible pleasure of an immediate acquaintance with the work and will take delight in the cleverness of the critic’s observations, making sure to respond with the reactions prepared for them by the critic when they read passages in the author’s work that were previously cited in the preface.

  All of this line is absurd, of course, since the book was purchased without reading the preface, and the reader is hoping for some escape from, or novel perspective on, daily life, else he or she would not have bothered to look at fiction in the first place. But the critical approach is foisted upon readers so persistently and authoritatively with virtually every book that it may succeed in persuading some of them that indeed this is what they want. Certainly the chief guilt in this idiocy belongs to those who write the preface, but those who pick up a book and read the cover blurbs and preface first are themselves not without blame. Readers should make it a rule to read the blurbs, preface and explanatory notes last, after the main work, so that they can enjoy knowing that their pleasure was not spoiled and their perceptions were not preconditioned, and so that they can revile the idiot who tried to spoil things for them by demonstrating that he had read the book first and therefore was one up on them.

  Now that this book has been converted to an electronic text, you find yourself in a bit of a fix. You can’t flip ahead to see when this anti-preface ends, and there are no page numbers to guide you. You could go back to the table of contents and click on the beginning of Scarecrow, jumping right over my remarks, or read on a bit and hope that I won’t be too long. Keep in mind that since the Spanish text has been dropped, the text of the book is now half as long, and I do have something to say.

  2. Within Your Reach

  Having said the above, I recognize my task as one of introducing the startling, stunning and definitely mind-altering work of Oliverio Girondo by not telling you what it is about, not only if you have followed convention and started reading this preface first, but even more so if you have not. I am writing the preface because it is definitely expected of me, the publisher, and the book, digital or print, would appear deficient without it, since Girondo is a writer almost totally unknown among readers of English. The print publication, aside from one or two poems in anthologies, was his “debut” in the language, and this Kindle edition is his coming-out party in e-land.

  Also I am writing the preface because there are a few things I can safely mention in advance without destroying the purpose of his work. For example, the title. Scarecrow—well, yes. In Spanish, Espantapájaros—literally, “it scares birds.” Where is the scarecrow? You may look high and low to find him. Or maybe he’s right there in front of your face. Who is he? You’ll figure it out. Who are the birds? Same thing. Now then, have I given anything away? Maybe, because I referred to the scarecrow as a “he.” Yet maybe I’m mistaken, and it is nothing more than an it.

  All right, so far, so good. Now what about the second title, or subtitle, which Girondo appended (in parentheses) to the work? Al alcance de todos—”within the reach of everyone.” How’s that—a scarecrow within everyone’s grasp? Does that mean that everyone can reach out and buy “Scarecrow”—the book—because it is found in every bookstore? No, the first edition of 1932 was printed up in 5000 copies and not sold in the bookstores at all. Instead, Girondo rented a landau coach from a mortuary and hired liveried footmen and coachmen to attend the vehicle. In place of the floral wreathes he stacked copies of the book, printed with his own money, and in one seat propped up a lifesize scarecrow he had made out of papier-mâché, with top hat, button eyes and painted white gloves. Then Girondo got in and, drawn by six horses, paraded through the streets of Buenos Aires announcing publication of Espanatapájaros through a megaphone, handing out copies and directing the public to a shop on la Calle Florida. There, on the sidewalk, a bevy a pretty girls selected by the author hawked the book, its cover bearing a likeness of the same well-heeled scarecrow. By such means the edition sold out in fifteen days. The dummy scarecrow retired to the vestibule of Girondo’s estate on Calle Suipacha, where it greeted unsuspecting visitors forever after.

  So the subtitle might refer to that occasion, for the book was unquestionably available to all within earshot of Girondo’s bullhorn. The price was $2.50, which though more than the usual 25 centavos for paperback still fell within the range of everyone’s pocketbook, which makes two meanings for “al alcance de todos.” However, in 1966, a year before Girondo’s death, Espanatapájaros was republished in a collection of his works and still bore the curious subtitle. Now it was not a separate publication, and it was purveyed in the bookstores
. So the subtitle must not refer to the first edition or to the price. It must mean another sort of accessibility, namely, the mental—the author thought his work accessible to every mind, high and low. It was, in his conception, an Everyman scarecrow: “You Can Get It.” When one considers the content, which no one will ever quite understand, such a meaning can only be taken as a joke. So maybe Girondo means something else again, such as “everyone can attain the status of a scarecrow.” Perhaps the idea is that the scarecrow stands up on a hill, at a height above everyone, and people must climb to attain—alcanzar—a closer acquaintance. Perhaps they can strive to be a scarecrow themselves.

  In this case, the scarecrow’s literary manifestation must be written in a state of heightened inspiration, awareness, understanding—another meaning of alcance. O.K., I’ll tell you: it is. You won’t see anything else in the world like it. Telling you won’t spoil your approach to it, because the crazy thing is so spectacularly original that even though alerted by my advance notice you are still going to be more surprised by Scarecrow than by anything else you have ever read in your life, even if you are ninety-five and have spent every free moment fiendishly consuming all of the most fantastic symbolist, futurist, cubist, surrealist, expressionist, anarchist, dadaist, existentialist, creationist, ultraist, vanguardist, magical realist, modernist, postmodernist and every other -ist compositions that you could lay your hands on, plus the farthest-out non-ist compositions as well, including Lucian’s True Story, Rabelais’ Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and Dostoyevsky’s Bobok. There is no way that you can prepare for the experience of coming face to face with Girondo’s scarecrow.