Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read online

  We might consider other possible meanings of the subtitle, but the translator, Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, has already considered them all. The one he likes best, because it captures the variant meanings mentioned above as well as the everyday tone, is the one printed here. Simply: “Accessible To All.” But it is not always possible to retain all the nuances and multiple readings of Girondo in one English translation. A choice must be made for every sentence, and that choice may be one of many. For example, Alter-Gilbert wrote me in the midst of his labors:

  There is a preponderance of sexual innuendo in Scarecrow, and Girondo has a wicked penchant (Joycean in method) for cramming a phrase with multiple meanings, so that a line such as Solidario del naufragio de las señoras ballenatos, de los tiburones vestidos de frac, que les devoran el vientre y la cartera has a double set of associations: (1) “I am in solidarity with the shipwreck of whale-calf señoras and with the sharks in tuxedos who devour their bowels and their flippers” or (2) “I am in solidarity with the broken romances of married whale-shaped women and with the lotharios in their coats and tails who consume them, both their wombs and their purses.” There is the plight of whales in nature and of betrayed women in society united by a creative use of Argentine slang. There is further the strong suggestion that the abandoned women are pregnant, a suggestion reinforced by a line in the next paragraph referring to rats and abortions circulating through the subsoil. This is one example among many that could be cited.

  So maybe the scarecrow can be all things to all people, creating such a plethora of readings as to reach out and grab anyone, or to appeal to the mind that reads it in its own way, which might mean any way. Maybe Girondo produced a deconstructionist text before the evil thought of tearing apart great works entered the envious minds of pretentious critics, and at the same time created their worst nightmare, for they can hardly deconstruct a text that in the process of self-creation deconstructs itself. They need to find the supposed standard meaning of a work before they can attack it, ascribe false readings to it and then claim that it fails in its mission, but here “al alcance de todos” there is no standard meaning, unless it be one that scares birds. For this reason, I believe that Scarecrow may become a guardian angel for the distraught soul about to bite the cyanide capsule of literary criticism and an effective antidote for those who already writhe in the throes of deconstruction.

  In any event, you can judge for yourself, but only if you read the print edition, where the original text is presented on the left-hand pages facing the English, which appears on the right, so that you can make your own possible alternate readings as you follow Alter-Gilbert’s inspired rendition. Here you must take my word for it that Alter-Gilbert has kept his translation close to the original text, but occasionally was moved by its spirit to outpourings of unrestrained eloquence, such as do not spring from the tedium of mechanically following word for word.

  3. The Straw Man Objects

  But wait a minute, someone who has already read the work might object. There are standard themes here: life, love, suffering, death, identification with the universe. What’s so original? Yes, I would agree, there are standard themes, but from what angle? Is Scarecrow symbolic, satiric, ironic, lyrical, rhapsodic, paradoxical, absurd—or all of these things put together? Does it have an overarching theme, or even a logical sequence? Must you read it straight through from chapter 1 to 24, or can you proceed in any order you like? And are the chapters really chapters; do they necessarily belong to the same work? To what genre does the thing belong, can you tell me that? Can you spell out its message, or if you tried would you not so grossly mischaracterize the work as to prove yourself a philistine? To all of these questions the wise guy whom I have invented must throw up his hands. And so, I imagine, must real readers whom I have not invented, even though the work is meant to be within their reach.

  Girondo once drew up a manifesto for a magazine he helped found, called Martín Fierro after the freedom-loving gaucho of the pampas. It lays out a sort of program, but one of such broad expanses as to remind us that “everything is new under the sun if seen with up-to-date eyes and expressed with a contemporary accent.” The manifesto is included at the end of this volume, so that you may hold it up to Scarecrow and see whether Girondo’s masterpiece observes his own rules. For that matter, whether anyone followed his rules, or whether there were any rules to follow. Dozens, scores and possibly hundreds of Latin American writers have felt the influence of Girondo, which greatly invigorated the Argentine avant-garde through the magazine, but it was one that reinforced their individual abilities and left no identifiable trace.

  Not too long ago, moviegoers around the world felt Girondo’s charm when his anomalous works, quite unaccountably, inspired a full-length feature film, The Dark Side of the Heart (1994). Argentine director Eliseo Subiela tooks themes from Scarecrow and Lunarlude, added some inventions of his own and fused them together with an original plot. The film’s hero is Oliverio, a misunderstood poet and reluctant advertising man, who wanders in a long coat through Buenos Aires seeking the woman of his dreams and testing attractive nominees with his tricky tropes. The woman who appreciates them most turns out to be a prostitute named Ana, who possibly is Death, but she insists that their relationship remain platonic. Overcome with passion, he offers her his bleeding heart in his hand, and together they dance the tango.

  The chief scene I recall takes place in the apartment of his friend, an artist who has fashioned his doorway in the shape of a gigantic painted vagina, through which Oliverio enters. I can tell you these things because they are not found in this book, but I strongly recommend the movie nonetheless, especially for that grand entrance. After its showing in Argentina sales of poetry went up and young men began a craze of pursuing young women with verse. Although a big hit at international film festivals, it did not noticeably increase Girondo’s reputation abroad, probably because he was not yet translated.

  4. What Was Wrong With Him?

  There is one question I would like to address before I turn you over to the author—or let him loose on you. Why did Girondo, having written Espantapájaros in 1932 and a slimmer yet also amazing piece of prose, Interlunio [“Lunarlude”], five years later—why did he write nothing more in fiction? Why did this talent, equal in these two works to practically any fantast you can name, a talent who might have won world renown on the order of the indisputable greats and topped any list of outstanding Latin American authors, rather than sought inclusion in its addenda or footnotes; why did he produce only enough miscellanea to fill one average-sized, large-print volume of Obras completas? No novel, no collections of stories, no literary essays, no book reviews that anyone recalls, no memoirs or biographies, no plays after the age of 25, only one translation—of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer—and that a collaboration with a friend, Enrique Molina.

  What was he up to? Was he such a pampered aristocrat, such a slick-haired fop and listless dilettante, that he couldn’t bring himself to raise his languid hand and write more than a hundred pages of fiction during the forty-five years of a professional literary career? Or did he consider himself a Rimbaud and value his poetry more—those anti-poetic effusions, actually not very numerous, some of which are included in this volume to shock, disgust and delight you. Or his art notes and occasional essays on social themes, destined like all such matter to yellow and become the province of antiquarians and pedants? (They have, however, been given fresh white pages in the 1999 Obra completa, published in Spain.) Or his drawings and paintings, which were accomplished, but rarely exhibited? One of his aphorisms, which are noteworthy but not profound, and which are included in this collection in lieu of any remaining prose of interest, perhaps gives us a clue: “No critic can compare with our desk drawer.” Was Girondo such a perfectionist, like the composer Paul Dukas, that he withheld most of his work and left posterity but one—or one and a half—Sorcerer’s Apprentice? Or could there have been another reason why his output was so small? Let’s take a brief
look at his life and work.

  5. A Biography of Sorts

  Born in Buenos Aires in August 1891, the last of five children, into a family of cattle barons. Spoiled rotten as a child, distinguishes himself by joining protests and throwing things at his teachers. First, at El Nacional school, the largest egg in nature—an ostrich egg—hurled at a pedagogue named Calixto Oyuela. Then, at the Albert Le Grande school in France, an inkwell aimed at the skull of a geography teacher who refers to “cannibals who live in Buenos Aires, the capital of Brazil.” Removed from these schools, as well as from the Epsom School in London, where something bad—we don’t know what—happened, returns to Argentina. Persuades his rich parents that he will be a good boy and study for law if they will send him back to Europe once a year for his vacation. Begins annual pilgrimages to France, Italy, Spain and beyond—to Africa and the source of the Nile. Also visits the United States, Cuba and other countries of Latin America. Finishes law school, but never practices law. Meets Ultraist poetess Norah Lange at a luncheon in 1926, marries her twenty years later. Presides as a patron of Argentine arts and letters until 1964, when he is run over by a car. Survives, but with a debilitating head injury. When the house on Calle Lavalle in which he was born is paved over, a literary friend proposes placing a plaque in the asphalt to mark the historical birthplace. To which Girondo responds: “I was fatally wounded in the same place as I was born—in the middle of the street.” Dies in January 1967.

  6. From Comoedia to El Puro No

  As for his literary career, he founds at age 20 a short-lived journal with his friends, Comoedia. Four years later, in 1915, writes a play with one of them, René Zapata Quesada, entitled La madrastra [The Stepmother], which premiers in November. A second play, La comedia de todos los días, fails to reach the stage when an actor refuses to say lines addressing the public as “estupidos.” Seven years later produces Veinte poemas para ser leídos en la tranvía [Twenty Poems To Be Read on the Streetcar], a slim volume of street scenes observed in European cities and in Buenos Aires. First edition published in Paris; second edition three years later in Buenos Aires. Written abstractly and illustrated with nonchalant water colors by the author, it establishes Girondo as a modernist among the literary elite, both abroad and at home. (Samples are included in the current volume as “Prose poems.”) The same year, 1925, sees the publication of Calcomanías [Decals], a similar collection, likewise slim. Meanwhile, in 1923, helps found the journal Martín Fierro, edited by Evar Méndez, which runs through forty-five issues up to 1949. Promotes the publication on his travels in Latin America and turns his home into a salon for established and aspiring writers: Leopoldo Lugones, Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Enrique Molina, Norah Lange and Xul Solar are among the Martinfierristas supporting the cause of avant-garde Argentine literature.

  On his travels he meets Blaise Cendrars, Paul Morand, Valéry Larbaud, Ramon Gómez de la Serna, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Salvador Dalí, John Dos Passos and other luminaries of the artistic world; forms a close friendship with some, such as la Serna; some visit his salon when in Buenos Aires, as do South Americans Miguel Angel Asturias, Amado Alonso, Olga Orozco. Settles down in Buenos Aires in 1931, but does not entirely forsake his travels; publishes Espanatapájaros the next year, Interlunio five years later. So far, all his books are short enough to dispense with page numbers.

  Five years later, 1942, he issues Persuación de los días, a collection of poems numbering 142 pages. Considered by some critics his major work, in that, aside from its size, it seeks to go beyond the referential sign, to pierce the world of illusions and to reveal the emptiness and corruption of life; others might consider poems with such sentiments as “Invitación al vómito” a bit adolescent. (The reader can judge, as the poems translated in this volume all come from this collection.) In 1946, another collection of poems, Campo nuestro [Our Countryside], which exhibits greater wordplay, is numbered—46 pages. In 1949 establishes the Martín Fierro Award to help young writers; continues to sponsor and support new publications. Then in 1954, thirteen years before his death, his last book appears: En la másmedula (“Into the Moremarrow,” possibly “Deeper Into the Marrow”). Here, as in Altazor, the last book of the similarly wealthy, but considerably more productive Chilean poet, Vicente Huidobro, Girondo cracks the language apart, breaking it down into units and reassembling them; “naming nothingness,” as the writer Ofelia García noted, “to conquer and transcend it.”

  Although En la másmedula is untranslatable, one of its poems has been anthologized, and I would like to try my hand at it:

  EL PURO NO

  El NO

  el no inóvulo

  el no nonato

  el noo

  el no poslodocosmos de impuros ceros noes que noan noan noan

  y nooan

  y plurimono noan al morbo amorfo noo

  no démono

  no deo

  sin son sin sexo ni órbita

  el yerto inóseo noo en unisolo amódulo

  sin poros y sin nódulo

  ni yo ni fosa ni hoyo

  el macro no ni polvo

  el no más nada todo

  el puro no

  sin no

  THE PURE NO

  NO

  the inovulate no

  the no-show no

  the no-o

  the no primocosmic soup of polluto-zero noes going no no no

  and no-o

  and no in multimono to the amorphous sicko no-o

  not Mephisto

  not in excelsis Deo

  soundless sexless not in orbit

  the obdurate non-osseous no-o in unisolo unmodulo

  non-porous and non-nodulose

  with no ego nor furrow nor final hollow

  the macro not from dust no

  the no more everything/nothing no

  the pure no

  minus no [1—see end of Anti-Preface]

  7. Ennui

  So then, a career that fills up a little entry in a bibliography or encyclopedia of Latin American writers and a body of heterogeneous works that gives critics interesting things to analyze and comment upon; but no one seems to have noticed the great gaps of years between each of those scant productions. Photographs show Girondo sitting beneath bookcases crammed with volumes and folders rising from floor to ceiling, his desk covered with manuscripts and books in the making. The greats of world culture are tramping through his house, Salvador Dalí is making crazy faces in the center of the room, Pablo Neruda drops by to share a few poems from his latest work in progress, young iconoclasts throw out bright quips to win the attention of their literary idols, Jorge Borges listens thoughtfully from a dark corner, servants creep around serving sweetmeats and drinks, Norah talks quietly with an indigent poetess who timidly hints at a loan, ideas are hatched, journals are launched, and in the midst of the ferment sits a little hunched man with a goatee and a bit of a glassy walleye whose puppet effigy in the antechamber reminds every incoming and outgoing guest that he possesses a hurricane of imagination that can blow them all away—and he produces nothing! What in the hell is going on? [2—see end of Anti-Preface]

  Perhaps it was not the parlor games or the peregrinations that stayed his pen, but something deeper gnawing away at his soul. In his first book, Twenty Poems To Be Read in a Streetcar, he honored his publisher Evar Méndez’s request for a preface, which turned out to be his first and final address to the reader. Among other things he writes:

  The voluptuousness of humiliating ourselves before our very own eyes? A tenderness for that which we despise? I don’t know. The fact is that instead of deciding its cremation, we condescend to inter the manuscript in a drawer of our writing desk, until one fine day, when we can least prevent it, people come asking about the keyhole.

  Nationalistic reasons, he continues, do not persuade him to release his work to the public, for one’s country is as impersonal as a hotel room, and “it is hard to become attached to hotel rooms.” Th
en he declares:

  Publish? Publish when even the best publish 1,071% more times than they ought? I do not have, nor do I wish to have, the blood of a statue. I do not lay claim to the humiliation of suffering the sparrows. I do not aspire to an ordinary tomb slobbered over by admirers, since the only really interesting thing is the mechanism of feeling and thinking. Proof of existence!

  The reason he releases Veinte poemas, he concludes, is simply a weakness for contrariness, which he takes to be synonymous with life. He tosses out his work like a stone, “smiling at the futility of my gesture.”

  Here, then, is the most likely explanation for Girondo’s scimpy output: profound literary ennui—at the age of 31! If it endured, then over the next forty-five years he would allow himself the joy and the vanity of completing a literary project and not stashing it permanently in a desk drawer only when the spirit of contradiction moved him. Most of the time, however, he would relinguish that occupation to others, and because he was rich and generous—indulge them in their pretensions and pleasures. For himself he would reserve the rarefied delight of fleeting and incommunicable thoughts, and accept the despair of their ephemerality, longing for the clean slate of the pure no.

  Does that mean that there might be a trunk somewhere brimming over with remarkable manuscripts, unpredictable and mind-boggling as Scarecrow on each and every page? Evidently not. A friend and witness of his last years, Lila Mora y Araujo, reports that Girondo systematically destroyed everything left in his desk that he deemed unworthy of publication. The scraps that remained and that since have been published are disappointing and negligible. However, one of his relatives, Susana Lange, has discovered his early play, La madrastra, and plans to publish it.