Oliverio Girondo has to be one of the most baffling poets of twentieth-century Latin American modernism. Among English readers, his works do not have the name recognition of Neruda, Borges, Vallejo, Paz, or Martí. Yet this Argentine word-slinger
provides some intoxicating abstractions in a language that resembles an alien life-form bursting out of vaguely Spanish words. This is especially the case in his 1957 collection En la masmédula where his Frankensteinian practice of lexical vivisection reaches it apex. So contorted are some of these poems that the book was long left untouched by translators even after decades of Americans “discovering” Latino@ writers. Recently, however, there has been glimmers of interest in this neglected poet. Two years ago, translator Joseph Mulligan and myself had a dialogue on one of the poems from En la masmédula and what kinds of possibilites it offers translation: https://jwmulligan.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/plexilioplexile-a-translation-dialogue/.
However, neither Mulligan (who is currently working on a collection of Vallejo’s non-poetry corpus) nor myself has delved further into the mysteries of Girondo. That work has been bravely done by Molly Weigel who will be publishing In the Moremarrow, her translations of En la masmédula, this April: http://www.actionbooks.org/. Weigel generously offers the Bug a sampler of her translations:
At the gravitating turning
In the begging
in the being
in the psyches
in the xes
in the exquisiphthisical replies
in the enmoonments
in the erect for the abcessed excesses of erofriction et cetera
or in the exhausted dreamencore of the “gimme take it give in all the way to the very
nape of your so desire”
in the unfaith that ruminates
in the vivisecond the dry psychic prospecting the metaphyserrata in elfabridgements
of the cosmic egogorgo
in each gesture graft
in any sunken polidented brrokenpurrpose flush with facing subrrubble exother
pidgipleonasm
hearthless houndless coveless diveless headless storyless
fobsorbengluted
by the mobile embryos of the gravitating turning under the starry itch
next to the lianamuses pulpy poresuckers and the no less polyp children of swamp
longing
volunteers of the miasma
so violated
trampled among bad eggs nevers and admonitory hooks
one pit at a time nongoing swimming in the face of only too wandering fodders of final
flood-gates that inundate hope
with my graymite the sporious
the leopard yawns the daft babble
on the sore spot
at the deployment of the blood without midget introits in the ample plicoitus with each
sleepless dream and each wagered specter
joyciferating
I would lace
in the offspawned spring
Morepleonasm
More boorish daily threshold
soresoul
masturbid
lunatic fate
mobile carnivores’ driest thirst
and magic rapt cajolery of alb albatross aurora
most sacred flesh lay of hyperhoneyed vibratile pubescents order of sextomb gondola
in the gullet of the gully out of the fertile mother of godcome
although postedium stretches its crayfish beds out to eunuch oblivion
more mute limp psalms
hands lunar roads beauty marks
drinks of wings
more bitch of a blind hunt after truth volatile ineternal extraharlotree
more jaguars longing
prolix terraqueous liquidations in collapse extreme pansurrender from the bony fide
boughs to the panicky cornea
to each lodger dream of pre-not-to-be waning
to each stony hope
love-lorn gaudy born
taut swoon meeting over tibias oboes with sidekick spasms
since even the grease interulcerates the dry masticuline mammaries
and the very floor spilled is a preverse fetus foretold if mused in flight
most sacred sick bellyful pregnant with pap rich rhyme so much featherless
parrotgibbonish vaticrap
but truncated hyperhours unthought acephalous dubifetuses and impacts of total disgust
although the quotedium sugarsulphurs its packs of hounds absorbent airholes of yawns
