Oliverio Girondo trans. Jeremy Paden

Oliverio Girondo (Buenos Aires, Argentina - 1891 / Buenos Aires, 1967), born in the same decade as Alfonsina Storni and Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the most noteworthy Argentine poets of the 20th Century. A key figure in the twentieth-century Bonaerense avant-garde, he wrote one of the principal manifestos for the Grupo Florida that ran the literary journal Martín Fierro. He was a poet of modernity, big cities, travel, technology, and modern alienation who always strove to renew poetry and find new modes of expression. He experimented with form and language and sought ways to sing about the mundane modern world in lyrical language. Girondo, along with Vallejo and Huidobro, pushed language to its very limits. His collections of poems are, Twenty Poems to Be Read on a Streetcar (1922), Decals (1925), Scarecrow (Within Everyone’s Reach) (1932), Persuasion of Days (1942), Our Countryside (1946), and In the Moremarrow (1952/1956).

Jeremy Paden, is Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Division of Humanities at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. His essays have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, Romance Notes, Romance Quarterly and other journals. He is the author of 5 collections of poems, most recently "world as sacred burning heart" (3: A Taos Press) and "Un poema rápido en vez de un himno," a collection of poems in Spanish co-written with the Chilean poet Luis Correa-Díaz. He has translated Argentine, Chilean, Colombian, Mexican, Peruvian, and Spanish poets.