Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read Online Free

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