Atahualpa Yupanqui’s timely revival of Argentine folklore made him a revered voice of political protest in an era beset by repression and revolution.

Poet, guitarist and composer, the musician affectionately known as ‘Don Ata’ has since become a household name in Argentina and an international icon, assuming a myriad of political and artistic positions over the last century.

Born Héctor Roberto Chavero Aramburo in 1908, Yupanqui was raised first in Pergamino and later in the northern province of Tucumán. The son of an indigenous father and a basque mother, he adopted the pseudonym Atahualpa Yupanqui in homage to legendary Incan kings.

Chosen long before his rise to fame in the 1930s, the name reveals a distinctly rural cultural map, heavily influenced by travel to Argentina’s northern territories and high plains.

The province of Tucumán captivated Yupanqui’s imagination, with the songs ‘Luna Tucumana’ and ‘La Raqueña’ evoking the region’s rustic, magical charm. Much of his music in fact, harks back to the time he spent drifting through far-flung transitional lands, immersing himself in indigenous culture.

Yupanqui’s communist affiliations and lyrical testimonies to the hardships of provincial life inspired a cult-like following, making him ripe for government target. Several periods of exile ensued. The first saw him take shelter in Uruguay following participation in a 1931 uprising against the de facto government of José Félix Uriburu.

Having returned to Argentina several years later, he set off again, this time with anthropologist Alfred Métraux. The pair went north to study the Amaichas Indians, from whom Yupanqui learnt the rhythms of zamba, vidala and chacera that would later find their way into his music.

Later, having made himself an enemy of the Peronist government, Yupanqui fled Argentina once more. In 1950 he travelled to Europe, where he was swiftly taken under the wing of celebrated French chanteuse, Édith Piaf.

Mid-century Paris was a hub of creativity, attracting artists and musicians from across the globe. After suffering several years of heavy censorship at the hands of the Argentine government, the 42-year old musician finally found himself a receptive audience and a sounding board for his music.

The French poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, as well as the influential Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, all featured among the close circle of friends who held Yupanqui’s poetry and lyrics in high esteem.

Shortly after signing his first recording contract with Chant du Monde, Yupanqui released his first LP, ‘Miner I Am’, which was awarded Best Foreign Disc by France’s Charles Cros Academy.

The prize enabled him to complete an extensive tour of Europe, which paved his way to international acclaim. For Yupanqui, France was an adopted homeland he would return to time and time again. At the end of his career, in 1989, he was offered the prestigious honour of composing the lyrics of a cantata commemorating the bicentenary of the French revolution.

His 1952 expulsion from Argentina’s communist party, brought a decade of radical politics to an end, but, at the same time, enabled him to enter the public sphere, making frequent appearances on national radio and performing live concerts.

By the 1960s, his popular lyrics had attracted the attention of such iconic Argentine folk singers as Jorge Cafrune and Mercedes Sosa.

In 1977, the latter dedicated an entire album, ‘Mercedes Sosa interpreta a Atahualpa Yupanqui’, to the work of her contemporary, honouring his significance as the most important folk singer in 20th century Argentine music.

Though nowadays synonymous with popular folk song, Yupanqui’s music stands in ambivalent relation to mythologised tradition. Always surpassing mere continuity, his music is constantly recasting its legacy in new, inventive, and often daring ways.

Besides music, Yupanqui was also a prolific poet. ‘Guitarra’, one of his most seminal works, was written in 1960 to accompany an album bearing the same name. Having learnt to play alongside his father, Yupaniqui held a romantic attachment to the guitar, which, for him, was the most natural accompaniment to his lyrical musings on everyday life.

Yupanqui died in Nîmes in 1992, aged 84. With 12,000 songs to his name, his lyrics continue to exert a profound influence on a whole generation of young musicians.

His songs have inspired such diverse tributes as ‘A Don Ata’, by the female folk singer Soledad Pastorutti, and a version of ‘El Arriero’, by the Argentine rock band Los Divididos.

Mention Don Ata’s name to an Argentine and you’ll be sure to receive an effusive outpouring of praise and admiration, and, undoubtedly, a few lyrics known by heart.

Genre: Folklore

Dates Active: 1928-1992

Most Famous Song: Los Hermanos

Best Lyric: “Just when things seem closer, is when they move further away. And so we keep wandering, cured in solitude.”

Famous for: Reviving the traditions of Argentine folklore and speaking out against injustice.

In his own words: “I’m an Argentine singer of forgotten arts who wanders around the world so that no one forgets what it unforgettable: the poetry and traditional music of Argentina.”

Best to listen to: On a weekend break in the country.

For the return of Beyond Borges, Alejandra Pizarnik joins Alfonsina Storni and Silvina Ocampo as the third female to appear in the series and one of the most important and complex poets in Argentine writing.

In her 17 years of writing Pizarnik made a huge impact on Spanish language poetry, taking it down to its darkest depths and abandoning it there, leaving one of the most fascinating legacies in Argentine literature.

A Tormented Talent

Born in 1936, Pizarnik was a second generation immigrant of Jewish descent. She was raised in Avellaneda amidst a Jewish community and received education in both Spanish and Yiddish. In 1954 she began studying philosophy and letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) but later dropped out because she said it couldn’t give her what she sought.

Besides literature, she also studied painting under the surrealist painter Juan Batlle Planas but found herself either willingly or involuntarily tied to poetry.

“I would have preferred to sing the blues in some smoke-filled hangout than spend the nights of my life scrabbling through language like a madwoman” she once said. In a letter addressed to her good friend Rúben Vela, she described her poems as “brawling” inside herself and, though her relationship with her writing was a difficult one, she produced some of the most remarkable poetry of the 20th century.

A regular user of amphetamines and hallucinogenics (she reportedly once spent seven days holed up on hallucinogenics listening to Janis Joplin records) Pizarnik suffered throughout her life from periods of psychological instability and depression. These emotional states probably only served to make her writing more original and more interesting but undoubtedly caused her difficulties throughout her life.

Having never felt at home in Argentina, she travelled to Paris in 1960 where she lived for four years, endearing herself to the city’s creative circles and Argentine writers Arnaldo Calveyra and Julio Cortázar. Recognised as a great literary talent by many of those around her, she was also counted the influential Argentine poets Rúben Vela and Raúl Gustavo Aguirre, as well as Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Olga Orozco and Mexico’s Octavio Paz among her friends.

Besides receiving Buenos Aires’ First Municipal Poetry Prize, she was able to return to Paris a second time as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1968. Shortly afterwards Pizarnik was institutionalised following a suicide attempt in 1970, and eventually ended her life aged 36 by taking a sedative overdose.

Body of Work

Pizarnik published seven books of poetry and one book of prose during the years 1955 to 1972.

Her first book of poems, ‘La tierra más ajena’, was published when she was just 19 and still a student of philosophy and literature. She followed it with ‘La última inocencia‘ in 1956 and ‘Las aventuras perdidas’ in 1958, both written before her trip to Paris in 1960.

Her 1962 collection ‘Árbol de Diana’, was written whilst she lived in Paris and is considered by many to be her best. Her most important work, however, would not arrive until 1968 when she was already grappling with her own mental illness.

‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ and the long prose poem of the same name, are regarded as a pinnacle of the author’s expressive abilities. Both the poem and its containing collection demonstrate a darkness not seen before in Argentine writing and rarely found afterwards.

As the title suggests, the book contains the most elaborate of Pizarnik’s meditations on the subject of madness – a theme carried across her entire body of work along with themes of entrapment and her almost hypnotic attraction to death.

Her books, in fact, come wrought with intertextual borrowing and overlapping symbolism; often mentioning forbidden gardens, cracks and voices in walls and night time (symbolic of both madness and death).

Obsessed with the idea of madness, fear of madness and the containment of madness, Pizarnik’s specialty was to drag the reader down into a chaotic, nightmarish world where they would be subjected to the same doubts, despairs, schizophrenic voices, claustrophobia, and fears as her.

Linguistically, her use of repetition, contradiction and words with ambiguous or changeable meanings lent her poems obvious overtones of paranoia. Her poems often transitioned radically between the first person, and a second third-person voice, which may have been forcibly created, or may, more likely, have emerged as second nature given her emotional and mental state.

If the character of Juan Pablo Castel in Ernesto Sabato’s existentialist novel ‘El Túnel’ had been an impressive product of the author’s imagination, then the ‘I’ in Pizarnik’s poetry was too close for comfort. One critic described the relationship between the two as a “death grip” – something which Pizarnik sought to distinguish herself from towards the end of her writing career.

Pizarnik’s Personal Legacy

From 1968 onwards Pizarnik set out to untether herself from “poetic language” and write with different “voices”. Around this time she turned to the writing of Cortázar in an effort to free herself from what she described as “creative prisons”.

Interestingly, though the “I” in her poems was something Pizarnik deliberated a great deal over, many poets have returned to use the first person singular without any of the same concerns.

The vocabulary and sometimes playful structuring of Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrate her mistrust for language. Her writing often freely condemned its failures and inadequacies whilst also revealing feelings of being powerlessness towards it. Torn between her dissatisfaction with language and her dependence on it as a poet, she would occasionally write poems omitting all punctuation marks bar parenthesis, and included lines of only one word causing intentional ambiguity.

An inability to write prose fiction was one of Pizarnik’s biggest grievances with herself as a writer, and she considered her only prose book, ‘La condesa sangrieta’, to be one of her greatest achievements.

The book, published in 1971, is in fact more of an elegant essay about a 16th century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed as many as 600 girls before finally ending her life walled up alone. Pizarnik ends the book with the resonating line “the absolute freedom of a human being is terrible” – a concept which she personally grappled with often.

Her last work, ‘El infierno musical’ was also written in 1971, one year before her death. It included the poem ‘El deseo de la palabra’, often considered to be her poetic suicide note.

Although it would perhaps be wrong to read the poem in this light, it does appear there was a literary suicide some time before Pizarnik’s real suicide took place. The poet and her poetry are at times so intertwined and bound up in each other that it almost seems her destiny was written out for her, by her.

Estranged, helpless and anguished, Pizarnik’s haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina’s most important female poet.

For the third in our collaborative series with Palabras Errantes, the Indy profiles young Argentine poet Laura Petrecca.

Laura was born in Buenos Aires in 1985 and grew up in the neighbourhood of Retiro. She started to write seriously while she was studying cinema and published her first collection of poetry, ‘Pensó que ya lo sabía’ in 2008.

Two years later she published her second book, ‘Los Barcos vuelven’, and has continued to contribute poetry and prose for magazines in Mexico and France. She currently lives in Paris.

How did you begin your career as a writer?

I started to write while I was studying cinema in Buenos Aires. I suppose more than anything I felt fortunate that– compared to working in film studios – I was able to make something autonomously, without money, people or long term plans.

Writing has a kind of instantaneous pleasure – like painting or photography – because it’s something that can be produced quickly. Gradually, writing became my main interest and it still is.

As with most of the things I really want to do, there’s never much forward thinking or planning; the desire and the action take place at the same time and just work themselves out – I couldn’t imagine it being any other way. For the time being, I know that writing is probably what I like doing the most but I try not to speculate too much, I simply try to do.

Are there any subjects that reappear often in your work?

I think rather than there being recurring themes, there are spaces, images and atmospheres that reappear in what I write. I’m aware of this and sometimes I do write the same thing but in different ways – with different versions and in different times. I recognise there is something specific I am looking for.

I think that’s the only way I can describe it, because I never start writing knowing that I’m going to write about this or that. I don’t have a plan, I find my way as I go along. That’s the thing I like most about certain types of poetry; when I work on short, condensed texts, an overriding theme emerges in the collection when they’re put together – the unity appears in the book rather than the individual poem.

How did you find the translation process?

The translation process was very rewarding for me. I was lucky enough to meet my translator, Cherie Elston, on a trip, and from then on we kept in touch by email.

What surprised me, and what I found most exciting, was that in her translation there was a type of rewriting that came about through interpretation and a deep understanding of the material. The poems I sent off went through a new creative process and I think that’s the most stimulating aspect of translation- especially poetry translation. You have to go beyond a mere faithfulness to the original to get the content across; literal translation isn’t enough if you want to create the same effect in a second language. People say that something is lost in translation but I feel the opposite; that through good translation the text gains something, and for that I’m very grateful.

Below are three untitled poems by Laura Petrecca, with translation by Cherie Elston

The black burns
extinguish within

ignited with milk
by the sound of the race

what are these faces tattooed with threads
but all those years in a foreign city?

where cold rusts
like sulphur on bridges,
like a girl turning
like that which you seek,

lost in the open strokes of possibility
saving with apples the perforations in the raft

the water below, waits above
and the dam rises in a submarine elevator

and is this your doubt, the same that goes down?

—-

I see the star revolve
retreat above the mute roofs

it does not exist as doubt does not exist
when the celestial mattress ties me

and I believe I see but above all I want
to know the nerve fertilizing the legs
imagine the dexterity of the virgin’s flight

to think that I above him opening me
in plastic bottles
still preserve a masculine offering
which is what makes him feel close to me

and he says it, occasionally,
I listen to him as he listens to me
beneath the perfect ending

—-

Facing the dog’s mouth
the sound is always the same

the same voice, the song that falters

like when you slept,
squashed against glass,
crowned with bees in a private plan

like he who smiles in the floor that opens up
who knows something more
because he defends the arms that fall

and smiling, therefore
is inevitable

as it is also inevitable
not to dream during war

and embracing the stomach of a panther
knowing,

curling yourself around her
bound to the warmth of the fur

where yes your father lived

In collaboration with Palabras Errantes we continue our four part series of poet profiles with Gabriel Cortiñas.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1983, he currently works as a poet and a literature teacher in primary and secondary schools.

His first book of poetry, ‘Brazadas’, was published in 2007. His second, ‘Hospital de Campaña’, won last year’s international Margarita Hierro poetry prize in Spain.

As well as writing poetry reviews and interviews for various websites he also co-runs the online magazine ‘La Literatura del Pobre’ – a website that encourages poetry exchange between Spain and Argentina.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

When I was little I didn’t want to be – not that I consider myself a ‘writer’ these days either – but I didn’t dream about being one; I wanted to be a football player like any young boy.

I started writing, more or less, when I was secondary school – I used to write prose, poetry and songs. There wasn’t a moment of revelation when I said to myself, “I want to be a poet” or anything like that.

When you write you feel as if you have got something to say – whether it is valid or not – but you should stop writing when you think you’ve got nothing to say. Right now I do have plenty to say but who knows how it will be in ten years time?

How would you describe your poetic style?

It’s difficult, because I find that when a writer wants to define his aesthetic, either consciously or unconsciously, he ends up putting his foot in it. What I would say is that I don’t write narrative poetry. There is a narrative in what I write, but it’s a hybrid narrative and it plays with broken syntax.

Someone once told me that there are two types of poetry: poetry you read under your breath and poetry you read out loud. I don’t know if I manage it but I try to write poetry that can be read out loud. By this I don’t mean poems that can be read at recitals, I mean poetry that has to do with the outside world, everything that takes place around you, and the sound of the spoken word. My poetry isn’t all about the ‘me’ and self-reflection, it draws more from the public domain.

I don’t know if I would define it as urban, but everyone writes about what goes on in their lives. What I write about is connected to what goes on in my life, and it is lodged in a certain place and time. I live in a city, I go to work everyday, I travel by bus and that all obviously feeds what I write.

How did you find the process of having your poems translated?

There was a lot of dialogue between me and Chris Schafenacker because the translator’s job isn’t easy.

When you have a narrative poem that tells a story in verse – it might be difficult to capture the sounds and everything but translation is possible. But when you’ve got poetry that breaks the syntax up and jumbles the words around, it gets tricky. That sort of poem requires a translator who is really dedicated to the work.

There was one sentence that was particularly difficult to translate because it played with a local saying. And I told Chris:  “Look, what I was trying to say was this, and I did in such a such a way but this is also a specific saying.” And one way or another, he had to find another saying in English that means something similar and incorporate it. At that point it’s not so much a translation as an interpretation – and it was amazing what he did – he had to rewrite it really.

It can be strange reading yourself in another language though, especially when you don’t understand some of the words!

Extract from ‘Hospital de Campaña’

Translation by Chris Schafenacker, courtesy of Palabras Errantes

You can’t make flour out of helmets

they roasted the enemy but ate him raw

his gold tooth burst in their belly

patiently, they ground teeth, picked at them

made tortillas: out of corn, out of rice

tortillas made of potatoes, made of molars.

The tooth’s shine threatens to tear loose

light doesn’t digest in the belly

a sliver that splits the eardrum in four.

If the vanguard doesn’t cover you: the buzz

the explosion.  Everyone in their seats

awaiting the start of the fight.

He closes upon the mat like a budding flower

(budding flowers don’t explode)

it is forbidden to wear a watch.

When his father fell in the jungle

he passed on his watch before dying.

He now caresses it under his pillow

will melt it for copper in a pawn shop

his old lady will forgive him

that time no longer exists.

There were still puddles in the street

he opened a window and tossed out something eternal

to be named after the fall,

car, salary, sidewalk: Justice

the third crossbreed dream, crossbreed harmony

—interpret—

—interpret—

the leaves scattered by the after class struggle.

A small mud statue on his bedside table

that he spits on every night

little idol deforms, mutates, day after day

brought it from Tucumán

dressed it as a soldier, prays to it, spits on it

every night:

muddied must red wine saliva

caked on.

Olguín prays to a dead father drowned in saliva

anoints him with a loogie

hawks up seeds, germinated must

wine flowers grow on his face

constantly deformed by water, saliva

prays to him ever night

a thick loogie

myth let loose in formless mud

once seen surrounded by corn, his face

never stopped laughing.

On a mountain

full of carbon full

of oil wells

the Scotsman won’t surrender, continues shooting

like a maniac on high

continues shooting: blistering chickenpox

doesn’t know that his bullets carry an implicit pact

spoken pact inside each bullet

in disbandment retreat one must wait

while the scorched tree grows

the tree bearing fruit wrapped in the pink skin

of the frenulum.

A cows tongue rotting in the sun

is all that’s left to eat

the flies

pick the tongue apart, in the jungle

salt gets at everything: pork jerky

bull jerky, duck jerky, no

ducks are always swimming

in pots of boiling water

duck, parrot, canary, hen

the broth is a blood pact boiling

that chills the corn, the beans, the teeth

salt gets at everything, a cows

tongue rotting in sun

the flies are a part of the deal.

The first of our ‘Palabras Errantes: Poet Profiles‘ is Mercedes Araujo. Born in Mendoza in 1972, she spent time studying in Madrid and has now settled in Buenos Aires. She writes both poetry and prose in addition to her work as an environmental lawyer for the Argentine government.

She has published several collections of poetry including ‘Asperos esmeros’ in 2003, ‘Duelo’ in 2005, ‘Viajar sola’ in 2009 and, most recently, ‘La Isla’ in 2010. Her work was included in the anthology ‘Poetas Argentinas 1960 – 1980’ and her debut novel, ‘La hija de la Cabra’, was awarded last year’s Premio Nacional de las Artes and is due to be published later this year.

Have you always wanted to be a poet?

Since I was very little I was determined to become a writer, even if I didn’t really know what it meant to be one. More than anything I was a voracious reader and, starting from when I was eight, I just read everything. That link with books and fiction helped me live in an imaginary world of words and that’s something that marked me since I was very young.

How would you describe your poems to someone who doesn’t know them?

Pretty much everything I write has to do with nature. It has to do with a certain type of subjectivity – more often than not a feminine subjectivity – that is lodged in nature. I feel like this comes from my relationship with the land when I was a little girl, surrounded by mountains and deserts. Writing about nature you can construct a lot of metaphors about life, but obviously I have to be careful not to make it too simple.

I don’t write with very rigid or formal constraints in terms of the metric and the rhyme, but there are some lyrical elements to my work. When I use a word, I want all the facets of the word to resonate – and that’s the challenge really.

A poet’s work basically involves searching and reading, finding the right word and then fine tuning the work until it sounds as good as it can.

What are your thoughts on Palabras Errantes as a project and poetry translation in general?

I loved the project; the whole idea is very interesting to me. I was curious to see how people from another culture and who speak another language would react to the work, because most Latin American writers are circulated around the continent and in Spain, but rarely in Great Britain.

When you translate poetry, you almost have to rewrite it. When you translate prose there is a linear aspect that allows you to translate it in the same way it was written and with the same meaning. The difference is that, in poetry, the words can have a multitude of different meanings.

When I read my poems in English I noticed that the translator had played a lot with the words, he didn’t follow the linear narrative at all. Well, it was very interesting indeed.

Extract from ‘The life of butterflies’
Translation by Paul Merchant, courtesy of Palabras Errantes

In the hundred metamorphoses

I have seen you,

-captivate me-

or, in the sureness of that incredible physical feat

that is your voracious appetite

able to exterminate my garden

leaving no food, nutrients, spots of damp

however tiny, yet enough for those small

wild flowers to last the winter

lean, sallow, gaunt,

lying back waiting

saying with certainty as at the beginning

with insistent pulsing

why does all that make you sad

all that, now distant and blurred

if even after this war

back to your garden, with wounded feet,

will come the exultant body.

Meanwhile, any tiny thing will suit

for painting the thousand-coloured garland

whose beauty announces the sadness of life,

because only we – the bloodless animals-

confuse a bright, fresh glow

that the tide returns to us

with the breathing of two dragons.

You know the evils that separation leaves,

a maggot prey to the planets’ influence

faces a small sparrow:

the sparrow comes close and the maggot tied

to a stick gives itself up to the beak.

There is not even an outline

of repentance, or future.

Such confusion, these wings

prehistoric moth, scaly wings

were they born with the will

to ignore absence?

And if I say: I have no strength

even with the clumsiness they give me

When I walk through the street, will the sun

have abandoned me

or will it allow the movement

spun between landscape, body, spirit?

Like the moon moth -I thought-

you will be left without a mouth

and I without sustenance, colour, earth or air.

Newborn butterflies

have those pretty wings, folded up,

but they also fall though they pursue

beauty, and each transformation

a silk thread wraps them in

wears them down in the battle for eternity, for food,

leaves them there.

Like words which are fresh

promises, of snow water,

hidden in the arteries of a basalt hill

gulping oxygen to begin again

such is my offering

I shelter you in the crimson cloak

and then the gift

-you already know it-

the torch, the fire in your hands

pure courage for that mission of yours

to bring things to their subtle state.

First mystery: time,

waiting is my nature

as a ghost of weeds

nettles, thistles, dandelions I eat,

these three feet and the body

which seems an unbroken block

at dawn, because perhaps during sleep

or precisely during sleep,

at a whim it heals that wound

and sorrow

is sweetly and delicately relieved.

All can be delayed if you stop

and lock your two feet to a tree,

monsters, sad memories

a headless doll

in childhood horror and desire are twins.

The stars say your flight is detached,

you keep yourself for the shadier parts

of jungles, what is left of what you were,

you will go and I who pray to future springs

and ask feed me, enlighten me

nail that metal to my temple, to my memory

drain me

pin me to the chosen cloth

where those graces hang

here the tiny shadow of burning trees

here your mother’s stories, here small stones

with your name, or else offer those warlike birds

my wings with their grey ocelli

it would not be bad for this body to end

loaded in a confused bird’s beak

floating in Brazil’s rough sea

and in those waters would I be able

to take on the form of the tide?

Dreaming as a moth brings a sky

a thought of sky

where enormous blue

whales rise up

among majestic clouds

courage must be like this, in dreams.

It may be difficult to go on: there are reindeer, beasts,

and we are not the branch or the breeze that moves it

salt or water, sky, land and sea

in an autumn garden I pass my afternoons,

and I can say wind, lightning

or that today is pure fire, that your mother expelled you

from her belly to the world, I’ll celebrate.

Leopoldo Marechal is a second-time-around success story; an author acknowledged only retrospectively as one of the most significant names in Argentine writing.

Following on from Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, the Beyond Borges series looks at the prolific poet, occasional playwright, essayist and novelist whose unpopular political stance resulted in his most accomplished writing being deliberately overlooked for decades.

Rediscovered by later generations, his full-length novel ‘Adán Buenosayres’ was one of the first Spanish language texts to have be deeply indebted to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and is today considered one of the pioneering, must-read works in Argentine literature.

Life and Early Work

Marechal was born in Buenos Aires in 1900; the eldest son in a family of French-Uruguayan and Basque-Argentine descent. He received a modest upbringing in a southern suburb of Buenos Aires and, from the age of ten, spent regular holidays with his uncle in Maipu. These early experiences provided an exposure to rural environments that would influence and specifically feature in much of his writing.

Having already begun the “dangerous habit” of counting syllables with his fingers, he wrote his first poems aged only 12. At 18, and only shortly after the death of his uncle, he suffered the loss of his father – an event that pushed him into a teaching career he would maintain for much of his life.

During the 1920s Marechal became actively involved in the avant-garde journals ‘Proa’ and ‘Martin Fierro’, along with the likes of Macedonio Fernández, Girondo and Borges. Amidst this climate of literary fervour he published his first collection of poetry in 1922.

‘Los aguiluchos’ bore echoes of earlier modernist influences while a second collection, ‘Días como flechas’, was published only four years later but adhered more closely to the avant-garde trends of the time. Though both titles revealed the same influence of nature and expression of passion, the latter demonstrated more of the finely tuned elements that framed it well within the reformist movements of the period.

In 1926 Marechal travelled to Europe where he wrote for several Spanish journals and surrounded himself with the artists and sculptors of the ‘Paris group’. He returned briefly to Argentina but, in 1929, returned to Paris where he completed his third book, ‘Odas para el hombre y la muter’. Marking something of a return to classical forms, the book received recognition in Argentina in the form of the prestigious Premio Municipal de Poesia.

As the 30s came around, the writers of the influential Florida group began moving away from the avant-garde, signifying an era of aesthetic conversion that witnessed many about-turns and relinquished ideals.

Marechal went on to publish several further books of poetry and won the Premio Municipal de Poesia a second time in 1940 for his book ‘Sonetos a Sophia’. By the end of the decade he seemed well on track to become one of Argentina’s most accomplished poets, had his political opinions not impinged so badly on his future literary success.

Adán Buenosayres

Despite being the author of three novels, almost 50 years of poetry and several plays and essays, ‘Adán Buenosayres’ is the single novel for which Marechal is now most known. Far longer than many of the celebrated Argentine novels before it, the 1948 edition covered 741 pages and was divided into seven books.

Purposefully named after Adam in a biblical sense, the Adam of Marechal’s novel also happens to be Argentine, and porteño, Parts one to five take place over three days and narrate the adventures of the principal character, while the sixth and seventh books make use of a more intimate first person; the sixth serving as Adán’s autobiography, and the seventh describing his symbolic descent into hell. Since the novel’s prologue informs us of his fate, Adán’s status as a mythical character is almost immediately secured from the offset.

As much poetry as it is prose, and as autobiographical as it is fictional, the mood of Marechal’s classic is one of its most noteworthy aspects. Its sarcastic and mocking spirit goes some way in tempering the melancholy sentiment of the story itself, and a linguistic richness accompanies its enormous flow of images and symbolism. Often compared to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ the novel aspired to do for Buenos Aires, and for the variations of the Spanish language, what Joyce’s novel had done for Dublin.

Rejection and Rediscovery

Had Marechal published his novel ‘Adán Buenosayres’ shortly after he’d begun writing it in Paris in 1930, its success story might have looked different. As it was, by the time the novel was published in 1948, its reception was marred by a general reluctance to detach the work from the political position of its writer.

A century earlier, the controversial ideologies of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento had likely succeeded in garnering more public attention for his historical essay ‘Facundo’, but Marechal’s masterpiece paid dearly for its author’s political allegiances.

Having initially aligned himself with a generally accepted trend of catholic nationalism, the author later declared his allegiances to the government of Juan Domingo Perón – a move that resulted in his work being shunned by his contemporaries for almost two decades.

Although his writing was not directly political, from 1945 there was no going back. Marechal would become known as the Peronist of his generation and, as such, his work would be purposefully overlooked until new political winds took flight.

Besides the favourable opinion of a select few writers and the ardent admiration of Julio Cortázar, the first publication of Adán Buenosayres slipped into oblivion. Its reissue, almost 20 years later, caught the attention of a younger generation whose historical interest in Argentine literature led to the novel’s resurgence and its current recognition as a pioneering work in Argentine writing.

The novel has since been translated to French in 1995, Italian in 2010 and is currently being translated into English for publication this year.

‘That’s enough prose!’ might sound like a byline from a hackneyed modernist manifesto, but there’s nothing stockpiled about this inventively curated exhibition, which marks the 25th anniversary of Diario de Poesía, one of Argentina’s most prestigious literary publications.

Founded by the poet and translator Daniel Samoilovich in 1986, the journal emerged against the backdrop of cultural and political discontent that marked the tail end of the military dictatorship.

In retrospect, its success was unsurprising. The journal filled the creative vacuum that materialised during years of heavy censorship and swiftly gained a reputation as an iconic artistic forum, instrumental in injecting the art world with the thrilling momentum of experimentation and collaboration.

Modelled on San Francisco’s beat magazine, ‘Poetry Flash’, it strove to cut a fine balance between international poets and prodigious homegrown talent such as Juan L.Ortiz and Arnaldo Calveyra. Its first edition set the benchmark with beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and it has remained at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde scene ever since.

Translation has long been the magazine’s trademark, with first and definitive translations by Samoilovich and Mirta Rosenberg, providing a platform for Argentine readers of poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Celan and Lee Harwood.

But unlike the coterie spirit fostered by most literary publications, attracting the masses through a tabloid-style and popular modes of circulation was integral to the paper’s conception.

Radically removing poetry from its elevation and obscurity as the manna of the elite, Diario de Poesía made a case for poetry as a spontaneous extension of mainstream, popular culture. Brazen vanguard headlines are tempered, for example, by an image of Patti Smith; a Philip Larkin poem features alongside lyrics by Tom Waits.

Whilst anniversary shows can run the risk of alienating the casual visitor by presenting an exhaustive anthology, this exhibition – curated by Viviana Usubiaga – radiates in its scale and ambition. By honing in on sketches and photographs created specifically for the quarterly editions, it charts the journal’s pivotal role in fostering an ongoing dialogue between poets and visual artists.

“The work of a painter, so comparable, so close in substance to the work of a poet’s,” Edgar Bayley wrote in the 11th issue of Diario de Poesía, “isn’t it that which keeps us continually alert, awake, attentive?”

No one fostered this cross-fertilization of the arts more fervently than the journal’s artistic directors Eduardo Stupía and Juan Pablo Renzi . The later’s graphic print ‘Boy Out of Window’ and trompe l’oeil oil ‘Interior with a tablecloth’ are among the highlights of the show.

Renzi, who died in 1992, was responsible for the classic, versatile five-column format which still adorns the magazine’s cover today, and he didn’t rest there. For Renzi, the idea of form was intricately bound up with content: typography and print are thus meticulously manipulated to reflect the tone of the work.

With its collage-like layout, the paper celebrates the suggestive, unexpected, and often humourous connections that arise between text and image. Breaking down cultural hierarchies and championing a democratic mode of art, poetry is seen as a process of exchange and interaction rather than as a static entity.

The ‘Artist Pages’, a staple section of the paper, feature everything from a delightful series of cartoony graphic prints, accompanied by overviews of the artists’ work, to comic strips and reproductions of iconic paintings.

Highlights include León Ferrari’s provocative interpretation of Angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary, ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’, and Guillermo Kuitca’s deceptively simple modern-day Atlas, ‘The Weight of the World’.

Valentina Rebasa holds her ground on the photographic end with a furtive series of prints of women, all of whom bear a remarkable similarity to the artist. The traditional concept of the self-portrait is thus radically reconfigured in Rebasa’s ‘other-portrait’, in which the self comes to be seen as a construct of others.

Poetry has its cameo part to play in film too, with screenings from the classics ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’. Incorporating a poem into a film’s flow has the effect of slowing down its tempo – the automatism of the cinematic image is momentarily confronted by the ‘other’ historical time frame of the poem, allowing its lines to echo subtly through the main plot.

Gathering Joseph Cornell’s ‘found footage’, Kurt Schwitter’s sound poems and the nonsense lyrics of Edward Lear under one roof, the exhibition is testimony to the endless inventiveness of the poetic form, and to the ever-fertile dialogue that Diario de Poesía continues to sponsor between artists and poets.