Oliverio Girondo

Oliverio Girondo was born on August 17, 1891, in Buenos Aires into a wealthy patrician family. Traveling constantly between Europe and Argentina, he absorbed the French surrealist, Italian futurist, and Dadaist revolutions, determining to violently awaken Argentine literature from provincial slumber.

In 1922, Girondo published Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (Twenty Poems to be Read in the Streetcar), illustrated with his own cubist watercolors. To promote his 1932 collection Espantapájaros, he rented a funeral carriage drawn by six horses carrying an enormous paper-mache scarecrow through the streets of Buenos Aires. His experimental late masterpiece En la masmédula (1954) shattered Spanish syntax to forge pure poetic sound.