Decals: Complete Early Poems

An important influence on Jorge Luis Borges and many others, Oliverio Girondo was at the center of Argentine poetry in the twentieth century. A very cosmopolitan writer, his early poems—many of which are collected here for the first time in English—demonstrate his wanderlust, crisscrossing Europe and the Americas on streetcars, express trains, and ocean liners. Many of the poems in here were written in diverse world ports, and are perched at the seaside, among sailors, seagulls, and tango cafés. They take the reader on a tour of Spain that cleverly deflates the romantic glamour of the country found in Hemingway and Dos Passos, but reinvigorates it with a sexiness found in Girondo’s intensive wordplay, Surrealistic influences, and idiosyncratic flare for metaphor.