Scarecrow & Other Anomalies
Read Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Online
Authors: Oliverio Girondo
Oliverio Girondo
SCARECROW
& other anomalies
translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
A Xenos E-Book Edition
Xenos Books
2011
Electronic Book Edition 2011
All rights reserved
ISBN 1-879378-28-0
*****
English translation copyright 2002
by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
All rights reserved
Original texts copyright
by Herederos Sucesión Oliverio Girondo
Contact: Susana Lange de Maggi:
This Xenos Books publication was made possible by a gift
from the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Charitable Foundation.
Cover art: Alfredo Castañeda, “Cuando el espejo sueña con otra imagen” (1988), reproduced with permission from The Bonino Gallery, New York, New York.
Cover design: Greg Boyd.
Book design: Karl Kvitko.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
for the Print Edition
Girondo, Oliverio, 1891-1967.
[Selections, English & Spanish, 2002]
Scarecrow & other anomalies / Oliverio Girondo ; translated from the Spanish by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert with an anti-preface by Karl August Kvitko.
p.cm.
“Xenos dual-language ed.”
Includes bibliographic references.
ISBN 1-879378-21-3 (pbk.)
1. Girondo, Oliverio, 1891-1967—Translations into English. I. Title: Scarecrow & other anomalies. II. Alter-Gilbert, Gilbert. III. Title.
PQ7797.G535 A23 2001
861’.62—dc21
2001026983
Published by Xenos Books
Box 16433, Las Cruces
New Mexico, USA 88004
www.xenosbooks.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOUR: FLAGELLATION AND FLAMENCOS
FOURTEEN: GRANDMOTHER’S ADVICE
TWENTY-TWO: DEFENSES AGAINST WOMEN
OTHER KINDLE EDITIONS FROM XENOS BOOKS
PREFACE TO THE KINDLE EDITION
THE PRINT EDITION of
Scarecrow and other anomalies
is a Xenos Dual-Language edition: the original Spanish text appears on pages to the left, the English translation on pages to the right. It offers the dying analog generation of book readers the obscure pleasure of comparing words back and forth, tracing them with their arthritic fingers and mumbling them out loud as spittle slides from their lips. Preparing this curious little book for the bright new digital generation, in particular for the amazing digital device that can carry seven-hundred thousand million books without any of them weighing a page, I foolishly thought of attempting to retain that feature; but try as I might, I could not find a way to make matching pages on an electronic reader. The technology is there, it must surely be possible, but I have not mastered it, and none of the guides to producing e-books was written by a person introduced to the English language before the vast digital divide. So I can’t get from there to here. Given that there are no pages in an e-book, let alone facing pages, I was forced to dump the Spanish text and retain the English alone. But then it hit me: the book is more streamlined this way, shorn of a tiresome encumbrance, and worthy of joining the new age.
The first page of
Scarecrow
is a pictogram—that is, a jocular poem typed in such a way as to form a picture. The picture is one of a strange little mannikin with a top hat.
The hat reads:
I know nothing You know nothing Thou knowest nothing He knows nothing Men know nothing Women know nothing You all know nothing None of us knows anything at all.
The outspread arms read:
The disorientation of my generation has its explanation in the direction of our education, whose idealization of action, was—without question!—a mystification, in distinction to our passion for meditation, contemplation and masturbation.
The belly or body reads:
(Guttural, as guttural as can be.) I believe I believe in that which I believe I do not believe. And I believe I don’t believe in what I believe I believe.
The two outstretched legs make up a “Song of the froggies.” It reads vertically from top to bottom. Such a thing is probably possible to produce on a digital reader, but only with an advanced degree. I will simply spell it out here horizontally, left to right:
And above the stairways climbing overhead! And below the ladders curving underneath! Is it there? It isn’t here! Is it thither? It isn’t hither! And above the stairways climbing overhead! And below the ladders curving underneath!
The whole thing makes up, you see, a drawing of letters. I can’t show it, so you’ll just have to imagine it. But I will include it at the start of the book, though it will certainly be jumbled on your screen by the conversion of a doc file into hypertext. Nevertheless, it should produce an effect, for the point is not actually the text, but the combination of text and picture, sort of like telling a story while making shadows on a wall.
The moribund print edition also contains a small number of graphics between its antiquated covers: a line drawing of the author, some of his own illustrations and representations of the scarecrow he fashioned out of papier-maché. But these don’t show up well in an e-book and have been dropped. An address is provided at the end of my Anti-Preface (which follows) that will direct you to a website that shows the gigantic creation.
Well, enough. Here in Kindle format you have the complete English text of
Scarecrow and other anomalies
by Oliverio Girondo. Because it is best in a digital book for the chapters to have titles, since they form the basis for a “linked toc,” and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. does not make a good table of contents, I have added a title to each of the twenty-four sections of
Scarecrow
. All the other titles are the author’s own. The book concludes with some notes and biographical sketches of the participants. I might have tried a few footnotes, but they seem to be beyond the capacities of e-books at their present stage. Soon they will have them—and photographs, and interactive features, and videos, and songs, and holograms of the characters, and then everything will be transformed.
Karl Kvitko
Editor, Xenos Books
P.S. If you prefer to go straight to
Scarecrow
, go back to the Table of Contents and click there. Otherwise, next come introductory words about the contents of the book.
Anti-Preface
THE SCARECROW STANDS ALONE
1. Idiocies & Introductions
There are countless idiocies in life, and many are ineradicable. One of them obliges millions of men around the world to wear a strip of cloth called a necktie from their Adam’s apple down to their omphalos. The convention originated when Croatian mercenaries flourishing a cloth talisman at their throats visited the court of King Louis XIV in 1668. The Sun King liked the fashion statement of the “cravates” (origin of the word “cravat”), as did the people, and so today believers in the scientific method, believers in the omnipotence of God and in the transformative power of faith in Jesus Christ, atheists, agnostics and neo-pagans alike ward off evil spirits with the selfsame artifact of superstition; and if you want to get and keep a job in the twenty-first century, you’d better wear that colorful and constrictive strip of idiocy too.
An idiocy of more recent derivation is wearing a baseball cap backwards, originating, evidently, in the murderous youth gangs of our cities as a show of juvenile defiance. Other kids liked the look; it said: “Look at me! I’m different, I defy the conventions of society.” And so today all the youth, most of the aging youth and a considerable number of millionaire entertainers, plus high-school coaches and dads who want to be pals, show themselves different and defiant by wearing a sign that easily reads: “I’m an idiot who follows a fashion begun by degenerate thugs.” You would think that someone might wear the tie and the backward baseball cap at the same time to demonstrate originality, or qualified conventionality, or double idiocy, but so far I haven’t seen it.
Or take the greatest idiocy of all: the parking meter—an instrument with which the citizens of a society penalize themselves for parking their vehicles in spaces laid out in their very own city, while they go about on foot to do perfectly legitimate business, paying a sub-class of citizens, supposedly civil servants, to prey on them, devise traps for them and to regard them as detestable but inexhaustible sources of revenue, with which to fund ever more elaborate furnishings for the civil servant-predators and ever more sophisticated devices for monitoring and punishing their nominal masters, the citizens, who are idiots for letting it happen.
So long as there are men’s suits, kids’ sports caps and private automobiles, and we shall not begin to discuss high-heeled shoes, theatrical greasepaint and civet anal scent prized as adornments by women, these three idiocies will not disappear; and so long as there are books, the particular idiocy that concerns us right now will not go away either. It is the practice of introducing a literary work designed to surprise, startle and perhaps even shock the reader with a critical preface that reveals nearly the whole story or content of the book, or analyzes it, and thereby deadens the surprise, startle and whatever there might have been of a shock.
The idea seems to be that readers are more interested in the intellectual assessment and categorization of a work than in responding to it directly, with naïve emotion and an unconditioned mind; they want to know to what school it belongs, what critics have said about it and what cultural values it possesses before they will bring themselves to read it; therefore they will forgo the stimulation and possible pleasure of an immediate acquaintance with the work and will take delight in the cleverness of the critic’s observations, making sure to respond with the reactions prepared for them by the critic when they read passages in the author’s work that were previously cited in the preface.