Oliverio Girondo

Born 17 Aug 1891 · Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Oliverio Girondo (August 17, 1891 – January 24, 1967) was an Argentine poet. He was born in Buenos Aires to a relatively wealthy family, enabling him from a young age to travel to Europe, where he studied in both Paris and England. He is perhaps most famous for his participation in the magazines (Proa, Prisma and Martín Fierro), which ushered in the arrival of ultraism, the first of the vanguardist movements to settle in Argentina.

His first poems, full of color and irony, surpass the simple admiration of beauty in nature which was then a common theme, opting instead for a fuller and more interesting topic: a sort of celebration of living cosmopolitan and urbane, both praising such a lifestyle and criticizing some of the customs of its society.

Girondo was contemporary to Jorge Luis Borges, Raúl González Tuñón and Macedonio Fernández and Norah Lange (whom he married in 1943) whom he met at a lunch banquet in 1926 held in honor of Ricardo Güiraldes. Of these authors, all also involved in the vanguardia (avant gardism) of Argentina, most identified with the Florida group in the somewhat farcical literary hostility between that group and another called Grupo Boedo. Girondo was one of the most enthusiastic animators of the ultraist movement, exerting influence over many poets of the next generation, among them Enrique Molina with whom he tra…