/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/POETRY-ARGENTINA: Olga Orozco’s Words Travelled Further

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 24 1999 (IPS) - The poetry of Olga Orozco, who died this month at the age of 79, is practically unknown outside Latin American literary circles but her work in “beseeching God to speak” are venerated by aspiring Argentine poets.

“With words, I can travel even further. I arrange them into verses like a convoy that takes me on trip around the world without passing through the door, that is to say, without my dying,” Orozco declared shortly before died on Aug. 15.

“In poetry, there is a marked absence of a hidden God, who suddenly reveals a tiny hint of himself like a flash of lightning. Always incomprehensible, I have to disappear to grasp it. I cover the weak point with my body to attempt it,” she said.

Winner of the Juan Rulfo Award in 1998, Orozco travelled a long road from her first books of poetry: “From Far Away” (1946), “The Dead” (1952), “Dangerous Games” (1962) and “Savage World” (1974).

At least five other books of poems by Orozco published between 1975 and 1995 were critically acclaimed and she also had several short stories published – notably “Darkness is Another Sun” and “Light Also is an Abyss.”

She also received the Gabriela Mistral Award, given by the Organisation of American States, and won at a dozen national literary prizes, some of which consisted of grants that gave her the financial resources to pursue her objective.

A passion to visit the “other world” caused her to venture into journalism and, using pseudonyms, Orozco was a hidden light on the horoscope pages and answering the sentimental mail of newspapers and magazines.

Her deck of tarot cards and “sixth sense” – an ability that she discovered as a young girl when she allegedly caused a neighbor to levitate – transformed her into something of a “priestess.”

“The tarot, occult things, the exercise of clairvoyancy, convoke dark forces from the great beyond. I live between those two worlds,” said Orozco, as if she were discussing a second job.

Despite earlier happiness, Orozco reportedly recognised late in life that the work of a poet was “true suffering”, and her reflections on the way in which she approached her art were similar to those of another great Spanish language poet, Jorge Luis Borges.

“At the moment of writing, one must have the attitude of an observer, one must play the role of an investigator. Dreams correspond to real, camouflaged situations, and at times it is not easy to discover what lies beneath this disguise. To write is to attempt to take off the mask,” she said.

“For me, it is not a pleasure but a duty, it’s the strongest way I have to express myself, but it causes me profound suffering. I am submerged into a black hole, and through the void I feel one with the surface, (but) that the way back is lost to me,” she added.

Like Borges, who sometimes considered these processes to be a nuisance, Orozco also said she knew the beginning and ending of a poem..”The rest is unknown territory; it is like a tunnel, through which it is hard to see the light at the end.”

In this quest, the poet was satisfied that she had obtained some answers from the great beyond, “but they are in another language.”

“I have to decipher them because they are still a mystery, and when I write, it is in those worlds which I investigate,” she said.

The U.S. writer Howard Nemerov once remarked that “Poetry is an attempt to urge God to speak.”

To her followers, Orozco achieved this task and, surprisingly, was recognised even by her atheist colleagues. Of her contemporaries, which included Oliverio Girondo, Norah Lange, Enrique Molina and Alberto Girri, she was the last survivor.

In times of crisis, she became afflicted with writer’s block, but her talent for linguistics made her a passionate devotee of crossword puzzles and games like “Boggle.”

Orozco was born in the town of Toay, in the province of La Pampa, on March 17, 1920. The “vast, flat plains, deep lakes and sand dunes that moved with the wind” frequently appeared in her work.

Critics, who sometimes defined her as a surrealist poet and sometimes as a neo-romanticist, said that she wandered far from traditional verse and created something uniquely her own.

For Juan Gelman, the Argentinean poet who presented her with the Rulfo Award, the poetry of Orozco remains “unique, powerful and free,” like its author.

“She has flashes of insight, which after they subside, leave teeth marks of fury and lands sown with jewels,” he told readers, who have yet to plumb the depths of her mysteries.