Ova Completa by Susana Thénon: Ontents

Contents
Ova Completa by Susana Thénon

translated by Rebekah Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Ova completa by Susana Thénon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
“Ova Completa: A Feast of Meaning”

by María Negroni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
“The Whole Ova” by Rebekah Smith . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Translator’s Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

why is that woman screaming?
why is she screaming?
don’t even try to understand
that woman, why is she screaming?

look at what beautiful flowers
hyacinths asters
why?
why what?
and that woman?

and that woman?
just try and understand
she must be crazy that woman
look look at the little mirrors
could it be because of her steed?
and where did you hear

the word steed?
it’s a secret that woman
look at the asters
the woman
little mirrors
little birds
that don’t sing
7
that don’t fly
that don’t intrude
the woman
and that woman
and was she crazy that woman?
she’s not screaming any more
(do you remember that woman?)
8
you
who’ve read Dante in folio
you let yourself drift
through those little drawings
so-called illuminated miniatures
and you swallowed it all
all
from ay
to bi
but it’s a lie
that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish

made on purpose to make you waste time
calculating in which circle
the bones of your soul
will end up
and you know something?

this famous inferno
has an admirable simplicity
it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning
you get there and they tell you
you’re free
go ahead and do as you like
9
Omnes Generationes
let’s go with one in vitro

and one in polyurethane
from Stockholm
I’ll educate them as much as possible
I won’t educate them
benedice carafam et monitorem

quia mineralia sunt et
penes mineralia burstitur
or better three
in formica
in cobalt
or four or six or a shard in love
10
Ova Completa: A Feast of Meaning
This book is an acid, a linguistic witches’ sabbath, a diatribe against

politically correct thinking. When Thénon published it in 1987, Argentina
had only recently returned to democracy, leaving behind one of the bloodiest
dictatorships in history.
Up to that time, poets had resisted the discourse (and the practices) of terror,
entrenching themselves in an extreme condensation of language. They had
found a way of saying more with less, eluding the pincers of censorship and
its deadly risks. To the desaparecidos,1 to the death flights,2 to the policies
that persecuted and abandoned the most vulnerable, they had answered with
a kind of asthmatic syntax, made of taut phrases and spasmodic rhythms.
Thénon herself had written distancias,3 saturating the white space with
meaning, opening subterfuges, making the poems dance across the page like
skeletons or material ghosts.
Now, with the political opening, there was space to explore less gloomy
terrain, to move toward play and insolence, and Ova Completa was, without a
doubt, the most extreme example of this change.
1 From 1976 to 1983, Argentina was ruled by a military junta. During those years of
state-sponsored terrorism, the junta persecuted people it suspected of being political
dissidents aligned with leftist, socialist, or social justice causes. The junta clandestinely
kidnapped, tortured, and killed an estimated 30,000 people, disposing of their bodies
as a way of seeking impunity. These individuals came to be known as the desaparecidos, or
“disappeareds.”
2 “Vuelos de la muerte” were one of the methods used by the military junta to disappear
people: victims were thrown alive, drugged, from aircraft into a river or the sea.
3 Susana Thénon, distancias, (Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero Editor, 1984); distancias /
distances, the English translation by Renata Treitel, was published by Sun & Moon Press
in 1994.
129
This book has everything: quotidian speech; cursing; utterances in Greek,
Latin, French, and English; invectives; jargon (legal, soccer, racetrack, tango);
references to the Malvinas War; sacrilege; scatology; sex; neologisms; free
association; chaotic lists; temporal dislocation and furied attacks on every
kind of cliché, including those that come from the paternalistic gazes of the
Northern hemisphere.
if you don’t like “and my Peripherals”

you can choose from these leftovers: “and my Kits”
“and my Gadgets”
“and my Accessories”
“and my Tassels”
“and my Replacements”
“and my Trinkets”
“and my Chess Pieces”
“and my Agoraphobics”
It could be said that, in Thénon’s gesture, language is a stammering puppet,

full of sonic contaminations, always on the point of veering off, from one
letter to another, from one seme to another, from one idea to another. Or
even—and which amounts to the same thing—that in that indecipherable
and carnivalesque that unfolds in writing, a syntactic explosion weaves
dispersion together with fortuitous encounter, in order to impede any
attempt at homogenous discourse.
I repeat: Ova Completa is a ferocious assault on social, formal, genre, and

gender conventions. A true consciousness of language that is exacerbated, if
it’s possible, with the use of irony, often self-directed.
taking a chance with “wrecked” or “incontinent”

it’s a passport to marginality
130
whilst you want to be the prize of crackpot anthologies?
to have a wart in the curriculum?
Perhaps this explains why the book had, at the very moment of its release,
such an enthusiastic reception on the part of the new generations of poets.
Ova Completa was read and appreciated in all its splendor, in all is aggressive
seriousness, in all its hilarious novelty. I don’t think it’s absurd to claim that
Thénon opened the way for what was known later in the Argentine poetry
scene as the “poetry of the 90s,” on the condition that it is remembered that
she arrived at desacralization and colloquial outburst after an arduous path of
semantic and formal condensation, and that the presumed “triviality” of her
discourse was always unfailingly political, visceral, and genuine.
“The poem is concerned with everything, even the most ungrateful earth,”
Susana Thénon wrote.4
Maybe because of this, in that obsessive arc that goes from Edad sin tregua (1958)
to Ova completa (1987), the “strange places” are repeated as signs that allude to
the “tragic and tender expiration of language,” understood as that “minimum
distance that exists between us and ourselves, or between ourselves and the
other,”5 to say the mark of every solitude, estrangement, or uprootedness.
There is in this work, it seems, a geography that turns outward in order to

immerse itself in the abyss of what isn’t seen, what is ignored or silenced
for reasons of taste or good manners, perhaps in the confidence that only a
4 See Ana María Barrenechea, “La documentación marginal para distancias de Susana
Thénon,” Filología 27 (1994): 79-80.
5 Thénon says this in relation to distancias in a letter from February 17, 1968 to Ana María
Barrenechea included in La morada imposible, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor,
2004), 193.
131
deformed map can yield the skeleton of a soul. The sensation is one of being
lost, of the painful loving of what’s been abolished. Always one more step.
Always an intervening crack, like a fold where it is possible to go to look for
what the poems can’t explain, but can understand.
These will be poems for poetry, she wrote, trying to explain how she wrote.
And in one sense, they are. Poems unrefined, debased, erect like a monument
in a black sun world, like music boxes or sonic homelands. As if the objective
of the process were to stage the always unrealizable project of meaning,
to remember that, as Severo Sarduy said, the desiring language of poetry
doesn’t recognize functionality, transgresses the useful, insists on failure.
This is desire par excellence, a desire for what does not exist, blind and in the
void, bringing forth the impossible: a feast of meaning.
If the seed of this conception of the world-as-enigma and language-as-

blindness is present from the beginning, it is in Ova Completa that it reaches
the climax of its corrosive ability. There, the carnivalesque zeal—that
multiplies the profanations and palimpsests—gives as a result a language
that, exhausting intertextuality and parody, intensifies the boustrophedonic
character of the poem to its very limits. The effect is one of radical
estrangement. As if the signs (not the emotions) revealed a disequilibrium
between the experience and the world that only a stark music, ambivalent,
could transcribe. And yes. What could be better for unexpressing reality—
that opacity that needs to be spoken—than a music made of familiarly
unrecognizable particles like Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie, halfway between
crystal architecture and the mysteries of a film still?
It’s almost unnecessary to add that the author of Ova Completa draws on
both “vulgar” and “refined” language equally. Aristophanes, Apuleius,
Catullus, Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Rabelais, Góngora, and Joyce are her
132
masters. Undoubtedly, Girondo’s En la masmédula—that, in the style of the
phonetic mosaics of Haroldo de Campos, invents, pluralizes, or superimposes
words, providing a spectacle of a split subjectivity—deserves to figure in the
list of precursor texts. Also, of course, the “very cacophonous little music” of
Alejandra Pizarnik’s La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la Polígrafa. Although
the parallels between the two poets hasn’t yet been noted, it is obvious that
they share various textual procedures (the sexual charge of the signifier, the
degradation of culture, the mix of speech registers, the deformation of Latin,
or banal usage), even though, in Thénon, the coarseness is always kept at a less
intense coordinate, the lyricism is absent, and the obscene has a more acidic
appearance, at times, more political.
As if united with what was lost, her voice speaks to say nothing, or better to say,
to be the voice of what is absent. There is no other world, it seems to affirm,
because there is no world. Or even, in words the order of death always sings,
that is to say, has already been sung. It is better to abandon the expressible
(that exiles us from ourselves) and then remain unsheltered, in those arid
landscapes where the roofless house of poetry is, its center unplaceable and in
a hurry to conquer precarity, its trembling of nightmares and light.
Poet and spy, Susana Thénon (1935–1991) dreamed of a literature that could
fit in the hollow of a child’s hand. Her aim always consisted of not giving
accounts, of running suddenly to the encounter with the splinters of the self
to fulfill loss, not to cancel it, to shine on it like a lighthouse.
María Negroni
Buenos Aires, May 2020
tr. Silvina López Medin and Rebekah Smith
133

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Contents

Ova Completa by Susana Thénon

Ova completa by Susana Thénon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

“Ova Completa: A Feast of Meaning”

“The Whole Ova” by Rebekah Smith . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Translator’s Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

that woman, why is she screaming?

and that woman?

and where did you hear

she’s not screaming any more

(do you remember that woman?)

but it’s a lie

that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish

and you know something?

you get there and they tell you

let’s go with one in vitro

I’ll educate them as much as possible

I won’t educate them

benedice carafam et monitorem

or four or six or a shard in love

This book is an acid, a linguistic witches’ sabbath, a diatribe against

if you don’t like “and my Peripherals”

It could be said that, in Thénon’s gesture, language is a stammering puppet,

I repeat: Ova Completa is a ferocious assault on social, formal, genre, and

taking a chance with “wrecked” or “incontinent”

There is in this work, it seems, a geography that turns outward in order to

If the seed of this conception of the world-as-enigma and language-as-

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