Susana Thénon - a collection full of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight, or, as Thénon writes, “me on earth; me with the others; me ignorant, rude, all mixed in Latin, Greek, shit, noodles, culture, and barbarism.”

 

Susana Thénon, Ova Completa, Ugly Duckling

Presse, 2021.

excerpt (pdf)

 Susana Thénon (1935–1991) is a key poet of the ’60s generation in Argentina. In Ova Completa, her final, most radical collection, Thénon’s poetics expands to incorporate all it touches—classical and popular culture, song lyrics and vulgarities, incoherence and musicality—embodying humor and terror while writing obliquely of femicide, Argentina’s last dictatorship, the Malvinas / Falklands war, the heritage of colonialism. Ova Completa is a collection full of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight, or, as Thénon writes, “me on earth; me with the others; me ignorant, rude, all mixed in Latin, Greek, shit, noodles, culture, and barbarism.”

 I’m in disbelief that these poems were written over thirty years ago by someone born in 1935. How can it be? Susana Thénon’s flair for code-switching—from Argentine regionalisms to mock etymologies to an ever-seductive English—seems ahead of its time, as do her poems’ fragmentariness, skepticism of language and its institutions. (Vide letters, bureaucracy.) Clearly, they weren’t, but that’s the magic of their immediacy and of Rebekah Smith’s brilliant translations. Caustic, restless, and delighting in their own performativity, they’ll make you want to catch up with them. - Mónica de la Torre

One of the best kept secrets of Argentine literature, Susana Thénon’s poetry takes on new life in this subtle English version of her Ova Completa. Wisely mixing critical reflection and casual impudence, literary references and unruly banter, Thénon draws her readers into a powerfully disquieting reading, a dialogue not only with her many voices but with literature itself. - Sylvia Molloy

This is the first time I’ve endorsed a book after reading a handful of poems because I’ve never encountered a handful of poems this intriguing. Is Susana Thénon Jorge Louis Borges' long lost daughter, is she Juan Gelman’s sister, or is she a star from some wholly underrecognized dimension? It took just a sampling of Ova Completa to expand both my sense of the Argentinian literary landscape and my sense of poetic innovation. I can’t wait to read the rest of this rich and resonating collection. -Terrance Hayes

Experiments with language, with writing, with discursive genres, with situations and communicative actions or with pragmatic effects; [Thénon's later poems] are, in a parodic version, a reflection on all of these. They are also… a bleak and acidic gaze on a world that “enduring—until when?—it destroys itself” and that incessantly longs to see reconstruction rising up over destruction. - Ana María Barrenechea

The thematization is almost obsessive around the book as aesthetic object and as commodity that offers a double market to circulation: that of the buying and selling, and that of the critical and academic discourse. In the face of both, this text shows itself as a relentless mocker. And so an anti-aesthetic proposal arises… the effect is to topple hierarchies and distances, contaminate territories, violently erase the limits of a discourse typified as “cultured poetry.” … A heterogeneous and mutant text that on a few pages reasons with cartoonish humor, on others becomes linguistic decomposition à la Girondo, and on others almost a Cortázaran fantastic tale or almost a Borgesian essay, almost a popular song. The reader can perhaps find in these almosts a little appeasement: a powerful discursive will seeps through... Delfina Muschietti

Kikirikyrie

god help us or god don’t help us

or god half help us

or he makes us believe that he’ll help us

and later sends word that he’s busy

or he helps us obliquely

with a pious “help yourself”

or cradles us in his arms singing softly that we’ll pay for it

if we don’t go to sleep immediately

or whispers to us that here we are today and oh tomorrow too

or tells us the story of the cheek

and the one about the neighbor and the one about the leper

and the one about the little lunatic and the one about the mute who talked

or he puts in his headphones

or shakes us violently roaring that we’ll pay for it

if we don’t wake up immediately

or gives us the tree test

or takes us to the zoo to see

how we look at ourselves

or points out an old train on a ghost of a bridge

propped up by posters for disposable diapers

god help us or not or halfway

or haltingly

god us

god what

or more or less

or neither

‘Susana Thénon (Buenos Aires, 1935-1991) was an Argentine avant-garde poet, translator, and artistic photographer. The daughter of the psychiatrist Jorge Thénon, she was a member of Argentina’s Generación del ’60. Although she was a contemporary of Juana Bignozzi and Alejandra Pizarnik, Thenon was not part of any literary group. She affiliated within the marginal construction that works in her poetry, without adhering to any reigning movement.

‘Her relationship with other poets of her generation was minimal, with the exceptions of Maria Negroni, who later became one of the compilers in Thenon’s posthumous books (La Morada Impossible I and II) and the aforementioned Pizarnik with which she frequented, and along with that published in the literary journal Agua Viva (1960), which was perhaps one of the few signs of her openness to the poetic environment. A gap in her publications occurred between 1970 and 1982 when she was actively engaged in photography, although she continued to write during that period. Thenon also wrote some essays.’ — collaged

Susana Thénon (1935–1991) was a poet, translator, and photographer. She is considered part of the Argentine generation of the 60s, alongside contemporaries Alejandra Pizarnik and Juana Bignozzi, though she was never formally aligned with any particular group. She published five books of poetry: Edad sin tregua (1958), Habitante de la nada (1959), De lugares extraños (1967), distancias (1984), and Ova completa (1987). Between her publications of 1967 and 1984, she took a break from poetry, focusing instead on photography, especially photography of the dancer Iris Scaccheri. One of these photos appears on the cover of her book, distancias, and a book Acerca de Iris Scaccheri was published in Buenos Aires by Ediciones Anzilotti in 1988. Distancias was translated into English by Renata Treitel and published by Sun & Moon Press (Los Angeles, CA) in 1994. Thénon’s work was collected and published in two volumes entitled La morada imposible, edited by Ana M. Barrenechea and María Negroni (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2001). Some of her poems have also appeared in English in the collections, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), The Helicon Nine Reader (Kansas City: Helicon Nine Editions, 1990), and Crossings (San Francisco: Center for Art in Translation, 2000).

On December 17, 2020, UDP hosted the launch event for Ova Completa by Argentine poet Susana Thénon (1935–1991). Poets Asiya Wadud and Silvina López Medin read from their work, followed by a reading from Rebekah Smith, UDP editor and Ova Completa’s translator. Additional contributions were made by Victoria Cóccaro and Emma Wippermann during the reading.

Along with fellow UDP apprentices Ainee Jeong and Raphael Schnee, I prepared an introduction for one of the readers. Ainee introduced Susana Thenon & Rebekah Smith, Raphael introduced Silvinia López Medin, and I introduced Asiya Wadud. I was first introduced to Wadud through her book Syncope (UDP, 2019) and have since enjoyed exploring more of her work. Finding her work through UDP has provided comfort and solace even during a time that has been extremely difficult for many of us. For me, it felt special for Asiya Wadud and Silvina López Medin to join Rebekah Smith during this particular reading of Ova Completa.

I, along with the other members of the audience, were able to bear witness to an astounding night of community during the Ova Completa launch. Though sharing space has been rather difficult during the course of the pandemic, gathering virtually for this reading brought people together from various corners of the world, including Argentina, where Susana Thénon is from.

As Rebekah, Silvina, and Asiya read in a call-and-response fashion from Ova Completa, I found myself relating to Thénon’s self-reflecting commentary of decades past. Similarly to Mónica de la Torre, “I’m in disbelief that these poems were written over thirty year ago by someone born in 1935.” Hearing each of their voices cradling Thénon’s musings as chorus, it felt more as though Ova Completa was always meant to be experienced with a community of others. Being introduced to this sample of meditations by Susana Thénon makes me grateful for the world of translation and the relationship UDP continues to create with the writers of our past, often lost to time and not given their appropriate consideration.

— Bria Strothers