Buenos Aires, Argentina Part 2

Buenos Aires was a shock to the system. I found myself avoiding going out doors to the point that I've lost a significant amount of weight from not maintaining my normal eating habits. When I finally did take a breath and cross the threshold, I would roam for miles (or, should I say kilometers) down what I considered secure corridors without ever going inside a cafe, restaurant, or shop. Picture me walking for 4-5 hours while constantly trying to ascertain if the street is safe, if there are women and children on the sidewalk, if the men are old or young. (I partially blame the countless "be safe!" tidings bestowed on me; while well-meaning and technically good advice, they tend to promote a paranoia that makes it hard to for me to enjoy myself.)

Self portrait in double reflection: the balcony window and the mirror
above the dining room table in the first apartment I stayed in.

Speaking to people terrified me because people in this region speak Rioplatenese Spanish, the sound of which I can best describe as Spanish with the inflection of Italian and the suaveness of French. The double L, which I learned to pronounce as a "yuh" sound, is pronounced as "zh," and Y is the same: Yo (I) becomes Zho; the street I first stayed on, called Gallo, is pronounced "gow-zho," not "gow-yo." Turns out my already bad Spanish was in effect useless.

This shoe shop's styles caught my eye, then I realized those are heels for dancing tango.

I suppose the biggest surprise was that folks didn't really speak English, and it seemed like few were willing to work with me. I became extremely embarrassed of being found out; I constantly wondered what happened to the girl who was happy to point and gesture in the pastry shop to buy a box of macaroons last summer in Europe. I toured museums constantly wondering where to get a map and why the second floor wasn't open, yet I wouldn't be caught dead asking a question to the staff or even to the people in whose apartment I was staying. I suppose part of that can be reduced to haughtiness, or self-consciousness to the point of conceitedness. But mostly stubbornness.

This somewhat sepia-toned floral pattern was very popular in all types of shops for clothing and accessories. Even vendor booths in street fairs had this styled of pattern available.

My discovery of the difference in pronunciation (and even vocabulary, to a certain extent) was perhaps the most disappointing when applied to my love for Alejandra Pizarnik's poetry in its native form. I realized I would never fully grasp the music and prosody of her work without living here and actively learning the language for a couple years. My stupid pie-in-the-sky dreams of seriously translating her work were dashed. And, because of my trouble with the language and culture, I never inquired about her anywhere, I never went searching for her in libraries or bookstores, I never made the trek to the suburb where she grew up.

Funny window display of a sea of reaching mannequin hands in a fabric store in Recoleta

Portrait of Buenos Aires apartments in reflection

Grocery stores often have a person specifically assigned to the produce section, that will bag and mark your fruit and vegetables for you. You don't tip taxi drivers. No one ever has change for a 100 bill, which is about the equivalent of a $20 bill in the US. Having change is important and you can get it at most banks (during my first foray into this at the local HSBC branch, I literally got a rush of adrenaline when it was my turn with the clerk and I think I visibly blushed).

A particularly artsy and well kept apartment facade near Recoleta.

Eventually I learned some tricks and employed them when I came to my wit's end, faint to the point I was worried of passing out on the street: when you go in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, you sit down wherever you want. Even in cafes you sit, and you are waited on. You always have to ask for your bill (that's one thing I remember from Barcelona 2001: the night Elizabeth and I waited for about two hours for our bill from a waiter who refused to bring it unless we asked for it in Spanish: la cuenta, por favor), and in fact I eventually amused myself by watching the Spanish speakers around me grow shifty and flag down their server to get their bill. You tip 10% usually (although many were very thankful when I did so, leading me to believe perhaps Porteños are actually not that generous...?) and there is a customary cubierto fee, which is a charge for using silverware, of about 4 to 8 pesos. While we're on the topic, Argentine people usually eat dinner at 9, 10 o'clock or later, and when they go dancing at clubs, they show up at 2 or 3 a.m. Apparently the business day still starts at the same time as the rest of the world (9 a.m.), yet somehow the life expectancy of Argentines is about the same as the US, according to my guide.

La Casa Rosa at night; this is that famous building from whose balcony many presidents and dictators made speeches, and from where Madonna sang "Don't cry for me, Argentina...."

Detail of wet footsteps on the plaque beside the Belgrano Monument in Plaza de Mayo

All this having been said, I survived. I got exercise. I stayed alive. I went to some museums. I went to some parks. I found the Russian Orthodox Church; I found the Jesuit Church (yes, it's freaking called St. Ignatius!). I had a couple English guided tours. I weaved my way through the packed Peruvian Pride festival in downtown Buenos Aires on a Sunday. I drank some dang good hot chocolate and I drank Fernet the Argentine way: with Coca-cola, as a mixed drink (they like Fernet a lot here). I don't regret my problems with the language and the culture and the things that it prohibited me from doing, although I did feel a constant bearing down from the people I stayed with or others to have a more vigorous experience; the thing is, I don't do tourism vigorously. I like to sleep in. I like to fart around in my pajamas. I like being comfortable. I like walking around somewhat aimlessly. I do slightly regret not preparing more, and not actively prepping myself with vocab or pronunciation as the experience was happening, but in the total sum of the way my life has changed in the last 4 weeks, I think I'm doing OK.

View of Torre Monumental, which used to be called the British Clock Tower before Argentina got pissed enough at the British to change its name in 1982, on a crisp sunny day. View from San Martin Plaza.

On one of my better days, I gave up my trek to some museums on the water front of La Boca when the sidewalk literally ended in train tracks and turned into a large thoroughfare underneath a highway. I retraced my footsteps and went back to Bar Britanico on the corner of Defensa and Avenida Brasil, across from Parque Lezama and down the block from the Russian Orthodox Church. I marched straight in, grabbed a table with a good view, and banished any weird feelings I had about attempting to order a hot chocolate from the unamused waiter. I stirred the bar of chocolate into my hot milk, sipped, and wrote a poem about Alejandra and the crazy, noisy, smelly streets of Buenos Aires. That day I truly accomplished something and I found myself whistling down Tacuarí as I returned to my apartment near San Martin Square.

Detail of a pool of water underneath the skeleton of a large derelict building past Retiro Station and on the way to the port.

Above all, I opened my eyes, ears, nostrils, and feet to Buenos Aires and in that way I absorbed the city in raw sensory perception. I know in 6 months from now, even in 5 or 10 years from now, some vortex of Buenos Aires will come back to me. Perhaps a certain smell or sound will trigger it, but in my experience cities just return to mind at random times, like a zeitgeist with a strong emphasis on the ghost part of the untranslatable concept. And a tinge of longing or unease for Buenos Aires will remind me that I did something difficult, I survived, and I'm living a worthwhile life.

Plans Change, Searches are Abandoned, Favor the Physical

Everything I read about the Fulbright said: Plans change. You'll labor over this proposal but through the course of your year abroad, it will all change. I didn't get that Fulbright, which I suppose was the first change, and again my plans have changed. I was going to go to New York, see old friends, go to Princeton, do research on Alejandra Pizarnik. I was going to write blog posts about the point where informational professionalism, poetry, and travel intersect.

I guess it started when I moved from Cricket's in Bushwick to Phil's in Hell's Kitchen on Monday - couldn't go to Princeton that day. I think I might have been too culture-shocked from living in a tiny chamber dry-walled off from a loft for 3 days in Bushwick to even consider it (Cricket, guru Jew of New York race said it best: no "normal white people" live in Bushwick - the only white people are "hipsters"). Then, Cricket's request for her trial to go to court on Wednesday instead of Tuesday was granted by the Judge, so she got Tuesday off and we went to Coney Island - couldn't go to Princeton that day. Tuesday night, as Phil was trying to recover from his horrible day at work, I was frantically trying to figure out if I could even see Alejandra's things the next day - would they be paged that quickly, or should I have already figured out what boxes I wanted to see and have put in the request? (That was going to be the topic of the blog post that will never get written - why do libraries make it so difficult to figure out how to access their collections? I am a library professional and no matter how many times I read all the web sites they sent me, I couldn't get a clear answer.) Then Google eventually told me it would take 3 hours one way to get to Princeton via public transit. I was already crapping my pants so hard about my upcoming flight to Argentina that I couldn't fathom spending 6 hours in 100+ degree heat trying to get to and from a library that may or may not be able to produce some papers I wasn't even sure I needed to consult. (That's the other thing: I was utterly unprepared for the devastation the NY heat wave would have on my San-Francisco-coldest-winter-summer biosystem.)

As Phil was heading out the door to work on Wednesday morning, he woke me up to see what my plans were. I reluctantly gave up the ghost - Alejandra's ghost - and I put it this way: it's so easy to come up with some idealized plan when you're sitting alone in the Government Documents room of a different library across the country. At 8:15 EST in a king sized bed on West 43rd and 9th Ave, I knew I couldn't spend my last full day in the States chasing that idealization, even at the cost of letting myself down (the hardest part: letting go of the principle). So I got up and started preparing for going to another country. I did my usual Google trolling to find answers to currency exchange rates to how best to get from Manhattan to Newark Airport. I "prepared" by spending hours online, moving money around in bank accounts, reading reports of first contact at the Buenos Aires Int'l Airport (EZE), and looking up the address of the apartment I would stay at in Buenos Aires.

Later that day, I actually walked through Port Authority (only two blocks from Phil's) and noticed all the signs: bus to Newark, this way. I found out how long it takes: 30 minutes. One bus, $16. All that stupid Googling never suggested this! The trip plan function on Google maps, About.com, the Newark Airport website: they all said take the subway to Penn Station to Amtrak to AirTran - oh it's so easy and cheap! Fast forward to the next day. Despite my freaked out exit off the Newark Airport bus at Port Authority and the rushed and sweaty jaunt back to Phil's to recover my cell phone, which I had left charging on his nightstand, I couldn't help but wonder: what would the lady at the info desk of Port Authority have said if I had asked her how to get to Princeton instead of Google. Information Professional lesson #1: Don't rely on the internet for things best done in person. No, scratch that. Revise what you think is best done in person and what is best done on the internet. Life ain't no academic database you can assume you've mastered, so live in the physical. Even if it means squashing reflexes and bypassing social anxiety.

And, oh yeah. I made it back to the next Newark Airport bus with my phone and plenty of time to spare. Only my clammy, moist clothes were the worst for it.

The Search for Alejandra Pizarnik

Vida, mi vida, déjate doler, mi vida, déjate enlazar de fuego, de silencio ingenuo, de piedras verdes en la casa de la noche, déjate caer y doler, mi vida.

• • • • • •
Life, life of mine, let yourself fall, let yourself suffer, life of mine, let yourself be bound with fire, with simple silence, with green stones in the house of the night, let yourself fall and suffer, life of mine.

from Tree of Diana by Alejandra Pizarnik, trans. Susan Bassnett


Left, an illustration of a common scrap that litters my surfaces: a Library of Congress call number scrawled on an old At-A-Glance calendar sheet. In this case, the call number leads to the book Exchanging Lives, in which English poet Susan Bassnett translates the work of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik and offers us some collaboration poems, although Pizarnik died in 1972 and, I assume, Bassnett wrote her poems in the 90s and early 00s.

This thin tome came into my life in 2008 during the MFA in Writing course Poetry Internationale: my uncle had just died, I had turned 25 the day of the funeral, and I was trying to find the balance between the library life and the literary life while reaping the benefit of tuition remission. After the previous semester of "challenging" American Modern Poetry like Moore and Stevens and Pound, I thought: finally, a poet who frickin' gets that poetry is about the pain and intensity of life, not about sleight of hand and feats of reference virtuosity.

El poema que no digo,
el que no merezco.
Mierdo de ser dos
camino del espejo:
alguien en mí dormido
me come y me bebe.

• • • • • •

The poem I do not write,
the one I do not deserve.
Fear of being two
pathway in a mirror:
someone sleeping within me
eats me and drinks me.

I thought, Alejandra Pizarnik, where have you and your mental illness and your poetics been all my life! And even more important, why is Bassnett's excuse for translation the only coherent English offering we have?

The "library life" eclipsed the "literary life" then intersected: I ran relentless searches in Ignacio then Link+, first with Pizarnik as author, then keyword, then subject; I gathered all English translations I could find, then I gathered select originals. (Bibliography via RefWorks coming soon.) For my final project in Poetry Internationale, I translated 4 of her poems from Spanish to English, then I made a run of 10 books containing the translations.

Three years later Alejandra remained in my heart: 2011's National Poetry Month and Gleeson's trial of the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) prompted me to again run relentless searches of Pizarnik as author, as keyword, as subject. I renewed my interest in her poetry and the (English) scholarship on her, all while testing out the prowess of EDS. For Poem in Your Pocket Day I carried around the one immediately above. I relished reading it to my mom that evening, even though its bizarreness shocked her (just a little bit).

Natuurlijk you can look up her history: a woman between two worlds, like many Porteños from what I understand: her parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants that raised their daughter in a suburb of Buenos Aires; she went to Paris for four seminal years; the one living within her finally ate her dead of barbiturates.

I am sure this was all percolating in my mind that morning I woke up determined to go to Buenos Aires and ride a freighter ship away from the Southern hemisphere, but a close friend was the one who made the connection; before he pointed it out, I just said "I always wanted to go there," when asked how I picked Buenos Aires as my starting point. So yes, Alejandra I am coming to your birthplace to find some trace of you, or to recognize some influence your environment had on you. But, here's the thing: the holy grail of research is not at Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Universidad de Buenos Aires) or even The Sorbonne in Paris. Her papers and manuscripts are at Princeton's Firestone Library in New Jersey, U.S.A.

The thing that confuses me and will be the subject of future blog posts is why Princeton University houses her papers and manuscripts. As far as I know, she never visited the U.S. or had any connection with Princeton. This occurs to me--a library professional--as a microcosm of American privilege and imperialism. Luckily for my sense of injustice and for my interests, I am going through New York on my way to Buenos Aires so I can make a day trip to Princeton. Stay tuned for more musings on library/archives control of information, and what I hope to get out of the search for Alejandra.