A Talisman in the Darkness by Olga Orozco

They tapped into its roots as a prophetic and creative function, poetry as sacred, the Logos that makes worlds. Olga and “The Generation of 40” were among a dying breed who viewed poetry as the ultimate “dangerous game”. She accredits Nerval, Rimbaud, and Beaudelaire as her greatest poetic influences. She was a lifelong student of gnosticism, Swedenborgianism, and the hermetic philosophies. (Cartomancy, a word I had to look up, means fortune telling by way of cards.) And that’s only one explanation for the poem, “Cartomancy”, that I’ll be sharing in this post. In the few photos I’ve seen, Olga looks happy enough with her fellow poets, though one also gets the sense that she observed them deep, profoundly so, beneath their skin without their realizing. Most of the members were men, their names unfamiliar to me. She frequented a Buenos Aires gathering of writers who called themselves “the Generation of 40”, referring to the decade. Descended from Basque, Irish, and Sicilian immigrants, Olga spent her entire life in Argentina. If it weren’t for Melanie Nicholson, who wrote the elegantly researched Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry, I would never have found or ventured toward Olga Orozco. Every time I finished a translation, I’d think, holy crap, that’s enough, then creep back in to try again. I knew there was an end, but I wasn’t sure of getting out. I could stand in Olga’s poems, but I couldn’t rush. They were immense, echoing and subterranean with shadows that milled about like guests at a muffled cocktail party. In translating Olga Orozco, I felt something similar, only the passages weren’t veins but caverns. So I translated the long one and the rest, as they ought to say, is mystery. If I said no, there would be no hard feelings. Reading them, I could decide whether or not to continue. He kindly agreed to my decision, asking only that I take a look at two more. I’d done three or four, and the experience was just too weird, too…can-opening. Prior to that poem, I had told my friend that I didn’t want to translate anymore. It felt the way you would expect, recently flung from an aorta or a birth canal. I could still feel his poem on the surface of my skin. Reaching the end of one long poem, in particular, I felt a kind of muscular expulsion that landed me, freshly oxygenated and stunned into some bright new place. Orzoco's previous publications.I once told a friend whose work I translated that the experience felt like crawling through his veins-slowly, on my elbows, with very little wiggle room. Set in the 1920s, it is a compilation of stories from two of Perspective of Lia, a young girl who lives in a small town in Argentina.

This collection of surrealist short fiction is told from the APA style: A Talisman in the Darkness.

A Talisman in the Darkness.' Retrieved from

MLA style: 'A Talisman in the Darkness.' The Free Library.

A Talisman in the Darkness by Olga Orozco