Open Access

Hanno Ehrlicher

• The magazine "Los raros: Revista de orientación futurista", published in a single issue by the Argentine poet Bartolomé Galíndez in Buenos Aires in January 1920, is not only a rare publication, but also an unusual document, offering a mixture of the tum-of-the-century aesthetic paradigm of Latin American modemismo and the new avant-garde ideas arriving from Europe, especially Italian Futurism, which Galíndez roughly equates with the Iberian Ultra movement. This kind of reception of Futurism in Argentina was quite symptomatic of the situation of posmodernismo and was marked by a mixing and merging of very different poetic currents, by epistemological uncertainty and by an institutional lack of stability typical of an emerging ‘field’ of Iiterature. Galíndez’s project failed because he did not succeed in creating an intellectual network that could spread his personal idea of a part-Symbolist, part-Futurist avant-garde, where the new beauty of the racing car would meet the old one of theThe magazine "Los raros: Revista de orientación futurista", published in a single issue by the Argentine poet Bartolomé Galíndez in Buenos Aires in January 1920, is not only a rare publication, but also an unusual document, offering a mixture of the tum-of-the-century aesthetic paradigm of Latin American modemismo and the new avant-garde ideas arriving from Europe, especially Italian Futurism, which Galíndez roughly equates with the Iberian Ultra movement. This kind of reception of Futurism in Argentina was quite symptomatic of the situation of posmodernismo and was marked by a mixing and merging of very different poetic currents, by epistemological uncertainty and by an institutional lack of stability typical of an emerging ‘field’ of Iiterature. Galíndez’s project failed because he did not succeed in creating an intellectual network that could spread his personal idea of a part-Symbolist, part-Futurist avant-garde, where the new beauty of the racing car would meet the old one of the swan. Despite its failure, this ‘rarefied’ Futurism remains interesting as it offers proof of a high degree of transatlantic exchange of ideas and materials in the Spanish-speaking world of the early 1920s.…