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| Linda Lorenzo - Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
These days I am printing up with my Canon Pro-1 Inkjet Printer my show which I will share with Argentine artist Nora Patrich at the nicely named Galería Vermeer in Buenos Aires. The "muestra" will open mid September. Because the galler's space is not big I must choose carefully. I have opted to have as much of an Argentine/Buenos Aires presence in the content of my photographs. I could easily just place photographs of the sensationally beautiful Argentine Linda Lorenzo. But that would simply be a repetition of a show called Nostalgia that Nora Patrich, Juan Manuel Sánchez and I had in Vancouver in 2001 at a South Granville gallery. So I have limited my Lorenzo output to four. But then I look at this photograph (and there are many, many more) and I feel frustrated, limited and vexed.
In this age of in-your-face pornography I revel at looking at my photographs of Lorenzo and feeling a bout of a subjective Argentine opinion (mine) that Argentine women are the most beautiful and erotic of all.
In a different age that was the 20th century my mother, who had a slim body, wore a girdle when she rode the Argentine buses called colectivos. This was her defense from avid Argentine pinchers. In the 60s I noticed that Argentine men, in colectivos were gentlemen only in the summer. Why? They would cede their seas to skimpily-dressed women so they could look down on their cleavage.
Now in this century, and at my age of 75, I must keep these thoughts to myself or perhaps take the chance that I may not offend all with them. Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti (14 September 1920 – 17 May 2009), whose complete name was Mario Orlando Hardy Hamlet Breen Benedetti Farrugia, had a special knack for writing erotic poems. There is another Uruguayan with that knack. He is Eduardo Galeano.
Nostalgia for your skin - Benedetti
Here in Canada in this century I am enjoying reading the poems by our very Canadian Susan Musgrave who gives Benedetti a run for his Uruguayan Pesos. As a sample to well illustrate Linda Lorenzo wearing a gaucho pant called a bombacha, a gaucho belt called a rastra and holding my facón ( a gaucho knife). Below both in Spanish and in English ( a rare translation as Benedetti is not as well known in these parts as other Latin American writers is his poem) is his Y si dios fuera mujer (What if God Were a Woman)
Y si
Dios Fuera Mujer – Mario Benedetti
¿Y si
Dios fuera mujer?
Pregunta
Juan sin inmutarse.
Vaya
vaya, si Dios fuera mujer
Es
posible que agnósticos y ateos
No
dijéramos no con la cabeza
Y
dijéramos sí con las entrañas.
Tal vez
nos acercáramos a su divina desnudez
Para besar
sus pies no de bronce
Su pubis
no de piedra
Sus
pechos no de mármol
Sus
labios no de yeso.
Si Dios
fuera mujer la abrazaríamos
Para
arrancarla de su lontananza
Y no
habría que jurar
Hasta
que la muerte nos separe
Ya que
sería inmortal por antonomasia
Y en vez
de transmitirnos sida o pánico
Nos
contagiaría su inmortalidad.
Si Dios
fuera mujer no se instalaría
Lejana
en el reino de los cielos
Sino que
nos aguardaría en el zaguán del infierno
Con sus
brazos no cerrados
Su rosa
no de plástico
Y su
amor no de ángeles.
Ay Dios
mío, Dios mío
Si hasta
siempre y desde siempre
Fueras
una mujer
Qué
lindo escándalo sería
Qué
venturosa espléndida imposible
Prodigiosa
blasfemia.
Mario Benedetti
WHAT IF GOD WERE
A WOMAN
What if God was a woman?
Juan Gelman
What if God was a woman?
Ask Juan undeterred.
Well, well, if God was a woman
It is possible that agnostics and atheists
No we said no with head
And we said yes with guts.
Maybe we approached to its divine nudity
For kissing his feet not of bronze
Her pubis not of stone
Her breasts not of marble
Her lips not of plaster.
If God was a woman, we embrace her
The distance to boot your
And we should not swear
Until death take us away
Since it would be immortal quintessential
And instead of transmitting AIDS or panic
We rub off their immortality.
If God was a woman not be installed
Far in the kingdom of heaven
But we wait in the vestibule of hell
With your open arms
Its pink that isn't plastic
And her love not of angels.
Oh my God, my God
If until forever and from always
You were a woman
How nice scandal it would be
What fortunate splendid impossible
Prodigious blasphemy.
