“We Were not Bequeathed letters, nor Weddings Rings, nor Pictures”: Olga Orozco or Self-figuration from Death

Abstract

This article studies the self-figuration process that the Argentine poet Olga Orozco develops in her book Las muertes (1952), and specifically in its last poem, “Olga Orozco”. By portraying other lyric subjects (both real and fictitious) the book by Orozco not only problematizes the limits between reality and fiction and between a fixed-I and a multiple-I, but it also rethinks the possibility of understanding the poem as an epitaph and as a dynamic zone. And although this peculiar selffiguration process, from and against death, posits the annihilation of the poetic self, it also stimulates the creation of a figure of the self-as-author. This figure, by portraying others and questioning his or her own identity, claims for its “enunciative authority” and develops its poetic identity.