«Yo no tengo ni deseo tener sangre de estatua...
Mejor reírse de uno mismo, excederse de humano»
(“I do not have nor do I wish to have statue’s blood... /
Better to laugh at oneself, to be excessively human”)
— María del Mar Estrella, Girandomédulas, p. 37
Chronicle of the Find: An Object Released on the Sidewalk
Urban chance in Buenos Aires rarely presents itself with violence: it arrives with the stealth of things rested at the edge of the curb, half a meter from the footsteps of strangers. There, exposed to traffic, appeared the copy: Fuegos Ceremoniales (Ceremonial Fires), by María del Mar Estrella, published in 2007 by Vinciguerra under its Metáfora Collection. A textured hardcover book, the kind that invites touch before reading, with that sober paper weight that promises permanence. Someone discarded it. Someone, once upon a time, chose it.
Upon opening it, the first sign of its private life rests on the flyleaf, penned in ink with a fluid script:
«A mi querida amiga y poeta Susana, con cariño y en hermandad de palabra.»
(“To my dear friend and poet Susana, with affection and in sisterhood of the word.”)
May 2, 2015.
Eight years elapsed between the press (2007) and the author’s affectionate gesture (2015). And then, more than a decade until the copy ended up on the street.
Facing this scene, one cannot help but wonder what route the object took to the sidewalk. Four hypotheses come to mind:
1. The dissolution of the bond. The “sisterhood of the word” expired. Letting go of the object is an attempt to erase the material proof of the link: if the gifted book no longer exists, it is as though the affection was never on the bookshelf.
2. Death or the clearing out of a personal library. The passing of the recipient and the subsequent cleanout by indifferent heirs, who dispatch whole boxes to the public street without even opening the cover. The inscription becomes invisible to anyone who cannot read the interior of others' bonds.
3. Implicit devaluation. The gift was never truly appreciated in its proper measure and slowly rolled toward discard: first a shelf, then a box, then the street.
4. A ritual of detachment and circulation. The noblest and most poetic hypothesis. The book was not discarded out of contempt: tucked between its final pages was a bookmark from another publisher—unequivocal evidence that someone traversed the text all the way to the last line. Its mission fulfilled with that reader, the book was liberated so it could find the next one. It is the age-old practice of book-sowing: the work, once read, returns to the city’s flow. The bookmark acts like a message cast into the river: “I made it this far; now it’s your turn.”There is no way to know which hypothesis is true, or if others exist that escape me, and that ignorance is part of the find. The object tells what it tells; the rest is interpretation. But the book contained more layers.
A Pantheon in Verse
Fuegos Ceremoniales has an unusual structure: each poem is explicitly dedicated to a giant of literature, and each dedication adds an attribute, as if the author were constructing a museum of busts in verse:
• Standing before the light (To Julio Cortázar: sentiment)
• Shadows on the wall (To Ernesto Sabato: commitment)
• The prodigal (To Alejandra Pizarnik: anguish / tearing)
• Night notebook (To Jorge Luis Borges: memory)
• Terrestrial tool (To José Pedroni: hope)
• Chance and circumstance (To Alfonsina Storni: challenge)
• Sower of dreams (To Fermín Estrella Gutiérrez: devotion)
• Girandomédulas (To Oliverio Girondo: irony)
• Circle of fire (To Enrique Molina: eroticism)
• Under the sign of a wing (To Olga Orozco: mystery)
And so it continues with many more…Cortázar, Sabato, Pizarnik, Borges, Pedroni, Storni, Girondo, Molina, Orozco: this is not a dedication to a “nobody,” to an indistinct figure. It is a national pantheon, and each poem seeks its place in the shadow of a giant. One of the names, however, is not an aspiration but a heritage: Fermín Estrella Gutiérrez, a Spanish-Argentine academic and poet, was the author's father. María del Mar Estrella, born in Buenos Aires in 1941, is the daughter of that poet and boasts over fifty years of uninterrupted writing and seven published books, starting with El poblador (RdC Publishing). This reframes everything: we are not before an unknown coasting on the fame of others, but a poet with her own trajectory, raised in a home where the busts of the pantheon were, at least one of them, the living room family portrait.
The Seven Pages of Validation
And then appears the other peculiarity, the uncomfortable one: at the end of the volume, under the title “About María del Mar Estrella,” the author deploys nearly seven pages reproducing praise and commentary from established authors who wrote to her throughout her career. Apparently, she didn’t just dedicate poems: she wrote in person to many of the living (this is my conjecture) and received responses. And she published those responses. One of them decrees: “María del Mar will no longer be forgotten.”
The scene thus takes on its most ironic shade: a book designed to ensure the legitimation and endurance of its author through the endorsement of literary authorities ends up abandoned on the paving stones. The phrase “she will no longer be forgotten” coexists within the very same object alongside a forgotten bookmark and a street that remembers nothing.
Before judging, a shift of focus is in order. First: the search for validation is not a personal flaw of María del Mar Estrella; it is a trait of the creative condition—of every creator who knows that ink guarantees nothing and signs the world hoping someone will sign back. She was merely more transparent than others when showcasing her pats on the back. Second: the 2015 dedication is the record of genuine affection at a given moment; that it ends up on the sidewalk speaks to the implacable passage of time, of how libraries are scattered, not to the falsity of the affection. The paradox is melancholy, almost tragic, and deserves respect rather than mockery. Third: the noblest twist of this story is the act of rescue itself. Instead of ending up in a dumpster or ruined by rain, the copy was picked up by someone who took the trouble to read it completely, analyze it, and take it for a walk. If anyone should be grateful for this ending, it is the word itself, which keeps circulating.
The street is the great equalizer: it evaporates vanity and dutiful praise, but it also restores books to their primary function: finding readers, one at a time, by chance.
The Motivation for the Walk: Turning the Marrow (Girando la Médula)
Among the first ten poems of the pantheon, one leaped off the page on its own merits: Girandomédulas, page 37, expressly dedicated “To Oliverio Girondo: irony.” It is worth transcribing a fragment:
(Through what crazy lock does it subversively penetrate
and winding up leisure
makes the blood dance on the truth of a single edge?
Immodest, perverse provocateur, irony distracts
prowling in a twilight streetcar
like a scarecrow crawling
in the masmédula of weeping.)
Ladies and gentlemen: here you have
a pin or filigree or convincing cyanide kiss;
depending on which hand releases it, which lips pronounce it
it will be a subtle feast or a crude bacchanal
scandal of puritan hypocrisy.
(Girandomédulas pulls the trigger against the ghost of doubt
fires
astride a nomadic and sharp vigil
while the girls of Flores agonize
clenching groans in their marble muscles.)
I do not have nor do I wish to have statue’s blood...
Better to laugh at oneself, to be excessively human
(and it continues)
La masmédula: The Word Buried in the Title
The title is a portmanteau word that only opens with the right key: girando (turning/spinning) + masmédula. It is not abstract anatomy: “en la masmédula del llanto” directly quotes the title of Oliverio Girondo's final poetry book, En la masmédula (1956), the deepest and most anguish-ridden work by the author of Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (Twenty Poems to Be Read on the Streetcar). The marrow (médula) in Estrella's title isn't generic bone marrow: it is Girondo’s marrow—his final word—quoted and turned.
And the poem is stitched with Girondian nods that confirm the operation:
• “Ladies and gentlemen: here you have” — The formula of the buffoonish lecturer that Girondo premiered in Espantapájaros (Scarecrow, 1932), the manifesto-book of his I that mocks all solemnity.
• “prowling in a twilight streetcar” — Impossible not to read there the streetcar of his foundational 1922 title, Twenty Poems to Be Read on the Streetcar.
• “like a scarecrow crawling” — The scarecrow, Girondo’s alter ego, reappears crawling within the tribute itself.
• “while the girls of Flores agonize / clenching groans in their marble muscles” — An image of masmedular pedigree, baroque and piercing.
• “I do not have nor do I wish to have statue’s blood” — The anti-statue: he who does not want to be a monument, he who chooses to laugh at himself.Estrella does not merely dedicate a poem to Girondo: she dresses up as Girondo, mimics his syntax, borrows his bestiary, and spins it. And here lies the object's greatest irony: the poem she dedicated to the great Argentine ironist met—she, her book—the most Girondian ending possible: the sidewalk, where the scarecrow from the beginning ends up “crawling in the masmédula” of urban discard. Girondo would have signed off on that script.
The Geometry of the Concept
On that basis, the walk organized itself, because the poem and the surname trace a mental map in the shape of a circle:
• Girondo / Giro: The surname carries rotation inscribed within it. Giro (turn/spin). Going in circles.
• Hondo (Deep): The deep, the concave. And the deep, stretching the thread, is a pit or well; and a pit, almost by definition, is round.
• Marrow (Médula): The center, the core, the internal axis. Turning the marrow (girar la médula) is stirring one's depths while one's feet trace the circle on the outside.
• Rosedal / Laps: The walk materializes the concept: tracing around the lake is literally a deep turn (giro hondo) with water at the center.The natural response to the reading was to translate the text into physical movement: the book in the pocket and laps around the Lake at Palermo's Rosedal, whose perimeter of approximately 1.6 km is the classic circuit for park walkers and runners.
Why the Rosedal: The Coincidence That Is No Coincidence
There is an extra argument, almost scandalous in its exactness: the Rosedal, designed by Carlos Thays based on a project inaugurated in 1914, preserves among its rosebushes a collection of writers' busts—the so-called Paseo de los Poetas (Poets' Walk)—with over two dozen sculptures of authors from around the world. That is to say: walking through the Rosedal is literally walking among poets turned into marble and bronze. And the book in the pocket is precisely that: a stroll of poets turned into busts of ink—“marble muscles,” “statue's blood”—each with its dedicated pedestal.
The physical stage and the stage of the book are the exact same stage. The poem's question (“Through what crazy lock does it subversively penetrate?”) finds its urban answer: the street was that crazy lock through which the object filtered out here. Add the White Bridge—the Puente de los Enamorados (Lovers' Bridge), to cross from one shore to the other without getting wet, like promised relationships—the Andalusian Patio donated by Seville in 1929 with its fountain and tiles, and facing it, the Eduardo Sívori Museum, and the apparatus is complete.
Book–Poem–Walk Relationship: The Three Concentric Laps
The journey was framed as a pedestrian essay in three laps around the lake, each with its own axis of reflection. Three times 1.6 km: almost five kilometers of circles for a book that left one circle—the printing press—and returned to another—that of the street.
First Lap: Surface and Legitimation
The Rosedal in bloom is pure surface: petals, fragrances, nature’s ornamentation organized by the landscape architect's hand. Upon that surface, the busts: marble poets who no longer breathe, monuments the park exhibits as proof of its own nobility. It is impossible not to think of the seven final pages of the book, of the pantheon of dedications, of the author taking shelter under the shadow of giants and printing their applause as a shield against oblivion.
The irony of the first lap: whoever seeks the immortality of the statue ends up on the curb. But also the reversal: the true validation of the book did not come through the signatures of the masters, but through this moment in which an anonymous walker rescues it and reads it completely. The street, which equalizes, also redeems.
Second Lap: Sisterhood and Detachment
On the second turn, the focus shifts to the handwritten dedication. “Sisterhood of the word and dispute” is the trace of a genuine affection that included its own disagreement: a bond known to be two-way. Relationships change, libraries dissolve, people part with objects, and what was once blue ink of affection is today paper baking under the sun on the curb. There is no trauma in this: there is only the passage of time.
The bookmark from another publisher between the last pages is material testimony that the reading was completed. If the abandonment was an act of surrender rather than contempt, then the second lap is walked as a ritual of detachment: someone let the book go so that the word could continue its course. Urban sowing works if someone gathers. It was gathered.
On the physical plane, this lap has its iconic moment: understanding that spaces are also dedications—the Andalusian Patio was left by Seville for Buenos Aires in 1929, and the city continues to read it.
Third Lap: The Masmédula and the Turn
The final lap integrates the entire game: Giro — Hondo — Médula — Rosedal. The lake is the pit, the deep filled with water; the marrow is the unseen center, the axis of oneself; spinning around it is the only way to encircle depth without falling into it. Walking in circles while contemplating the futility of human recognition is, literally, turning the marrow: stirring the core while the feet repeat the outline.
The poem—and with it the entire book—finds its proper scale: not that of the monument, but that of the body that turns and laughs at itself. “I do not have nor do I wish to have statue’s blood... Better to laugh at oneself, to be excessively human.” The circle closes with the Girondian decree: the book that sought to erect itself as a printed monument finds its human dimension in discard, in chance, and in the act of walking.
The Final Paradox
If the author were ever to find out, the irony would reach its peak: a poem dedicated to Oliverio Girondo about irony comes to life precisely through the most ironic event possible—discard, chance, rescue, and the walk. But there is something even deeper: the book that wanted not to be forgotten will not be remembered for its seven pages of crowning praise, but for the gap it left in a bookshelf and the knot it formed in a stranger’s pocket. The true life of the word occurred not in the fixed ink of the press, but in motion: from the press to the friend, from the friend to the sidewalk, from the sidewalk to the pocket, from the pocket to the loop around the lake.
And this chronicle is the next link in the chain. The found word keeps circulating. One open question remains, that of all sowing: when this book finishes fulfilling its mission with this reader, will it return to the street to find the next one? The bookmark already left its message: “I made it this far; now it’s your turn.”
Sources and Verifications
• Biographical details of María del Mar Estrella (daughter of Fermín Estrella Gutiérrez, born in 1941, fifty years of writing, seven books): RdC Publishing https://rdcpublishing.com.ar/artista.php?id=167
• Lake Rosedal Circuit, ~1.6 km: Meteored https://www.meteored.com.ar/noticias/actualidad/el-rosedal-de-palermo-el-pulmon-verde-de-buenos-aires-aire-libre.html and Pacer Map https://www.mypacer.com/es/routes/327892/lago-del-rosedal-caminar-y-correr-sendero-palermo-buenos-aires-argentina
• Design by Carlos Thays (1914) and collection of writers' busts: Alquiler Argentina https://www.alquilerargentina.com/blog/paseos-y-excursiones/recorriendo-el-rosedal-de-palermo.html
• Andalusian Patio (donation from Seville, 1929), White Bridge, Sívori Museum: Buenos Aires 123 https://www.buenosaires123.com.ar/paseos/rosedal.html
• Poem Girandomédulas (p. 37), index of dedications, handwritten dedication from 2015, and publication details: transcription from the found copy itself.
• https://www.cultura.gob.ar/oliverio-girondo-7-poemas-imperdibles_7045/
• https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/oliverio_girondo/su_obra_literaria/
Wikiloc track: https://es.wikiloc.com/rutas-senderismo/walk-through-palermo-caba-maria-del-mar-estrella-girandomedulas-book-poetry-290489244
With AI help. (Gemini)
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