NADAÍSMO

Tabloid Newsprint, Bilingual edition, 14-5/8" x 10-1/4", 28 pages Flexi Disc by El Colmo included

Translated from the Spanish by Javier Arango Introduction by Shook Nadaism (Nothing-ism) ranks among the best named of Latin America’s many avant-garde movements. The movement flourished in Colombia from 1958 to 1964, “a revolution in the form and content of the dominant spiritual order in Colombia,” in the words of founder Gonzalo Arango. While he took much inspiration from Surrealism, French Existentialism, the Beat Generation, and Dadaism, the originality of Arango’s poetics was rooted in the tumultuous political condition of mid-century Colombia. Indeed, the movement was an artistic response to Colombia’s conservative literary culture, as well as La Violencia, the country’s decade-long civil war.

NADAÍSMO: Gonzalo Arango presents the force, humor, prescience, and beauty of Arango’s prose and verse in their first English translations. His language bursts at the seams with energy and dynamism, with a revolutionary fervor that shows off the author’s belief in the radical potentiality of the written word. He also exhibits astonishing variety, both in form and tonal character: from the politically and philosophically charged pronouncements of the First Nadaist Manifesto, to the lyrical verse of “My Resurrection”; from the surreal morbidity of “Diary of a Nadaist,” to the elegant power of “Providence.” Indeed NADAÍSMO showcases a writer of radical originality, committed to dismantling the confines of received literary forms. His rebellion against the conservative social order of mid-century Colombia—against what he saw as a stagnant literary tradition in Latin America—had both a political and an aesthetic dimension. In 1970, Arango, a man of large contrasts and contradictions, declared that he was abandoning Nadaism. (Fitting for a movement whose manifesto declared its intention “Not to leave a faith intact, nor any idol in its place.”) While several dozen men and women had associated themselves with the movement prior to 1964, many continued in different directions as the movement fractured, some fading into obscurity and others ensconcing themselves in Colombia’s literary establishment. Today, however, Nadaism’s revolutionary spirit continues to inspire young writers, not unlike the Beats.  

Nicknamed “the Prophet” by his companions at school, Gonzalo Arango Arias was born in 1931 in Antioquia, Colombia. A writer, poet, and journalist, he led the Nadaist movement that flourished in Colombia from 1958 to 1964. Javier Arango is a translator and graduate student in the Philosophy Ph.D. program at UCLA. He has a focus in philosophy of language and logic, and has published translations of fiction from Spanish and French by authors including Mario Bellatín and Michèle Audin. Shook is a poet and translator in California. Their translations from Portuguese include Conceição Lima’s selected poems, No Gods Live Here, for which they were a 2017 NEA Translation Fellow, and Jorge Lauten’s Bury My Heart on Mt. Ramelau.