Declaiming, Proclaiming, Reclaiming: Berta Singerman and the Argentine Avant-Garde

• In Event: Technology, Music, Noise and silences in Latin American Narratives

Abstract

Despite being greeted with widespread acclaim abroad throughout the 1920s, the famous declamadora Berta Singerman often encountered a cooler reception among the avant-garde back home in Argentina. Even though they could occasionally be found reciting their own works on radio broadcasts or as part of the Revista Oral, these predominantly male poets were quick to discount her performances. Eduardo González Lanuza, one of the most vocal critics, would later proclaim that Singerman was poetry’s “public enemy number 1.” Although such a decidedly negative declaration about declamation from the author of pieces such as “Poema para ser grabado en un disco de fonógrafo” and “Poema para ser leído por radio” might seem surprising, González Lanuza and others fascinated by technology frequently heard Singerman’s as a source of noise—as one that obscured the signal of poems that did not require the flourishes of her style or that prevented listeners from discovering new works. As I address this clash between poets and a performer in order to auscultate a literary dimension of what Christine Ehrick has called the gendered soundscape, I argue that those attempts to mute the importance of Singerman’s work by dismissing it as mere noise failed to hear how it generated new publics for poetry. Understanding noise not as dissonance but rather as an excess that it is possible to reclaim, I trace how Singerman created forms of acoustic and poetic interaction that her avant-garde counterparts might have aspired to but never quite achieved.

Author

• Sam Carter, Cornell University