Fuzzy borders between poetry and theater, word and image. A reading of "Swift-footed Puppets" by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada

Abstract

In this paper we present a reading of Títeres de pies ligeros (1929) by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895-1964), a dramatic text in verse whose first publication includes drawings by the author himself, which involves the relationship between word and image and the mixture of literary genres (De Aguiar e Silva, 1984; Lampis, 2016). In addition, we will analyze how this “theatrical poem” (Barcia, 1995) or dialogue poem (Ghiano, 1957) incorporates in a particular way the tradition of the Italian commedia dell’arte and its French version –in the representative farcesque characters–, the dramaturgy of Luigi Pirandello and some aspects of the book Lunario sentimental by Leopoldo Lugones. Our proposal stops, then, in making a careful observation of the relationship between the literary text and the drawings that represent and highlight the central elements of a play starring puppets that exhibit human vices and virtues. These drawings mark a double link with the text, since they reaffirm their antecedents in the tradition but, at the same time, point out characteristics that differentiate them because the characters are subjected to the irreversible passage of time (Burgos, 2011). To complement the analysis, we will draw on the concepts of intermediality (Wagner, 1996; Pimentel, 2003) and imagetext (Mitchell, 2009; Alberdi Soto, 2015), which characterize the complex operation of transposition (Steimberg, 2013) carried out by the author in this “dramatic experiment”.