Martín Fierro (1924-1927) played a major role in the large proliferation of avant-garde journals published in Argentina, more specifically in Buenos Aires in the twenties. Evar Méndez led it, even though throughout the year of 1925, Oliverio Girondo, Eduardo J. Bullrich, Sergio Piñero and Alberto Prebisch also took part in its administration. Among the participants were great Argentinian writers such as, Girondo himself, Ricardo Molinari, Leopoldo Marechal and Jorge Luis Borges, among others; as well as the participation of artists Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar and Norah Borges. Martín Fierro ceased to exist with the national presidential campaign of Hipólito Yrigoyen; the group divided among members who proposed to include politics in the journal’s content and those who opposed it. This internal debate resulted in the publication’s closing. It’s important to emphasize that Martín Fierro was perceived by its contemporaries as representative of the “avant-garde” in Argentina. Xul Solar (Oscar Alejandro Agustín Schulz Solari, 1887-1963), distinguished Argentinian artist, tied to the aesthetic renovation of the twenties, invented an artificial language he called neoCreole, which he had begun to develop by the end of the first decade of the century. This one mentioned stemmed from a fusion of Spanish and Portuguese. NeoCreole is a key factor in Xul Solar’s avant-garde project, which to his understanding is the language that will be spoken by the “New Race”, by the “New Man” who shall emerge from Latin America. The piece of writing, “Cristian Morgenstern (Xul Solar’s Version)” by Xul Solar is a neoCreole translation from a text by the German poet, Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914). The published version was taken from Christian Morgenstern. Stufen: eine entwickelung in aphorismen und tagebuch-notizen. [Stages: A Development in Aphorisms and Diary Notes]. (München: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1918).
It’s the second written work Xul publishes in Martín Fierro in neoCreole and it marks the artist’s approach to German literature at the beginning of the 20th century.