An Episode in Provincial Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This article explores the relationship of the work of the Argentine poet Juan L. Ortiz with Chinese poetry, which he not only translated into Spanish, but also read and referred to in his own writing. In the first part of this paper, I read Ortiz’s oeuvre as building a position in the Argentine literary system from the margin, the “province” of Entre Ríos where the author lived and published his books. In the second part, I use the notion of provincial cosmopolitanism to perform a World Literature reading of two poems that may illuminate aspects of a literary formation that a national reading framework is not able to recover. Poetry can be provincial and cosmopolitan at the same time, as my approach to Ortiz’s poems—as a contribution to the erosion of national hegemony in the reading of literature—intends to demonstrate.