n some evenings, a little before twelve, the phone on the desk I shared with Calvetti rang and we, anyone of us, used to hear Daniel Giribaldi’s voice paraphrasing a Rubén Darío’s poem that exclaimed: «God’s Towers, poets!»

Giribaldi was journalist in the Crónica newspaper and had written magnificent lunfardesque sonnets. When he phoned us at that time it was to meet soon later at a dirty barroom on Avenida de Mayo near the Pedemonte restaurant. Very often we met there after our working hours: Giribaldi, Calvetti and I, together with two other paper men of La Prensa: José Luis Macaggi, author of the Diccionario Gardeliano, and Hernán Giménez Zapiola.

We had some glasses of wine and some small dishes with tortilla or cold meat. I, the most virtuous one, only used to sip a glass of wine, or half of it, and soon later said goodbye and went back home while my partners stayed until «the wee small drinks of the morning».

According to his outward behavior, Giribaldi liked to play the role of what we call in porteño jargon a reo (rogue). Perhaps he really was. I remember one midnight in winter when the mist invaded an almost ghostly Avenida de Mayo, deserted and cold. With our friend we were walking to the barroom when a whore, from the opposite sidewalk, said hello waiving her arm: «Hi, Giribaldi!»

Giribaldi died in 1985, at age 54 and, as it was to be expected, of a cirrhosis. As a poet, he thought that lunfardo was the best way to express his talent. A lunfardo poetry with metaphysical features with which he succeeded in transmitting not only a critic and humorous vision of the idiosincracy and the habits of man in Buenos Aires, but also his own existential concerns and even his religious preoccupations.

Man of an extensive knowledge, reader of Quevedo and translator of Baudelaire (he used to call him Carlitos Baudelaire), he lived for the night scene, for drinking and for his friends and, in poetry’s service. Poetry, that goddess whose brightness —according to Calvetti— also lights the nights of the dives. And as the servant he was, he regarded himself, humbly, more a word craftsman than a poet and journalist.

With the sonnet entitled, precisely, “El artesano” (The crafstman), from Bien debute y a la gurda, a book I have the honor of introducing at El Viejo Almacén one evening, I want to end this somewhat disordered chat about poets and journalists.

Giribaldi’s sonnet begins with a parody play in which he imitates the initial lines of a famous poem by Darío: «Yo soy aquel que ayer nomás decía/ el verso azul y la canción profana...». (I am the one that just yesterday used to say the blue poem and the profane song...). Giribaldi wrote:

Yo soy aquel que ayer nomás batía
el verso mugre y la canción ranera.
El que casi amasija a una mechera
que el mate cebó con agua fría.

El que quilombizó la taquería
la vez que cayó en cana en la tercera,
cuando escribió en una pared fulera:
¡Quevedo volverá! La Poesía...

El trompa y el peonacho de la rima,
el que apiló palabras a destajo,
el que en la viola fue bordona y prima.

Y al fin de su jornada de trabajo
siente que el mundo se le viene encima
y canta un mundo que se viene abajo.

(I am the one that just yesterday used to pronounce
The dirty lines and the mischievous song.
The one that nearly killed a poor girl thief
Because she poured cold water into his maté.

The one who made a mess in the police station
When he was in jail in the third precinct,
When he wrote on the awful prison wall:
Quevedo will come back! Poetry...

Boss and worker of the rhymes,
The one who piled up words without rest,
The one who was treble and bass string on the guitar.

And when his working hours are over
He feels the world is crushing him
And sings about a world that’s tumbling down.)

* Editor’s Note: Even though his life was undoubtedly a tango paradigm, curiously, Daniel Giribaldi never wrote a tango. In our section La Biblioteca/Letras, you can find two pieces of his, a tango and a milonga, but in fact they are a sonnet, “El velorio”, and an allegorical poem, “Milonga de Don Quijote”, with music written later by the Mendoza guitarist Jorge Marziali although they had not been written with the intention of fitting into a music. Furthermore, we can find in SADAIC seven compositions more by other musicians that as well were inspired by his poetry.

Text read by Antonio Requeni when he was admitted into the Academia Nacional de Periodismo.