Darío Galicia
The Science of Sadness
(2023)
While alive, Darío Galicia published two books, Cinematic Histories (1987) and The Science of Sadness (1994). These books sold out quickly, and Galicia did not bother to republish them again. Several months before his death in 2019, Ediciones sin fin (from Barcelona, Spain) published his two books together under the title The Science of Sadness, with the addition of a few unpublished poems. Now, The Science of Sadness is the first bilingual edition of Darío Galicia's anti-canonical and gay poetry
From the Prologue
Darío Galicia put an end to the binary dialectic of the closet that had dominated Mexican poetry and which previous homosexual poets accepted. He wiped out their masks, their closeted poetic forms and under- handed language, their notion of a “universal” subject, and their reliance on discretion as the modus operandi of queer identity. It is impossible to see Dario Galicia as only a poet because for him, being queer and being a poet were inseparable. This is why Mario Santiago and Roberto Bolaño proclaimed him a member of ‘infrarealism,’ and one can clearly recognize his closeness to the group in the various significant aspects of his poetry and person. One fact is certain: Dario left us his “electric charges”, and his way of “artificially creating rain”, and like all true avant-garde artists in whom art and life are one, he challenged patriarchal society like no other queer Mexican had done: he left a time bomb in (the institution) of the closet for every queer person to detonate. The queer writing that followed (Abigael Bohórquez, Luis Zapata, José Joaquín Blanco, Luis Felipe Fabré, César Cañedo, Saúl Ordoñez, Juan Carlos Bautista, among many others), owes much to Darío Galicia; it cannot be understood without his poetry or the impact he had as a queer artist
- RUBÉN MEDINA
Biography - Darío Galicia
Darío Galicia was born in Mexico City in 1953. He studied dance and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). From his late teens he was publishing poems and translation of English language poets in magazines and literary supplements. In 1975 he was awarded the Salvador Novo Scholarship for up-and-coming young writers. In 1977 two of his poems appeared in San Francisco magazine Gay Sunshine, translated by Erskine Lane. From an early age he achieved notoriety by writing openly about his queer experience, advocating for human rights (particularly sexual rights), and for defending gender diversity in Mexico. In 1976, at the age of 23, he underwent elaborate neurosurgery in treatment for a brain aneurysm he had suffered. This surgical intervention resulted in physical sequelae for Galicia that would last through the years and affected his physical and intellectual abilities — including language. Nevertheless, Galicia was still able to speak, write, and create poetry. In 1987 his first book, Historias cinematográficas, was published at the Autonomous University of Puebla. The second, La ciencia de la tristeza y otros poemas, was published by the UNAM in 1994. These books were widely read at that time and copies quickly sold out. In the early 2000s, most of Dario’s friends had stopped seeing or hearing from him. Soon, his whereabouts were all but totally unknown and for years he was considered missing. Many believed he had died. In April 2019, the friends and writers Mario Raúl Guzmán, Luis Antonio Gómez and Ana Clavel found Darío wandering around a working-class neighborhood in Mexico City. These three had assumed the duty of locating Darío — looking for him throughout the many sections of Mexico City and pursuing many inquiries. Galicia had spent several years in impoverished destitution, rootless and itinerant, and during that time he developed a series of nutritional issues and health problems. He died of diabetic ketoacidosis on December 30, 2019, in Mexico City. He was 66; it was eight months after his friends had found him. Several months before his death in 2019, Ediciones sin fin (from Barcelona) published his two books together under the title La ciencia de la tristeza. The following year a co-edition appeared in Mexico by the small publishers La zorra vuelve al gallinero and La Ratona Cartonera. Now, The Science of Sadness is the first bilingual edition of Darío Galicia’s poetry.
Rubén Medina, Translator
is a poet, translator, scholar and one of the founders of Infrarealism. Since 1991 is a professor of literature and U.S. Latinx Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In collaboration with John Burns, he compiled and translated an anthology of Beat poetry, Una tribu de salvajes improvisando a las puertas del infierno (Aldvs, 2010); recently he translated into Spanish Memoria de una beatnik by Diane Di Prima (Matadero-UNAM, 2021).
Lázaro B. Medina, Translator
Lázaro B. Medina is a translator and editor living in Los Angeles. A product of The New School in New York City, he has studied both journalism and poetry. Originally from Madison, Wisconsin, his focus is counterculture movements and subcultural identities.