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“Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of
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Eros provides a masterful introduction to the life and e
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English-speaking public is afforded, for the first time,
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access to the complex and sophisticated poetry that
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turned Agustini into a celebrity during her lifetime
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and a role model for generations to come.”—Cathy
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L. Jrade, author of Modernismo, Modernity, and the
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Development of Spanish American Literature
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This graceful translation and bilingual edition is
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the first to bring English readers a representative
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Agustini
sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published
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before her untimely death in 1914 at the age of
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twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan
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Alejandro Cáceres and including work from each of
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Agustini’s four published books, this collection is a
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response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems
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but in the passionate and daring woman behind them.
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Alejandro Cáceres, an associate
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and Literatures at Southern
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Illinois University Carbondale,
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was born in Montevideo, Uruguay,
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and has lived in the United States
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since 1977. He is the editor of the definitive critical
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edition of the complete poems of Delmira Agustini,
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published in Uruguay by Ediciones de la Plaza.
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(Poetics of Eros
Edited and Translated by Alejandro Cáceres
With a Foreword by Willis Barnstone
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Eros
A Bilingual Edition
Southern Illinois
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University Press
$15.95 USD
1915 University Press Drive
ISBN 0-8093-2868-2
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ISBN 978-0-8093-2868-0
Mail Code 6806
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Carbondale, IL 62901
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Caceres-NIP-Poetics of Eros.indd1 1
6/4/08 8:35:13 AM
Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini
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Selected Poetry of
Delmira Agustini
[ Poetics of Eros edited and translated byAlejandro Cácereswith a foreword byWillis Barnstone southern illinois university press ⁄ carbondale
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Copyright © 2003 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
Paperback edition 2008
Foreword copyright © 2003 by Willis Barnstone
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08
4 3 2 1
Frontispiece: Delmira Agustini ca. 1907. Courtesy of the National Library of Uruguay, Raúl Vallarino, Director. Photo of image by Daniel Mesa.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Agustini, Delmira, 1886–1914.
[Poems. English & Spanish. Selections]
Selected poetry of Delmira Agustini : poetics of Eros /
edited and translated by Alejandro Cáceres ; with a foreword by Willis Barnstone.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Agustini, Delmira, 1886–1914—Translations into English.
I. Cáceres, Alejandro. II. Title.
pq8519.a5a23 2003
861´.62—dc21
isbn-13: 978-0-8093-2537-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 2003050394
isbn-10: 0-8093-2537-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8093-2868-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8093-2868-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Printed on recycled paper.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
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To my mother, Carmen Ana,
in memoriam
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i Contents
Foreword: A Poet of Life Who Prefigures the Future in Poetry Denied Her by Two Bullets Willis Barnstone xiii
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction 1
De El libro blanco (Frágil) (1907)
From The White Book (Fragile) (1907)
El poeta leva el ancla 34
The Poet Weighs the Anchor
La estatua 36
The Statue
Una chispa 38
A Spark
Misterio: Ven . . . 40
Mystery: Come . . .
Intima 42
Intimate
Explosión 46
Explosion
Amor 48
Love
El intruso 50
The Intruder
La copa del amor 52
The Love Cup
Mi aurora 56
My Dawn
Desde lejos 58
From Far Away
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De Cantos de la mañana (1910)
From Morning Songs (1910)
De “Elegías dulces” 62
From “Sweet Elegies”
El vampiro 66
The Vampire
(La noche entró en la sala adormecida) 68
The night entered in the sleeping room
(La
intensa realidad de un sueño lúgubre) 70
The intense reality of a dismal dream
La ruptura 72
The Rupture
Lo inefable 74
The Ineffable
Las coronas 76
The Crowns
Las alas 78
The Wings
El nudo 82
The Knot
Fue al pasar 84
Passing By
Tú dormías . . . 86
You Were Sleeping . . .
Los relicarios dulces 88
The Sweet Reliquaries
El raudal 90
Torrent
Los retratos 92
The Portraits
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De Los cálices vacíos (1913)
From The Empty Chalices (1913)
(Debout sur mon orgueil je veux montrer au soir) 96
(De pie, sobre mi orgullo, quiero mostrarte, ¡oh noche!)
Standing, on my pride, I want to show you, O night!
A Eros 98
To Eros
Tu boca 100
Your Mouth
Oh tú! 102
Oh You!
Día nuestro 106
Our Day
Visión 108
Vision
Con tu retrato 112
With Your Portrait
Otra estirpe 114
Another Lineage
El surtidor de oro 116
The Golden Fountain
Fiera de amor 118
Fierce of Love
Ceguera 120
Blindness
Inextinguible . . . 122
Inextinguishable . . .
Nocturno 124
Nocturnal
El cisne 126
The Swan
Plegaria 130
Entreaty
A lo lejos . . . 134
At a Distance . . .
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De Los astros del abismo (1924)
From The Stars of the Abyss (1924)
Mis amores 138
My Loves
(Tu amor, esclavo, es como un sol muy fuerte) 144
Your love, slave, is like a burning sun
El arroyo 146
The Stream
Por tu musa 148
To your Muse
Diario espiritual 150
Spiritual Diary
La cita 154
The Encounter
Anillo 156
Ring
Serpentina 158
Serpentine
Sobre una tumba cándida 160
On a White Tomb
Mi plinto 162
My Plinth
El dios duerme 166
The God Sleeps
En el camino 168
On the Road
Boca a boca 170
Mouth to Mouth
Selene 174
Selene
Tus ojos, esclavos moros 176
Your Eyes, Moorish Slaves
Las voces laudatorias 178
The Laudatory Voices
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El rosario de Eros
The Rosary of Eros
Cuentas de mármol 182
Beads of Marble
Cuentas de sombra 184
Beads of Shadow
Cuentas de fuego 186
Beads of Fire
Cuentas de luz 188
Beads of Light
Cuentas falsas 190
False Beads
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Foreword: A Poet of Life Who Prefigures the Future in i Poetry Denied Her by Two Bullets
The twentieth century has seen so many of its major poets find early death as a result of suicide, or by execution in totalitarian regimes. At age thirty-two, Hart Crane jumped from the Mexican ship Orizaba on his return to the States, Sylvia Plath turned on the gas in London, Miguel Hernández died in his prison cell of tuberculosis contracted in Franco’s prisons. Hernández’s death followed that of Federico García Lorca, executed at the Well of Tears outside Granada in the first days of the Spanish civil war. In Paris the leading postwar poet in the German language, Paul Celan, waded into the Seine in despair and madness. One of the great French surrealists, Robert Desnos, died of typhus at Buchenwald one day after its liberation. The inventor of surrealism, Guillaume Apollinaire, the day after Armistice Day, 1918, succumbed to a head wound he had suffered earlier in battle. In Moscow, alerted to a gang of jeerers who were to invade his reading, Vladmir Mayakovsky played Russian roulette until he lost. Earlier, Sergey Yesenin wrote his suicide note in his own blood. In internal exile in Elabuga, harassed and destitute, Marina Tsvetayeva hanged herself. In the same circle of the silenced Akhamatova and Pasternak, the great classical poet of silences, Osip Mandelshtam, disappeared in 1938 in the snows of a Soviet concentration camp. In Italy the searing novelist and poet Cesare Pavese put a pistol to his head. It would seem that suicide and execution have decimated the poetic talent of our (twentieth) century.
In the apparently unique case of Delmira Agustini, the lords of the detective mystery intervened to remove her from her genius by domestic murder, a bullet from her husband’s revolver. She was only twenty-seven.
Her life and poetry had been as daring and outrageous as her film noir death.
Absurd seconds of who-knows-what awful fate determined that she would foreshadow the history of Latin American poetry but be deprived of a long life of poetic development. Only Albert Camus’s absurd death—in a car accident in which he was merely a passenger—seems as unnecessary and tragic as was that of Delmira Agustini.
What was the life in poetry she had? She tells us through her diamond-cutting diction: “Fantasy / Wears a rare gown filled with precious stones”
(“The Poet Weighs the Anchor”). Her pathos is revealed, even when she pities Contents / xiii
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an inert but very much alive statue, with words that are a battle of oppositions:
“Poorer than a worm, forever calm!” (“The Statue”). Here, as did Baudelaire, she sees the noble in the miserable, in this instance, a statute deprived of consciousness.
When Agustini speaks of love, she leaves no question about the sexual fire she dares make explicit—in her time almost unthinkable: “your golden key sang in my lock” (“The Intruder”). On the pillow, she writes, “Your impudence fascinated me and I adored your madness” (“The Intruder”).
There is no passive woman here, waiting for her lover’s announcements. She is her own person and writes what she feels, what she knows, what she wants to tell the world. And how beautifully she does so. In poem after poem, we find mysterious lines of interior illumination as in “Your figure was a stain of light and whiteness” (“The Intruder”).
Delmira Agustini fell silent in 1914. Already Braque and Picasso had invented cubism in Collioure in the winter of 1909–10), but throughout Europe and America the modern diction, in poetry of the twentieth century had not taken hold. It begins in young Antonio Machado, in Jules Laforgue, in early William Carlos Williams. Only in Apollinaire in France and Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria do we find full-blown modernity in enduring maturity.
In Agustini we see a transition figure. She has the swans of marble but also the candor of the pillow. Her mythological references are predictably of her time, yet almost always subverted by a lexicon that will wander astonishingly elsewhere. She wrote with the love speech of an Edna St. Vincent Millay, with similar candor and courage, but Millay nev
er changed. In the case of Agustini, I think it indisputable that she would have been charged by later twentieth-century innovations, as were Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, whose lives mark a history of modern American poetry. But she Delmira is what we have: her fragile white book, her morning songs, her empty chalices, and her stars in the abyss. Even so, she had time to experiment with prose poems and a lexicon of steel emotions that only find a precursor in seventeenth-century Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. That is a lot and allows us to sharpen our gaze on this substantial spring and winter of a young poet. We need not look through thousands of pages to find black pearls. In her pages they shine with rays of darkness. Yet we must be careful. With a single line from her brief life, like a Contents
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fated Russian heroine, she can destroy us: “With one kiss we became old”
(At a Distance . . .”).
Alejandro Cáceres has made a fine selection and enlightened translation of Agustini’s oeuvre and, in addition, presents us with the key details of her life along with a profound and scholarly discourse on the significance of her work in the context of contemporary literary movements. His devotion to detail and concept is revealed on each page. His study is essential in making this introduction of Agustini to the reader in English felicitous.
— Willis Barnstone
oakland
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i Preface
My critical edition of Delmira Agustini’s complete poetry was published in 1999. This project started during the early 1980s, when I was still a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, where I had taken a course in which we analyzed, among other works, the poetry of “the five great ones of the south”: María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay, 1880–1925), Delmira Agustini (Uruguay, 1886–1914), Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889–1957), Alfonsina Storni (Argentina, 1892–1938), and Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay, 1895–1979).
Delmira Agustini, in particular, attracted my attention for her sensuous poetic voice and daring message. Of course, her poetry was not new to me at the time, but that new reading of the poet left a mark on me. During the following summer, I started collecting a bibliography and organizing a file on her. And this I continued to do for a number of years whenever I had some time to devote to this project. In the meantime, I became very involved with the writing of my dissertation on another author, and therefore the project was suspended for over two years. When I had the opportunity in 1992 to live in Montevideo for over a year and a half, however, I started working at the Agustini archives, at the Biblioteca Nacional del Uruguay; my in-depth research on the poet’s work grew to fill not only that year and a half but also the following five summers. The result was a critical edition that included a detailed monograph on each work she wrote and a study of the most relevant criticism written on Agustini since 1914.
Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini Page 1
