Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini
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The idea of translating the poetry of Delmira Agustini started a few years ago when I felt the need to present some samples of her poetry to English-speaking audiences, in order to illustrate my arguments or points in various conference papers or lectures. The more familiar I became with her work, the more in tune with her discourse, and the more enchanted with her message, the more I realized that English-speaking audiences in general, and those involved in areas such as feminist studies, gender studies, and women studies in particular, could benefit a great deal from an English translation of Delmira Agustini’s poetry. I did not realize, however, just how difficult and challenging it is to translate poetry, particularly if one wants to preserve as much as possible the original spirit of the poem. Sometimes I spent hours, days, and even weeks without finding exactly what I wanted. Other times, it came to me Contents / xvii
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rather quickly. What I do know is that the relationship I was establishing with Delmira Agustini was becoming something fairly obsessive.
At a certain point, I decided I needed to try her out in public by organizing a poetry reading of my translations to see how her poetry would be received by an English-speaking audience. For that occasion, I invited a female graduate student, Jill Hildebrandt, from the Department of Mass Communi-cation at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, to help me give a recital, in which we alternated reading my translations of some of Agustini’s most celebrated poems. Poet-in-residence Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble, editor of the Crab Orchard Review, were in the audience; at the end of the performance, they expressed their interest in publishing five of my translations in the next issue of the journal. It was at that moment that I sensed a new opportunity for Delmira Agustini. I was happy and proud, for she had survived the test of my translations. Now, the publication of this volume marks the end of my efforts, but the beginning for the poet, now resurrected in a different language 117
years after her birth.
Works of literature are traditionally translated into the native language of the translator, and therefore such an approach was my original plan. However, I soon realized that this approach would have probably meant subjecting Agustini’s poetry to reinterpretation by the translator, a result that would have been in opposition to my wish to present her work to her new audience in a more neutral fashion. While I am not opposed to new poetic creations and reinterpretations based upon the poet’s manuscripts, I do believe that when a comprehensive collection of her work is offered in English for the first time, though the translations should certainly be poetic, it is most important that the translations be as literal as possible, that they should try as much as possible to respect the original works. And thus, though I never intended to undertake such a daunting project as translating these poems on my own, I had found a new solution for Agustini, as well as a new problem for myself !
My pleasant burden was eased by the research grant I was awarded by SIUC’s Office of Research Development and Administration and the agreement of Darren Haney, a then-graduate student in our Spanish program, to be my research assistant and translation consultant. Darren and I worked together for two and a half years. Being a native speaker of English, with fluency in Spanish and a B.A. in classics, Darren turned out to be an invaluable Contents
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help, overseeing the translation process, making sure the result was as meaningful in English as the source was in Spanish.
In this bilingual anthology, I have selected about half of the 130 poems Delmira Agustini wrote. This has allowed me to choose a number of poems from each of the books she published during her lifetime; the order in which they appear in this volume is the chronological order in which they were published. I have also included several poems from her posthumous work, The Stars of the Abyss (Los astros del abismo); this group includes those poems that form the cycle “The Rosary of Eros” (El rosario de Eros) and a selection of other poems included in that publication. The selection in the current volume includes all the best poems Delmira Agustini wrote, and they represent the universally accepted canon of Agustini’s poetry. However, I have also included other poems that serve to trace the poet’s development in her search for her poetic inner voice.
This anthology represents an homage I feel most honored to pay to an extraordinary poet and a superb woman, Delmira Agustini, whose poetic discourse can now be read for the first time in a language other than her own.
Contents
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i Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to the following people, whose generous help made this book possible: Professor Josep Miquel Sobrer, for his advice to me that I translate these extraordinary poems into English, my second language, and for his faith in my ability to do so; Distinguished Professor Emeritus Willis Barnstone, for his input regarding the translations; Mr. Darren W.
Haney, who assisted me as a translation consultant; Professor Frederick Betz, whose suggestions regarding the introduction of the book were most helpful and insightful; Professor Edward Brunner, whose unwavering support from the early stages of this project gave me courage to continue; Professor Cathy L. Jrade, for her sustained support and her input regarding the translations; Dr. Karl Kageff, executive editor at Southern Illinois University Press, for his enthusiastic and constant support from our first discussions about the publication of this project and then for his specific and detailed comments on the final typescript; Professor Allison Joseph and Mr. Jon Tribble, who invited me to publish five of my translations in the Crab Orchard Review in the spring of 1999; Ms. Carmen Pittaluga Armán and Ms. Myriam Pittaluga Armán, for the translation into Spanish of the poem written originally in French, which opens The Empty Chalices (1913); and finally, Ms. Kathleen Kageff, project editor and copyeditor for the book, whose sensitive and thoughtful editorial input has not only impressed me but has also given the book a higher level of clarity and precision. To all of them, again, my most sincere thanks.
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Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini
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i Introduction
Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 24, 1886.
A descendant of Italians on her father’s side and of Germans on her mother’s, she was born into a well-to-do family in the Montevidean society of the 1900s.
Agustini wrote three books of poems within a period of six years: The White Book (Fragile) (El libro blanco [Frágil]), written during the years of adoles-cence and early adulthood and published in 1907 when the poet was twenty-one years old; Morning Songs (Cantos de la mañana), published in 1910; and The Empty Chalices (Los cálices vacíos), published in 1913.1 There is also a fourth volume of poetry titled The Stars of the Abyss (Los astros del abismo), published posthumously in 1924. The circumstances of her death, which occurred on July 6, 1914, when the poet was twenty-seven years old, are still surrounded by mystery, though the facts of her death are well known: Her husband Enrique Job Reyes shot her to death with two bullets to the head and then shot himself with two more bullets to his head.2 However, it is not precisely clear whether this apparent murder could not have been perhaps the resul
t of a suicide pact between the two. One of Agustini’s early poems,
“Intimate” (Intima), suggests that possibility:
Ah! tú sabrás mi amor, mas vamos lejos
A través de la noche florecida;
Acá lo humano asusta, acá se oye,
Se ve, se siente, sin cesar la vida.
Vamos más lejos en la noche, vamos
Donde ni un eco repercuta en mí,
Como una flor nocturna allá en la sombra
Yo abriré dulcemente para ti
Ah! you will know my love; but let us go now,
Far away, through the blossoming night;
Here what is human frightens, here one can
Hear, can see, can feel unceasing life.
Let us go farther away into the night, let us go
Where no echo can rebound in me,
Like a nightly flower here in the shadow
I shall softly open for you
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Reyes and Agustini had been married for only one month and twenty-two days when she left her husband and returned to her parents’ home, pronounc-ing the cryptic phrase, “I cannot stand so much vulgarity,” which is all the more strange, since, after she had filed for divorce and while the divorce was in progress, Delmira and Enrique Job continued meeting as lovers in a humble room in a boarding house to which he had moved.3 Agustini’s biography may or may not be considered of great importance for the evaluation of her work, but it is indeed important to note that all her actions seem to have something in common: passion.
While Uruguay has traditionally been known for its democratic system, high level of education, low index of illiteracy, and prominent intellectuals and scholars in the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences, as well as artists in all disciplines, the message Delmira Agustini was presenting to the Uruguayan society of the turn of the century was neither understood by all people nor accepted. In 1900, Montevidean society was going through a process of profound change that contributed to shaping its future in very progressive ways. The president of the country was Don José Batlle y Ordóñez, a liberal politician, whose administrations (1903–1907 and 1911–1915) brought about a dramatic and beneficial change. Nevertheless, Uruguay was traditionally a Catholic society,4 and for many people of strong religious feelings and strict moral standards, Delmira Agustini’s poetic discourse was simply too advanced, too sacrilegious, and too transgressive.
Agustini’s poetry focuses primarily on praising the beauty of love and the beauty of the male. Invoking Eros, the Greek god of love, she sings:
¡Así tendida soy un surco ardiente,
Donde puede nutrirse la simiente,
De otra Estirpe sublimemente loca!
Thus lying I am an ardent furrow
Where can be nurtured the seed
Of another lineage sublimely mad!
From “Another Lineage” (Otra estirpe) in The Empty Chalices of 1913, these lines clearly illustrate the kind of erotic discourse and sexual aesthetics that characterize Agustini’s whole work.
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Nevertheless, the disdain many felt and the indignation of the religious women of society were not necessarily always observed behind closed doors.
In a magnificent essay on what he called “Modesty and Flirting” (El pudor, la cachondez), Julio Herrera y Reissig, born to a distinguished family of the Uruguayan patriciate, and a well known leading figure of Uruguayan modernismo, 5 exposes in a blunt and sarcastic manner the hypocrisy associated with women’s sexual practices in the Montevidean society of the 1900s.6
This essay, originally a chapter of a larger essay titled “The New Charrúas”
(Los nuevos charrúas), makes reference—in a most disrespectful, mordant, and ironic tone—to the women who pretended to live in society as role models of virtue and decency, while in their private lives they were intensely sexually driven and eager to experience the product of their fantasies.7 This kind of model is common in societies highly influenced by religious beliefs and social codes of pretended decency—as in, for example, England in the nineteenth century. What matters in this case is that Delmira Agustini carried out a message both in her life and her work that her contemporaries in Uruguay were not able, much less ready, to receive.
From as early as 1903, when the first poems written by Agustini appeared in literary magazines, until the most mature poems written around 1913, the work of Agustini shows the ways in which she was developing and maturing both as a poet and as a human being, experimenting with both content and form and identifying her own lyric inner voice. Her development can be measured in an ascending line that goes from the early modernista sonnets, charged with the traditions of oriental palaces, exotic perfumes, and wandering princesses, to the most hermetic collection of poems she conceived towards the end of her life: The Rosary of Eros (El rosario de Eros), which first appeared as a posthumous work.8
Delmira Agustini’s poetry is filled with a variety of elements that appear recurrently from The White Book (Fragile) of 1907 to The Stars of the Abyss of 1924. These elements are also commonly found in other aesthetic movements of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in France.
For example, from the French Parnassians, such as Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, José María de Heredia, and Charles Baudelaire, Agustini draws her cult of form and harmony, which suggests classical grandeur. On the other hand, from the French romantics, such as Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Introduction / 3
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Alphonse de Lamartine, she draws the sonority of the words and the intimacy and sentiment of the verse. From the French symbolists, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Albert Samain, Agustini also draws the musicality of the verse as well as the vagueness and the intangible atmosphere of their poems. Characteristics of late-nineteenth-century decadence, also derived from French symbolism (from such poets as Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire) can also be found in Agustini’s discourse: an exaggerated refinement of the words, abnormality, perversity, exquisiteness, rareness, and exotic sensations, experienced and expressed by the hero of decadence who is consumed by the mal du siècle.
All these literary movements and poetic trends of the turn of the century, suggesting a constant aesthetic revolution, would be contained in the new modernista movement, the theory of which has been subjected to sustained discussion and revision by twentieth century scholars.
Spanish-American modernismo is a literary movement that started during the nineteenth century, near 1870, and lasted approximately until the second decade, around 1920, of the twentieth century; on the other hand, Anglo-American or Anglo-European modernism started later in the nineteenth century, towards 1890 in France, and lasted until the 1940s. In other European countries, as well as in America, the movement existed within a similar time span.
While for Anglo-European modernism, the term pertains to all the creative arts, particularly poetry, drama, fiction, as well as painting, music and architecture, for Spanish American modernismo, the term pertains to poetry and fiction. Some of the most influential modernist writers tried some radical experiments with form: poets like Pound and Eliot working in free verse, for instance, and novelists like Joyce, Woolf, and Stein experimenting with
“stream of consciousness” to try to capture a character’s internal thought processes. Characteristics of Anglo-European and Anglo-American modernism are often associated with or contained in other “isms” of the time, such as constructivism, dadaism, decadence, existentialism, expressionism, free verse, futurism, imagism, new humanism, symbol and symbolism, ultraism, vorticism, as well as free verse and stream of consciousness mentioned above.
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As for Spanish America, the traditional vision of modernismo as a literary movement was one of a trend more concerned with form than content that aimed to break with the pathos and excesses brought by romanticism. This vision, which characterized the first decades of the last century, has been reevaluated during the second part of the twentieth century by a variety of scholars who consider that the political scene, the socioeconomic and philosophical changes that occurred in Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and the relation of all these aspects to the birth of nations constitute major components of the movement. Involving both political and linguistic issues, modernismo is the entire experience of Spanish America entering modernity.
As early as 1962, Luis Monguió discusses the concept of “cosmopolitanism” as one of the main characteristics of modernismo: 9 “Around 1870 and 1880, Spanish-America . . . was going from the era of romantic nationalism, whether it was liberal or conservative, to the era of materialistic positivism”
(85). Spanish American writers of the time, led by Rubén Darío, did not like the kind of materialism prevailing in their countries and felt they had to preserve beauty and idealism from the ugliness and materialistic atmosphere of daily life. In other words, “since they did not like the real world that surrounded them, they were as much cosmopolitans in their ideal world as their country-men were in the world of money” (85). However, the Spanish American War in 1898 and American construction of the Panama Canal beginning in 1903 made these writers fearful of American imperialism, which could put their national identities in danger, and therefore they felt the need to reaffirm the spiritual values in their language, nationality, religion, and tradition.10 Or, as Cathy Jrade notes,
the Spanish American writers of the end of the nineteenth century—most of whom lived in the urban capitals of their countries and/or traveled extensively in Europe—believed that they were confronting, in a noble struggle, the most acute issues of modern life. (2)11