Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros

by Alejandro Caceres (Editor), Willis Barnstone (Foreword)

This graceful translation and bilingual edition is the first to bring English readers a representative sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published before her untimely death in 1914 at the age of twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan Alejandro Cáceres and including work from each of Agustini’s four published books, Selected Poetry of Delmira Poetics of Eros is a response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems but in the passionate and daring woman behind them and the social and political world she inhabited.  Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1886 to wealthy parents of German and Italian descent. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-one and followed with two more in the next six years. But her life was cut short in 1914, when Enrique Job Reyes, her ex-husband of less than two months, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself. Too sensual and explicit for a literate, but Catholic, Uruguay, Agustini’s work was neither accepted nor easily understood during her lifetime—but it is now being discovered and studied. Cáceres is at the forefront of a new critical approach to Agustini’s work. In synthesizing and reviewing both Spanish-language and English-language work on Agustini, he provides the definitive resource for future inquiry and research. Noted translator and poet Willis Barnstone provides the foreword to the volume.  Agustini’s poetry reflects the emotional world of a young woman in the early twentieth century. Rich with exotic and erotic imagery, the poems populate an intangible atmosphere vibrant with color and mythological symbols. Agustini celebrated sexuality in her work as part of the struggle to empower women and served as a forerunner of other feminist poets. Carefully selected for this bilingual, en face edition, the poems collected here track and highlight Agustini’s development and strengths as an artist—including her methods of experimentation, first relying on modernista forms and later abandoning them—and her focus on the figure of the male, which she portrays as the crux of devotion and attention but deems ultimately unreachable. Cáceres’s introduction presents biographical information and situates Agustini’s work and life in a larger political, historical, and literary context, particularly the modernismo movement, whose followers broke linguistic and political ties with the pathos and excesses of romanticism.

Genres: Poetry

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the silence of the night my soul
Reaches yours like a great mirror.
*
It was a sea overflowing with madness and fire,
*
Imagine! To embrace, vivid, radiant
The impossible! The lived illusion!
I blessed God, the sun, the flower, the air
And life itself, because you were life!

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every once in a while, I read a book like this and think that I should have totally studied Comparative Literature instead of Economics.

Review to come, after I finally figure out how the heck to do math

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Delmira Agustini was a turn-of-the-century Uruguayan poet of Italian descent who died at age 27 in a grisly murder-suicide perpetrated by her equally passionate ex-husband. If you're unfamiliar with Agustini's work, you may be wondering what wise thoughts this poet could possibly have had to share with the world at the callow age of 27. But Keats died at age 25; Rimbaud retired from poetry at age 21. Why shouldn't there exist a woman poet as precocious as these two celebrated men were?

Like Keats, Agustini is the very type of a Romantic, prone to lapse into hazy reveries peopled by angels and vampires and sirens and Greek gods. An idealist in the worst sense of the word, she prefers her landscapes to be adorned by roses and lilies and diamonds and rubies and crystal fountains. It would be so easy to write her off as an amateur who traffics in cliches, the sanitized stock furniture of the world's most banal poetry. But to do so would be to lose one's opportunity to enjoy the subtler nuances of her work. An excessive love for all things pretty and all things Greek didn't prevent H.D. from becoming a significant poet, and it didn't fatally blight Agustini's career, either.

Agustini is a poet clear-sighted enough to admit her own worst shortcomings: that is, her over-fondness for reverie and her weak grasp on objective truth. In an early poem addressing her beloved, she says:

"I die of reverie; I will drink the truth
In your fountains...
I know in the great depths of your chest
Is the spring that will vanquish my thirst."

Agustini boldly re-conceives the poet's role, envisioning the poet as a Salome figure who beheads her victims in order to study their suffering, a vampire who feeds off of the emotional lives of the people around her.

Her love poetry is sometimes quite splendid:

"Your eyes seem to me
Two seeds of light within the shadow,
And there is in my soul a great blossoming
If you fix them upon me; and if you lower them, I feel
As if the carpet were to blossom."

Her late poem "Mis Amores" (My Loves) is worthy of comparison to Millay's "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" and Tsvetaeva's "Whence All This Tenderness?"

[Meredith is a hot mess · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Notes on the English translation:

If you enjoy poetry, and have even a rudimentary understanding of Spanish, I highly suggest reading Agustini's poetry in the original language. No English translation will ever do Agustini's poems justice. There is simply a lyricism to the Spanish language that is non-existent in English.


Willis Barnestone's foreword was good as always, and Alejandro Caceres is certainly qualified for the task of translation. I found his introduction educational and enlightening. It's difficult to find much in English about Delmira Agustini because so much has been written in Spanish with few translations.

However, I found reading Los cálices vacíos a more immersive experience. Rubén Darío gave an incredibly touching foreword praising Agustini that was beautiful.


With that said, it's nice to have this book because it's bilingual -- there were times when I was interested in learning the English translation for a phrase I was unfamiliar with. I did not read the English translation for enjoyment. While I understand Alejandro Caceres decision to have a literal translation of Agustini's poetry, the result ended up occasionally with a few English translations that felt stiff. I hope in the future there are more reimaginings of Agustini's poetry that are liberal with the translation, yet true to the spirit of her work.

I have enjoyed English translations of Spanish poetry before, I can't remember the name of the translator, but there's one in particular who did an excellent job translating Miguel Hernández's poetry. This was in another anthology Willis Barnestone wrote a foreword too (I need to look this up). I'd be really interested in reading a different translation of this poetry.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Agustini brings a strong expression of feminine desire to modernismo. Are the translations too literal and lacking poetry?

[Kelsey Hennegen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m struck by the strange, wondrous images and instances Augustini plumbs. There’s something splendid but foreboding, something withheld but glimpsed at, and a tremble at endeavoring toward the ineffable. What I admire in these poems is the speaker that beckons the mysterious. At times, the speaker seems a predator, or is it simply that she is so full of desire she portrays the world as prey? Indeed, “Fierce of Love” leaves us asking what the object of the speaker’s desire is, how we are to understand her opening declaration, “I suffer hunger for hearts.” There are poems in which life is presented to us as an abyss, yet she continues to hunger, undeterred by the terror of unknowability that is life. In reading, my sense of time is upended—it isn’t simply a question of whether we are in some mythic past or not, but almost a feeling of being beyond time. Where we can discourse with Eros and contemplate death with a degree of emotional remove.

[Oana Dragomir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't mind me as I start 17 online Spanish courses in order to read this in its original language :)
These poems were splendid!

[Rachel Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Her poetry is full of body parts, symbols, swans, fountains, vultures, death and sweet sweet drama. It is impossible to read her work, or the introduction or critical theory around her work, and not think WOMAN, WOMAN, WOMAN, killed by her MAN, and analyzed by MAN, and now translated by MAN, and sure gender is a construct but read this sentence in the foreword entitled "A Poet of Life Who Prefigures The Future in Poetry Denied Her by Two Bullets": 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 27. Her life and poetry had been as daring and outrageous as her film noir death," and tell me that this human did not die unrecognized. We are only, always, woman.

[Lia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poets, this is a delightful collection from 4 collections (plus an introduction) by Agustini's foremost translator.

[Premnarayan Nath]

Please provide me to read some poems prior to my writing reviews of the book.

[Вікторія Слінявчук · Rating 3 out of 5]

Я еще никогда так сильно не жалела о том, что не знаю испанский.
Алехандро Касерес, конечно, проделал большую работу, перевел около половины стихотворений Агустини на английский. Но, увы, это скорее подстрочники. Такой подход избрал переводчик - сделать как можно более буквальные переводы. А поэзия от этого страдает...
Впрочем, я нашла несколько переводов на русский, сделанных Инной Чежеговой:
http://imwerden.de/pdf/agustini_stihi...
Они не настолько близки к тексту оригинала, но зато они поэтические. А те, кто читают по-испански, имеют возможность насладиться ее стихотворениями в оригинале, и это самое лучшее.

[EIJANDOLUM · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Red love, love of mine;
Blood of worlds, and blush of skies . . .
Give him to me, my God!”