#uruguayan poet

[madmardybobshaw]

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Born in 1886 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Delmira Agustini is one of the most celebrated Latin American poets of the last century, known for her precocious talent and tragically short life. Her work was strictly modernist but she helped to redefine the tradition with her intensely erotic verse that looked at the world from a woman’s viewpoint.

Agustini began to write poetry at the age of ten years old and, when she was just 16, went into the office of a prominent local editor in Montevideo and presented her first collection of poetry. She was met with astonishment and laughter by the editor but a short while later the work was published and garnered her national fame. She would write three more collections over the next few years.

The remarkable thing about Agustini was that she produced erotic poetry at a time when the literary world was largely dominated by the male voice. In many of her works Eros is the central character and it may well be that her early death has leant a certain amount of mystery to her verses. She was, essentially, a poet who had not reached her peak and many wonder what she would have been had she lived to a greater age.

When she published her third volume of work in 1913, Los cálices vacíos, Dario wrote the forward, praising her voice and her impact on the literary environment. With her star quickly rising, Agustini married Enrique Job Reyes in the same year. Whilst they had been engaged for five years, the marriage was destined to end in tragedy after only a short while. Barely two months after the ceremony, Agustini left their home and returned to her parents where she filed for divorce.

Despite this, she continued to meet with Reyes, now taking him as her lover and meeting in secret. In 1914, Reyes took out a gun and shot her, then turned the weapon on himself. Agustini was barely 28 years old.

Source: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/delmira-agustini-poems

[amanece-parabellum]

(translation of "Ya no" poem of uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño)

[leftistfeminista]

The Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (in Spanish: Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez, FPMR) was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation officially founded on 14 December 1983 as the military wing of the Communist Party of Chile in the context of this party policy denominated as the "Política de Rebelión Popular de Masas", created with the goal of a violent overthrow of the civic-military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Sandra Trafilaf, popular communicator, Mapuche poet, popular educator in organizations of peasant women and indigenous peoples, member of the Network of Free and Popular Media, when speaking, stated:

"The publication of this book is very necessary, a debt to our sisters, especially to our fallen sisters, those who have offered their lives, who offered their dreams and their unfinished projects to a libertarian cause.

(...) Before commenting on the book, I would like to share with you some words from another combatant, one of our combatants whom we greatly admire, who is Fabiola, the only woman who participated in one of the most important actions of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, the tyrannicide, and she also wanted to be present on this occasion with some words, through the following audio that I am letting you listen to: "June 16, 1987, Cecilia Magni, Camila and I shared an apartment in the center of Buenos Aires. That morning, through the press, we learned of some confrontations in Santiago de Chile. Everything was confusing, there was no certainty of what had happened, the numbers disturbed us, like 12, that was too much, there must be some mistake. Those three women, each with their peculiarities, different missions, different origins, and so were our destinies, but all three united by the same dream.

Each one of us in our world broke the rules established by the patriarchal and mediocre society of the time, we were not what was expected of a "young lady." I don't think any of us cared much about that detail. 24 years later our dreams are still alive. Every time I see a Primera Línea, I am overcome with emotion and I know that nothing was in vain."

After listening to the audio sent by fellow combatant Fabiola, Sandra Trafilaf continues with her story: "For this book I also took on the task of talking with some of my surviving sisters, some of my combatant sisters, because I believe it is a great responsibility, and this book, "Revolucionarias," is a great debt to the role of women in these liberation struggles.

It is an honor to be able to speak for my surviving sisters who today preferred to remain anonymous, leaving behind a testimony of their time in the FPMR, but we must also assume the tremendous responsibility of speaking for those sisters who today we carry in our memories, as Fabiola said, who are part of the collective and popular history, whose lives were cut short when they led the fight against the dictatorship.

This book is appreciated as it gives an account of the participation of women in the battles fought by the FPMR. We always speak, commonly, of the heroic combatants, masculinizing the struggles in a cultural imprint that is certainly part of the dominant patriarchal ideology.

The colonization of the peoples in these territories called Latin America also brought this practice of making invisible the role of women in the community, their political, strategic and economic role.

Of course, the FPMR was not exempt from this colonization of thought and supremacy of the patriarchy, however we are grateful that there was a Latin American context that preceded the creation of the Front, and we can count on the feats of Cuban, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, Mexican, Uruguayan, Brazilian, Colombian women, who paved the way to avoid this destiny that necessarily led us to become "good ladies." Instead, we were able to join the armed struggle without being burdened with pejorative stigmas.

Today, three or four decades later, it is natural that women serve a purpose other than just distributing bread and tea in the party structure. Gender inclusion is debated and rights are fought side by side, but three or four decades ago, it was not so easy to assume roles historically reserved for men in politics.

If we look at the revolutions and liberation processes in different territories, there will always be women taking up arms. However, for some reason we end up relegated, made invisible or subsumed when it comes to making the epic account.

How and why did we take up arms and join the armed struggle during the dictatorship? Discussing this issue with some of my sisters from the FPMR, we have concluded, in these formal, informal and telephone conversations, that class consciousness is fundamental, because it reaffirms the conviction of liberation. However, early childhood education, experiences of the environment, the transmission of information and our place in our respective homes are also an important part of the basis of this determination. We grew up and reached adolescence in the midst of the most brutal dictatorships in recent history in the territories of the continent. We left childhood with horror stuck in our eyes. Murders, disappearances, torture, concentration camps, prisons, poverty and the precariousness of the populations made the rebellion grow. We said enough!, as recently happened on October 18, 2019.

At some point, you reach a point where there is no turning back. Injustices were overwhelming the enslaved people and we moved forward to end the barbarity. We could no longer continue turning the other cheek and we saw that there was no possible future if the dictatorship continued. Dreams, the certainty that there is the possibility of changing reality and realizing projects to be happy, was undoubtedly the driving force. We did it scared shitless, because it is not possible not to be afraid, especially those who had already been mothers and had the courage to expose their whole world to think of another future.

As combatants, in my case fulfilling the role of integrating the Operative Groups, militancy in the Front was a step that also shaped our character. Obviously, we always had to prove that we could accomplish the task and that is why we had the respect and recognition of our comrades, who became brothers in the heat of the struggle. In some cases, our youth was vital, the courage of youth, at 17, 18, 19 years old, we fulfilled missions that always meant risking our lives.

Women were in all the structures of the FPMR, in health, exploration, intelligence, logistics. Without that work and without assistants, who were mostly women, the heroic feat of the FPMR would undoubtedly not have been possible. That great infrastructure was moved by women and men who, in every task, however simple it may have seemed, meant risking their own lives and those of their families.

As women, it is also necessary to pause to emphasize that repression brutally punishes the decision to be part of armed groups, and at the time of being captured by the enemy, we were mostly subjected to political sexual violence, under the logic of patriarchal domination, of taking our bodies to humiliate us and leaving a psychological scar that will forever remind us of the audacity of invading that world, from this perspective of repression, of this military, of this macho. However, we never pigeonhole ourselves into the category of victims, we will never pigeonhole ourselves into that category either; we do not put our fallen sisters in that place either, they are and will be protagonists of a history that was sealed with blood, as people who rebel and rise up always do.

In fairness we can say that although we saw sexist behavior within the Front, we always had the respect and recognition of our brothers and sisters and for that reason, in particular, we send a special greeting to all those who trained us on that path, transmitting their knowledge and experience, so that we could become what we are, a Rodriguista combatant.

In this idea of ​​reconstructing this collective historical memory, crossed by the colonization of thought, but also by the ups and downs of traditional politics, the FPMR, although it was born as another disposable structure that the PC, the Communist Party, put on the scene to bang the table, became an autonomous entity that was recreating its own existence. It was an unprecedented project in our territories, it was a national project. Apart from the Mapuche resistance, no other structure with similar characteristics had been maintained in the dictatorial context, and over time. The MIR was quickly dismantled, Lautaro was born with a rebellious and libertarian proposal, and the Front maintained its pace in the armed struggle, building a new path, installing new capacities, which moved away from traditional militancy, in a party whose elite always denied its paternity; it was a landowner denying its offspring. Leaving it adrift in moments of having to endure the repressive attacks.

And today we can see it again in an arrogant and overbearing attitude of its main presidential figure, who shamelessly denies the status of political prisoner of our brother, Commander Ramiro, Mauricio Hernández Norambuena, leaving him helpless before the thirst for revenge of the right, who would only like to be able to feast watching our brother dry up in a jail, like a hostage of his captors, subjected to permanent torture.

To finish, I would just like to make it clear that we are not and will not be beings endowed with a special or supernatural gift. We were young women of different ages, women from poor, precarious families, with few resources or with resources, who came from homes where the fundamental thing was to transmit values ​​and principles with a sense of class, and with the conviction that we had to end barbarism, but also with the conviction that we deserved a future full of rights, that we deserved to be happy, to live in a better world, and that we undoubtedly had the right to have it all.

The anti-dictatorial struggle has not ceased, because injustices, the model, the Constitution, the laws and businessmen thirsty to fill their pockets at the expense of the lives and energies of the working class are still present. The pandemic today is a clear example, they have imposed restrictions, curfews, safe-conduct passes, health passes, only after the objective of social control, without caring about our lives, our recovery, our health. They open quarantines if they want to sell, they close the communes if they want to control. Without going any further, June 30 is the deadline to end the State of Exception and Congress must make a decision whether to continue with the repressive path or finally respect and honor the lives of the inhabitants.

Life is meaningless for those who govern us today and offer us candy to sweeten slavery; they make us consume morning shows, trash programs, they mutilate us, they murder us, they imprison us and they continue with their jingles and rainbows to make you think that something is changing, to change nothing. Winning elections is one thing and governing is quite another. It seems to me that more dialogue is needed, more reflection with Salvador Allende, to learn from his experience and how we came to the coup d'état. Short-term memory cuts off our analysis, the ruling class will never give something in exchange for nothing. The people must learn this lesson to avoid being blinded by social Peace Pacts that only seek to crush rebellions.

The political situation has been focused on different changes and today women are once again raising their flags, once again making themselves present in the streets of dignity, in the squares of dignity. Today women, in the last three decades, have made progress in different struggles and today talking about the role of women in politics evidently has another perspective and another connotation. Our daughters, our granddaughters, have undoubtedly arrived in a different world, with more progress and with more conquests and rights in their bodies, in their minds and that lets us know that we have made progress and have traveled the right path, which is the liberation of the peoples.

[latamclassiclitbracket]

Las venas abiertas de América Latina - Eduardo Galeano

Las venas abiertas de América Latina es un libro publicado en 1971 por el escritor uruguayo Eduardo Galeano. En la obra, el autor opina de modo global sobre la historia de América Latina desde la colonización hasta la América Latina contemporánea, argumentando con crónicas y narraciones el constante saqueo de los recursos naturales de la región por parte de los imperios coloniales, entre los siglos XVI y XIX, y los Estados imperialistas, como el Reino Unido y los Estados Unidos principalmente, desde el siglo XIX en adelante. La obra recibió mención honorífica del Premio Casa de las Américas.

Lee más sobre este libro en Wikipedia.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent - Eduardo Galeano

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent is a book written by Uruguayan journalist, writer, and poet Eduardo Galeano, published in 1971, that consists of an analysis of the impact that European settlement, imperialism, and slavery have had in Latin America. The book was published during the ideological divide caused by the Cold War, when most of Latin American countries had brutal, right-wing dictatorships. Open Veins was banned in several countries and quickly became a reference for an entire generation of left-wing thinkers. In the book, Galeano analyzes the history of the Americas as a whole, from the time period of the European settlement of the New World to contemporary Latin America, describing the effects of European and later United States economic exploitation and political dominance over the region. Throughout the book, Galeano analyses notions of colonialism, imperialism, and the dependency theory.

Read more about this book on Wikipedia.

[salvadorbonaparte]

list of bizarre experiences today (non-exhaustive)

Name badge with my chosen name on it

Free tote bag and food and map

Standing in front of my poster answering questions

Talking to a researcher about fanfiction and dead and minority languages

Attending a staged reading that friends performed on about this Franco-Uruguayan playwright talking about a Catalan poet

Hearing my lecturer describe a striptease in said staged reading

Having a lengthy informal chat with some lecturers

Two lecturers again really encouraging me and my friend's PhD applications and telling us that they'll help us get funding

Explaining the snake thesis defense article to my supervisor's phd student

Casually chatting with our translator in residence

[orpheuslament]

If you feel comfortable answering, how do you feel about your connection to uruguay? I am uruguayan, born and raised; it is always lovely to hear people's thoughts on my country.

By the way, I reckon you'd enjoy a lot of Mario Benedetti and Delmira Agustini's work. They're vastly different from each other but, as I see it, they are very uruguayan at their core.

ive never been to uruguay myself so everything i know about it comes from my father's stories, which means the entire country has a tint of melancholy to me. he was forced to leave during the dictatorship & he couldnt go back for a long time but he speaks of it with so much love... so for me uruguay is my father; its tango, its artists, its poets, its rebels. its the country that raised the man that raised me, & its as complicated as he is.

btw mario benedetti was like the first poet i ever loved!!!! & i also really enjoy agustini's work <333

[urupotter]

I'm late to this but 10, 11, 15, 27, and 28 for the not from the US asks

10. Most enjoyable swear word in your native language?

I actually don’t enjoy the normal swear words all that much, but there’s a lot of pretty creative insults that are amusing even if I don’t really approve lol. “Hamburger graveyard” for a fat person is really mean but also amusing despite of it. “Lice slide” for a bald person is similar.

11. Favorite native writer/poet?

I’m not actually super familiar with local writers, but I do enjoy Horacio Quiroga I guess. Wrote a lot of horror stories that I read in school that I remember being unsettling and looking back probably weren’t age appropriate (there’s a particular one about a little girl getting her neck snapped like a chicken by her mentally handicapped brothers that really made me go wtf. Gotta promote the national literature I guess).

15. A saying, joke or hermetic meme only people from your country will get?

Hmm there’s a lot of very obscure football ones. One that someone who both knows Spanish and has recently seen a popular Netflix movie (Oscar nominated) might get is “no se lo come ni Parrado”, or “not even Nando Parrado would eat him” in English. Eating someone is a phrase often used to mean kissing, and Nando Parrado is a famous Uruguayan cannibal, who had to eat his friends corpses to survive after a plane crash left him stranded in the Andes mountains for three months (the movie Society of the Snow covers it on netflix, pretty great. Also Alive for an older take. Not as good though).

27. Favorite national celebrity?

I guess Diego Forlan gave me a lot of very happy memories as a kid, very good football player. Uruguay just doesn’t have a lot of famous people though lol. There’s some local celebrities but I don’t really care about that lol

28. Does your country have any mountains, rivers, lakes? What’s your favorite?

Uruguay is basically the capital + a bunch of towns and cities made for tourists on the coast. After you go inward it’s all flat grassland lol.

In the spirit of the question I really do think those beach towns are very pretty, there’s Punta del Este if you love glamour and party life (super expensive though), an actual city. If not you have places like cabo polonio or punta del diablo for more of a hippie feel.

[leer-reading-lire]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge || June || 5 || Poetry

Mario Benedetti was an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet and an integral member of the Generación del 45. He is considered one of Latin America's most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century.

[seamusicpoetry]

Idea Vilariño on a sea-side rock.

Idea Vilariño Romani (1920-2009) was a Uruguayan poet, essayist and literary critic.

You Didn’t Know

My poor love you believed that it was so you didn’t know. It was richer than that it was poorer than that it was life and you with your eyes closed you saw your nightmares and you called that life.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Litoral. Revista de la Poesía, el Arte y el Pensamiento.]

One of the most widespread poems of the Uruguayan poet Idea #Vilariño, "No more", about impossibility and farewell, is for many one of the most beautiful poems of love. He was a member of the so-called Generation of 45, a group of writers, poets, critics and editors who, in the words of the professor and literary critic Rosario Peyrou, were "cosmopolites, non-conformists, rigorous, introduced Uruguayan literature in modernity". "I don't know how to tell you what poetry is to me." It's a way of being, of my being. Everything else in my life are accidents," the Uruguayan writer replied in an interview. YA NO.

It will be no more ya no we will not live together I will not raise your son no coseré tu ropa I will not have you at night I won't kiss you when you leave you'll never know who i was why did others love me. I will not get to know why or how never nor if it was real what you said it was nor who you were nor what I was for you nor how it would have been live together want each other wait for us be. I am no longer who I am forever and you ya you will not be for me more than you. You are no more in a future day I will not know where you live with whom not even if you remember. You'll never hug me like that night never. It won't touch you again. I will not watch you die.

[letitrainathousandflames]

Ah I see now. 1) You: *makes post about having trouble managing your emotions* Ppl with tumblr-level of reading comprehension: decides post is defending white tears. 2)You: "while the discussion of white tears as a tool weaponized by white women against POC is important, it isn't my place to speak on it since I am not a Black person. I myself am not white. I just want u to get that neurodivergent ppl sometimes have trouble managing emotions" 3) Anon: "got it. you're still pretty white tho???"

*sigh* well, this is the website where you get asked "how dare you say we piss on the poor" whenever you accuse someone of having piss-poor reading comprehension, isn't it?

And, while I shouldn't have to defend myself against some spineless bitch who doesn't even have the guts to come off anon, I take great pride on my heritage - my Black great-grandma, my brazilian native great-grandpa and my other uruguayan native great-grandma.

My other great-grandparents were portuguese, (of colonizers' descent, I'm certain). My green-eyed aunt is seen as what we call 'white' in Brazil. She has also been discriminated in europe because of her curly hair and other features that make her not 'white' enough for their standards. It's weird and messy, as is my country's history.

To quote the brilliant poet, composer and songwriter Chico Buarque on his speech of April 24, 2023:

"I have Black and Indigenous ancestors - whose names my white ancestors were quick to suppress out of their family's history. As the great majority of the Brazilian people, I carry in my veins both the blood of the whipped and of those who whipped."

In conclusion, to that previous anon: I am still not white. I am still a brown-skinned latina with an ascendancy as complex as that of most colonized latin american nations. I grew up hating my nose and trying to forcibly make my hair straight rather than curly, and dreaming of having blue eyes. So, no. To your gringo standards, i'm most certainly not "white".

And the post was about neurodivergent people like myself having trouble managing emotions but how dare I say y'all piss on the poor. Anyway...

[apolobellvedere]

You put into words what I wish I could say about poetry. This is so true. Poetry is magic, and poetry is sacred. So. True. I recommend to you the Complete Poetry and Diaries of Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentinian poet. Also, the works of Delmira Agustini, Uruguayan poet. Both of them had a unique way of working with the language in portraying the human experience in an absolutely beautiful manner. Oh, and also Silvina Ocampo!! Please, please, read them! I think you would like 'em.

thank you so much for the recommendations! a good excuse to practice my spanish as well

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 8.16

Beer Birthdays

Emile A.H. Seipgens (1837)

Johann Kjeldahl (1849)

Dann Paquette (1968)

John Pinkerton (1969)

Justin Dvorkin (1982)

Jacob McKean (1983)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Charles Bukowski; writer (1920)

James Cameron; Canadian film director (1954)

Steve Carell; comedian, actor (1962)

Pierre de Fermat; French mathematician (1601)

Hal Foster; Canadian-American author and illustrator (1892)

E.F. Schumacher; philosopher, economist (1911)

Famous Birthdays

Arthur Achleitner; German author (1858)

Scott Asheton; drummer (1949)

Kevin Ayers; English singer-songwriter and guitarist (1948)

Angela Bassett; actor (1958)

Bruce Beresford; Australian film director (1940)

Ivan Bilibin; Russian illustrator, artist (1876)

Gloria Blondell; actress (1910)

Ann Blyth; actress and singer (1928)

Frankie Boyle; Scottish comedian (1972)

Ida Browne; Australian geologist and palaeontologist (1900)

Arthur Cayley; English mathematician (1821)

Matt Christopher; author (1910)

Madonna Ciccone; pop singer (1958)

Mae Clarke; actress (1910)

Albert Cohen; Greek-Swiss author and playwright (1895)

Vincenzo Coronelli; Italian cosmographer and cartographer (1650)

Robert Culp; actor (1930)

Jean de La Bruyère; French philosopher (1645)

Bill Evans; jazz pianist (1929)

Suzanne Farrell; ballet dancer (1945)

Ernie Freeman; pianist and bandleader (1922)

Barbara George; R&B singer-songwriter (1942)

Hugo Gernsback; Luxembourger-American author (1884)

Frank Gifford; New York Giants QB, tv sportscaster (1930)

Anita Gillette; actor (1936)

Eydie Gorme; singer (1932)

Georgette Heyer; English author (1902)

Timothy Hutton; actor (1960)

Laura Innes; actress and director (1957)

Eddie Kirkland; singer-songwriter and guitarist (1928)

Reiner Kunze; German poet (1933)

Jules Laforgue; Uruguayan-French poet and author (1860)

Ketty Lester; singer and actress (1934)

Robert Squirrel Lester; soul singer 91942)

T. E. Lawrence; British colonel, diplomat, writer and archaeologist (1888)

Kathie Lee-Gifford; television personality (1953)

Gary Loizzo; guitarist, singer (1945)

Gabriel Lippmann; French physicist (1845)

William Keepers Maxwell, Jr.; novelist, short story writer, and essayist (1908)

George Meany; labor organizer (1894)

Pierre Méchain; French astronomer (1744) Otto Messmer; cartoonist and animator, co-created Felix the Cat (1892)

Lois Nettleton, American actres (1927)t

Julie Newmar; actor (1933)

Fess Parker; actor (1924)

Armand J. Piron; violinist, composer, and bandleader (1888)

Taylor Rain; porn actor (1981)

Billy Joe Shaver; singer-songwriter and guitarist 91939)

Bill Spooner; rock musician, singer (1949)

John Standing; English actor (1934)

Wendell Meredith Stanley; biochemist (1904)

James "J.T." Taylor; R&B singer-songwriter (1953)

Nigel Terry; British actor (1948)

Wallace Thurman; author and playwright (1902)

Mal Waldron; pianist and composer (1925)

Lesley Ann Warren; actor (1946)

Eric Weissberg; singer, banjo player, and multi-instrumentalist (1939)

[anotherwaytosay]

Friday, June 23rd, 8PM, at our beloved Molasses Books spot, AWTS is celebrating the recent and forthcoming releases of new work in translation from Spanish, Italian, and German,

~featuring~

Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas -- whose translations of Silvia Guerra wonderfully recall H.D.'s "Oread" --  will be presenting their co translation of Uruguayan poet Mariella Nigro's Memory Rewritten (White Pine Press); Alta L. Price will be reading from both Mithu Sanyal's Identitti (a highly recommended review by Susan Bernofsky for LARB can be found here) as well as a forthcoming translation from World Editions, About People by Juli Zeh; Hope Campbell Gustafson will read from Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Indiana University Press), a coming-of-age story that runs parallel to recurring exile, “The sound of the ocean, its roar, is the leitmotif of my childhood."

***

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her translations include Still Life with Defeats by Tatiana Oroño, also published by White Pine Press, Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia. She is the co-translator, with Jeannine Marie Pitas, of A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the coeditor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Jeannine Marie Pitas is the translator or cotranslator of ten books, most recently Uruguayan poet Mariella Nigro's Memory Rewritten (co-translated with Jesse Lee Kercheval and published by White Pine Press in 2023). Her most recent collection of poetry, Or/And, was published by Paraclete Press in 2023. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at Saint Vincent College. Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Alta holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Hunter College. Recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, Alta’s translations from German and Italian have appeared on BBC Radio 4, Specimen, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Of the more than forty books Alta has translated, the latest are Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti and Giorgio Agamben’s Hölderlin’s Madness. Alta has translated two novels by Juli Zeh: New Year was a finalist for the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize as well as the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize, and About People is forthcoming this fall. Hope Campbell Gustafson translates from Italian, and works for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her translation of Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's novel Commander of the River, a project for which she received a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant, was just published as part of Indiana University Press' Global African Voices Series. In 2019, Fontanella Press published a collection of Marco Lodoli's vignettes about Rome in Hope's English, as Islands -- New Islands: a Vagabond Guide to Rome (Fontanella Press). She is currently working with a non-fiction book by Lorenzo Alunni titled Odysseus' Scars: Bodies and Borders in the Mediterranean.

[coochiequeens]

Today for Women’s History Month we honor the Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou both March 8, 1892.

Juana Fernández Morales de Ibarbourou, also known as Juana de América, (March 8, 1892 – July 15, 1979) was a Uruguayan poet and one of the most popular poets of Spanish America. Her poetry, the earliest of which is often highly erotic, is notable for her identification of her feelings with nature around her. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Juana de Ibarbourou was a feminist, naturalist, and pantheist.

Juana de Ibarbourou was an early Latin American feminist. Ibarbourou's feminism is evident in poems such as "La Higuera", in which she describes a fig tree as more beautiful than the straight and blooming trees around it, and "Como La Primavera", in which she asserts that authenticity is more attractive than any perfume. Also, in "La Cita", Ibarbourou extols her naked form devoid of traditional ornamentation, comparing her natural features to various material accessories and finding in favor of her unadorned body.

Nature imagery and eroticism define a great body of Ibarbourou's poetry.

Ibarbourou's depiction of death in her poetry was not consistent throughout her body of work. In "La Inquietud Fugaz", Ibarbourou portrayed a binary, final death consistent with Western tradition. In "Vida-Garfio" and "Carne Inmortal", however, Ibarbourou describes her dead body giving rise to plant life, allowing her to live on.

In "Rebelde", one of Ibarbourou's most richly constructed poems, Ibarbourou details a confrontation between herself and Charon, the ferryman of the River Styx. Surrounded by wailing souls on the boat passage to the underworld, Ibarbourou defiantly refuses to lament her fate, acting as cheerfully as a sparrow. Although Ibarbourou does not escape her fate, she wins a moral victory against the forces of death.

Like most poets, Ibarbourou nursed an intense fear of death. Though it is easy to surmise this from her poetry, she states so explicitly in the first line of "Carne Inmortal."

Example of her poetry

"RECONQUISTA" 

No sé de donde regresó el anhelo  De volver a cantar como en el tiempo  en que tenía entre mi puño el cielo  Y con una perla azul el pensamiento.

De una enlutada nube, la centella,  Súbito pez, hendió la noche cálida  Y en mí se abrió de nuevo la crisálida  Del verso alado y su bruñida estrella.

Ahora ya es el hino centelleante  Que alza hasta Dios la ofrenda poderosa  De su bruñida lanza de diamante.

Unidad de la luz sobre la rosa.  Y otra vez la conquista alucinante  De la eterna poesía victoriosa.

-Montevideo, 1960  Mi pequeño regalo de Pascuas para Nimia Vicens Madrazo,  en su espléndido San Juan de Puerto Rico. Afectuosamente. -Juana de Ibarbourou[2]

Published works

Lenguas de diamante (1919)

Raiz salvaje (1920)

La rosa de los vientos (1930)

Oro y tormenta (1956), biblical themes reflect her preoccupation with suffering and death.

Chico Carlo (1944) contains her memoirs.

Obras Completas (3rd ed. 1968).

[psycheapuleius]

Jules Laforgue (1880-1887). A Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist.”

Legende

Great loves, where are they now?

They were simple in any case:

Lips that needed no introduction,

Though the song is dead and gone

Still eager for the chase.

But the eyes of a beautiful, well cloistered soul.

Finally, she is taking me into her confidence.

It is making me suffer more than she can guess.

— translated by Louis Simpson.