Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini - Poetics of Eros - by A. Caceres, W. Barnstone

Foreword: A Poet of Life Who Prefigures the Future in 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 diamondcutting diction: “Fantasy / Wears a rare gown filled with precious stones” (“The Poet Weighs the Anchor”). Her pathos is revealed, even when she pities 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 never changed. In the case of Agustini, I think it indisputable that she would have been charged by later twentiethcentury 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 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